NPR host Arun Rath talked with Alan Rabinowitz, a renowned zoologist and conservationist responsible for the world's first jaguar sanctuary, the Cockscomb Basin Jaguar Preserve in the mountains of Belize. Rabinowitz, the author of books about conservation and animal behavior, wrote a children's book based on a very painful part of his childhood.
I was born with a very debilitating stutter. ... I still stutter now, but now I have the tools to control it, and I'm controlling it now as we speak. But when I was a young child, there was no control, and my kind of stuttering were the blocks — solid blocks — not just the repetition. So in trying to get the air flow and the words out, I would turn red, my body would spasm.
I was put in special classes in school for disturbed children because they really didn't know what to do with me back then in the New York City Public School system. So ever since I was a child, I had the idea that I was broken — now that was to human beings. What I discovered was when I was with animals, that I could talk to them alone. I could be myself. And my father saw that and took me to the zoo, to the Bronx Zoo.
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