5 MINUTES WITH... BEN DRESSEN

SINCE BEING gifted a children’s python on his sixth birthday, Ben Dessen’s love for reptiles and animals has continued to grow, and now working as Retail Manager at Kellyville Pets, Dessen is able to impart his knowledge and passion to all those who visit.

“After my sixth birthday snake I was hooked. One snake became many, and pretty quickly we had reptiles and frogs and all sorts of creatures everywhere around the house. After a while, Mum and Dad said there were too many animals in the house so we built a big shed out the back.

“The shed is where I used to spend most of my time, breeding all sorts of snakes and lizards and amphibians and insects and that’s actually how it led to my job at Kellyville Pets when I was 15.”

Dessen was breeding stick insects and selling them to Kellyville, when one day he decided to bring his resumein and after an interview with Kellyville Pets’ owner John Grima, he walked out with a job half an hour later.

“When I came into a retail environment, I realised how much I enjoy sharing my passion with others and helping others to have the privilege of sharing their lives with so many amazing animals.”

Sixteen years later, that passion for animals has led Dessento be managing the store alongside Richard Sheen, even if that’s not what he might have expected for himself at 30 years old.

“It really wasn’t a matter of if I would work with animals, I knew I would always work with animals, but I wasn’t exactly sure what that path would take. If I was in primary school or high school and you said, ‘When you’re 30 you’ll still be working in a pet store’, I’d say no, surely not.

“But you know, here I am, and I love it more than ever and I’m excited to continue driving the business forward and improving standards in the industry across the board.”

One of the changes that Dessen, Grima, and Kellyville Pets was instrumental in implementing, was the ability for pet stores to sell reptiles.

“Up until about 10 years ago, pet stores couldn’t sell reptiles. It really came down to our store and John working closely with the Government and the Pet Industry Association of Australia (PIAA) to get it across the line.

“Now there’s a few stores qualified to sell reptiles, and new stores that don’t currently sell reptiles can apply to get a special licence to be a commercial dealer and sell reptiles in their shop.”

Although Dessen warned that selling reptiles is not something a store should take lightly, given it is a very specialised area of animal care.

“If you don’t have educated staff and know the correct procedures and have the right setups in place, it’s ultimately going to fail or the animals are going to suffer. So that’s something that I would urge any shops considering taking on reptiles to think about very carefully.”

It’s not just Kellyville Pets that has been fortunate enough to reap the rewards of Dessen’s passion and knowledge, with his work allowing him to travel and participate in exciting projects.

“I’m very, very lucky to travel widely, not just through my work with Kellyville but I do quite a bit of work outside Kellyville with various conservation organisations and groups. I’ve spent collectively about six months living in the jungles of Borneo, working to help set up an orangutan orphanage in 2011/12.

“The orphanage that we established back then is now a fully thriving setup with orphaned babies coming through and being rehabilitated and raised and released into the wild. I’m very passionate about Southeast Asia and the work that we established there.”

Through the work in Borneo, Dessen then linked up with Bob Irwin, the late Steve Irwin’s father, and became a Director on the Bob Irwin Wildlife and Conservationfoundation’s board helping to run fundraising for various conservation projects. But the moments Dessen cherishes most are the times he got to spend with Irwin in the bush doing what they both love.

“Every year in September all Bob wanted to do is get out into the bush, so we used to go out to a remote property in Cape York and spend a couple of weeks just catching crocs and snakes and doing wildlife surveys and just being out in the in the middle of nowhere together.”

Dessen sees Bob Irwin as the grandfather of conservation in Australia and said that after growing up watching Steve Irwin on TV, and then to be out in the bush years later learning from his father was a dream.

“To be able to spend time one on one with him in the bush hearing his decades of stories and his philosophies and things, I feel very privileged to be able to learn from someone of that calibre. I try and put the things I’ve learned from Bob into play every day with the things I do and the goals that I have moving forward.”

Educating people on how best to care for their pets is paramount to Dessen and Kellyville, and the launch of Kellyville Pets Pet School Online is a further testament to their desire to ensure potential, and current pet owners can provide the best possible life for their pet.

“We have always run education courses in person in our store. John was one of the first people to start doing that. I think we were the first pet store in Australia to start running educational in-person courses for looking after pets, and we’ve been doing it for two or three decades now.

“Obviously through Covid we had to stop the in-person courses, so we branched out to online. Initially, it was just me in a room doing the normal two-hour course to camera, but we thought we could so much better and there was a real opportunity to create something special.”

What resulted was a series of incredibly engaging cinematic masterclasses aimed at not only teaching people the correct way to care for their animals but also entertaining them.

“When you watch it, it doesn’t feel like you’re watching a class or a school, it’s like an Attenborough documentary. There are drone shots of sweeping landscapes and we’re out in the rugged bush and trudging through the desert looking for lizards and all sorts of things. It’s like watching a documentary but you’re learning at the same time.”

Dessen hopes these masterclasses, which are $39.99 each for lifetime access, will allow Kellyville Pets to spread their knowledge to people who aren’t able to physically get to the store.

“Education is such an important thing for anyone looking to share their life with a pet and now with these masterclasses we can potentially educate people in every corner of the globe.”

Taking the masterclasses worldwide would be a fantastic achievement for Dessen and Kellyville, but Dessen believes none of this would have been possible if he wasn’t gifted that python on his sixth birthday.

“That’s what sent me on my path in life and now I’ve gone on to work with animals around the world such as the conservation work in Borneo and various other projects like the wildlife sanctuary that I run. You know, I don’t think I would have done all of that if I didn’t have that privilege and opportunity to keep a reptile as a pet.”