David Kleven

Our Story
In December of 2014, the zoo using David's database enlisted the assistance of a staff member's spouse, Michael Gagne, to make the database more user friendly. David was impressed with the improvements that Michael had made in such a short amount of time. Thus began a discussion about combining their knowledge of animal care and software architecture to create a new record-keeping platform that could be accessed from anywhere on any device. The goal of the new solution would be simplicity and customizability to fit the needs of a diverse set of animal care facilities and capture only the most important information.

David and Michael, along with the rest of the AnimalCare software team have surveyed, consulted, and received feedback from people from across the spectrum of the animal care field. They started by asking how animal care staff at different facilities recorded their daily records. They were surprised to learn that the majority of zoological facilities polled still recorded daily reports on paper or spreadsheets. They narrowed down what types of information were important to facilities to collect daily and asked what they could do to help animal care staff do their jobs more efficiently.

From there they talked to various supervisors, curators, registrars, veterinarians, and zoo directors to find out what was most important to them. The answer? Make the data it easily searchable, secure, and current.

During the research and development process, David and Michael repeatedly heard that the time and expense of training staff to implement a record-keeping system was a big barrier to having all levels of animal care staff use other available solutions. Thus, AnimalCare was created to be intuitive and requires little to no training for all level of animal care staff.

AnimalCare® Software looks forward to partnering with animal care professionals around the world to build the best and easiest to use digital daily record solution available.