JACKSON — A hush fell over the room last week as 13 Monmouth University psychology students knelt on the floor and waited for the subject of the day’s lesson to arrive.
With a rattle of an opening cage door, two lion cubs — Kanu and Kondo — bounded into the room and immediately began playfully nipping at the students’ hands and gnawing on their shoes.
“How many other Monmouth classrooms have you been in with an African lion?” said Jessica Peranteau, a supervisor of animal training at Six Flags Great Adventure.
The students are part of Monmouth University’s “Field Experience: Six Flags Wild Safari” class offered on location in the animal park at Great Adventure in Jackson. The course, designed for upper level psychology students, uses the park’s animals to demonstrate psychological theories and principles that can also be applied to humans.
This semester, students worked with giraffes, sea lions and other wild and trained animals to learn psychological concepts ranging from positive reinforcement to behavior modification.
“The experience the students are receiving is a personalized education like no other,” said Lisa Dinella, a Monmouth University associate professor of psychology. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for students to be able to see the psychological principles being adapted in a unique way.”
Dinella came up with the idea of offering psychology classes at Great Adventure a few years ago when she took her children to the park for the day. While watching a dolphin show, Dinella realized the animal trainer was demonstrating some of the psychological theories she was trying to teach her students back on Monmouth’s West Long Branch campus.
“It was exactly the lecture I’d given the day before — but they had better props,” Dinella said.
The professor approached Great Adventure officials with the idea of using their animals for her psychology classes. She began bringing students behind the scenes at the park for field trips and eventually developed a semester-long course taught at Great Adventure, about 30 miles from campus.
This year, Monmouth University and Six Flags formalized the unusual arrangement and signed an exclusive affiliation agreement to offer classes at the park. Great Adventure animal trainers, who usually have psychology degrees, help teach the classes.
“For Six Flags, it allows an opportunity to get in contact with the community,” said Staci Wheeler, a Great Adventure supervisor of animal training. “People are so surprised at times that psychology is used in this field that it kind of opens a lot of eyes.”
Great Adventure has more than 1,200 animals that live in the park year-round, including elephants, rhinos, bears, lions, tigers and kangaroos on a 350-acre preserve.
Last year, Great Adventure stopped allowing visitors to drive through the animal park in their own vehicles and debuted its Safari Off Road Adventure ride, which takes visitors to see the animals in a fleet of open-air trucks.
The Monmouth University class also uses the trucks to give students up-close views of animals. Though it may look like a day at an amusement park, several students said the class is rigorous and they are learning the basics of psychology.
“The highlight has been when we got to interact with the giraffes because it’s really cool to see every principle coming to life,” said Jennifer Ruggiero, 21, a junior psychology major from Staten Island.
The students tested psychological principles to learn to feed and gain the trust of the giraffes. They first fed the animals with their hands and later with carrots passed from the students’ mouths to the giraffes’ mouths.
“Animal training is all positive reinforcement and operant conditioning, which is everything you learn in an intro to psych class,” said Nicole Conklin, 21, a junior psychology major from North Arlington. She recently got a job working in a Great Adventure animal show for children after meeting trainers in the class.
Monmouth’s Great Adventure class has quickly become one the most popular courses at the 6,500-student private university. This semester, the 13 spots in the small class filled quickly and nearly 60 students were on a waiting list hoping someone would drop out.
But the students said they learned working with animals has its dangers. Several students were bit by the 3-month-old lion cubs they met during last week’s lesson.
The male cubs were born to a lioness, Nala, in the safari park in January. They were taken in by the park’s veterinarians after Nala failed to care for one of the cubs. The park plans to return them back into the park’s lion population when they are 1½ years old. They will eventually grow to 500 pounds each.
The students learned Kanu and Kondo, though still 30-pound cubs, have powerful jaws and sharp teeth.
After class, senior Lucy Russo lifted the sleeve of her sweatshirt to show a red bite mark where one of the cubs playfully latched on to her upper arm. She said it was a unique souvenir from an unforgettable day. “It was absolutely incredible. I love that we have the opportunity to engage with these animals,” said Russo, 21, a psychology major from Brooklyn.
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