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Sylvia Jackson poses with ZaZa, a red boa, outside UF's new Small Animal Hospital.

Receptionist featured
in magazine

A year after Sylvia Jackson embarked upon an ambitious weight loss program, she has maintained her svelte new shape and was recently featured in an Av-Med publication to promote Weight Watchers.

 “I started in mid-January 2010 and gradually took off 70 pounds,” said Jackson, a receptionist in the UF College of Veterinary Medicine dean’s office.

Because Jackson participated in the “Weight Watchers at Work” program and also has a fondness for exotic pets, she asked the photographer assigned to the article to shoot photos of her at work.

With assistance from clinicians with the zoo medicine service, arrangements were made for Jackson’s photo to be taken with Za Za, a red tail boa constrictor who was donated to the service by an owner who could not afford to continue caring for it.

“As I wanted to reflect my interests and hobbies in these photos, Za Za was the perfect choice,” Jackson said. “I met her in the zoo medicine ward, where I like to visit. The doctors there graciously offered to let her model for us in the photo shoot.”

Jackson’s collection of exotic pets began soon after she became smitten with a bearded dragon she held in a pet store.  Although she didn’t buy the animal then, her sister soon gave her another bearded dragon as a present.

“Since then, I have happily succumbed to the charms of other exotics,” she said. “My collection now includes a bearded dragon, various snakes, green iguanas, desert iguanas, a Chinese water dragon, leopard geckos, tarantulas, scorpions and a pacman frog. I raise mealie worms and superworms as food for some of them.”

Jackson also owns cats, Quaker parrots and goldfish.

The article appears in the January 2011 issue of AvMed Magazine.