Mindy Joyce isn’t your average 9-year-old.
While many children her age read about wizards and magical spells at Hogwarts, Joyce would prefer cracking open a 400-page book on how to care for animals.
Other children may have pets that need training but Joyce took the time to go through obedience school with her dog Jasmine and has spent months on end perfecting new tricks.
And perhaps most amazingly, even to her parents Melody and David Joyce, she seems to have a knack for training a group of wild squirrels in the Joyce’s backyard.
When she was 5, Joyce named the first squirrel to venture into the family’s backyard, Ritz. The ease of taming the animal made her want to interact with other squirrels.
“After we met Ritz, I thought they were cute,” Joyce said.
“She has sat here (in the backyard) for hours just to get one squirrel to come out,” Joyce’s mother said. “She has a lot of patience.”
That patience coupled with what her parents call a natural instinct in understanding animals has led to the addition of multiple squirrels to the list of family pets.
Hansel is the most friendly and most daring of the current squirrels, the 9-year-old says. Even though Joyce had to begin in small steps while gaining the trust of the squirrel, Hansel now barely thinks twice before crawling up the young girl’s leg looking for food. Hansel even climbs to the top of her head if the promise of nuts takes him there.
But feeding the squirrel is only part of the equation—she’s even got Hansel doing tricks for food.
“He walks on his hind legs,” Joyce said, while beckoning the squirrel to walk across a picnic table on her porch.
Identifying Hansel from other squirrels in the yard is not too challenging to the trained eye—a small square-like chunk of the squirrel’s right ear is missing.
Close contact with wild animals was initially a concern for her father. David Joyce can remember his apprehension the first time he saw his daughter petting a squirrel.
“I thought, ‘How are you able to do that without getting bit?”
Despite countless hours in the backyard with Hansel and the rest of the squirrels, Joyce has never been attacked.
The fourth-grader’s love and knack for interaction with animals does not end in her backyard. Her dream is to become a veterinarian but because of her age and insurance issues, local animal hospitals have refused her requests to volunteer.
However, Joyce did find an opportunity with a local humane society that needed help fostering animals. Her mother says the family will soon begin taking in unwanted cats and that the youngest of her four daughters will be responsible for feeding, cleaning and administering medication to the animals if necessary.
The home-schooled fourth grader also has her sights set on practicing holistic, alternative remedies once she becomes a vet. The Joyce family recently lost their cat, Rascal, to food poisoning from commercial pet food. After this, Joyce and her mother began preparing and feeding their dog Jasmine homemade food so the Siberian Husky-German Shepard mix would not meet the same fate.
The girl’s concrete, unshaken belief in her future career and looking at natural remedies with traditional methods is combined with a simple, yet caring philosophy of why she wants to be a vet in the first place.
“I want to save animals,” Joyce said.
And even though Joyce may be temporarily limited to training animals in her backyard and reading books on her future career, her parents have no question that success and her uncanny relationships with animals, domestic or wild, will follow her for a long time.
“She’s our little Dr. Doolittle,” Melody Joyce said. “She can talk to the animals.”
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