A young Montville resident just spent part of her summer hanging out with lions.

Paige Skinner, a junior at the University of Vermont and a 2014 Montville High School graduate, returned to town recently after three weeks caring for orphaned and abandoned animals at the Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage.

Skinner, 20, got back from the orphanage in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe in the middle of several widely-discussed news stories about Americans’ relationships with animals — like the one that left a gorilla at a Cincinnati zoo dead last month and a two year-old drowned by a crocodile in Orlando — and said her experiences working with lions and pythons have given her a new perspective on animal-human interactions.

People’s relationship with wild animals is more respectful in a place where elephant stampedes are a normal part of life, she said.

“They don’t blame the animals for their instincts,” Skinner said. “What happens here is people want to see only the cuddly side of animals. But when you actually stand next to those creatures — you see them get up against that cage — you really get a different understanding of what their powers, and what they, can do to you.”

Skinner was one of a group of volunteers from across the world who helped out this summer at Chipangali, which houses wild animals that have been orphaned, abandoned, injured, born in captivity or removed from households where they were being kept as pets.

She helped build shelters and clean up after the animals, and had several up-close experiences with abandoned raptors, snakes, antelopes, lions, leopards and jackals and other animals getting medical care or shelter at Chipangali.

Skinner said she also helped cut up the meat of cows, horses or donkeys that had died of old age or were hit by cars as food for the lions, one way she said the organization tries to save money.

“It’s very expensive to take care of animals, in any country,” she said. “They had to come up with a lot of creative and efficient solutions.”

“They’re not a zoo,” Skinner said, though visitors can come see the rescued animals for a small fee.

“Their main goal is to rehabilitate and release those that they can,” she said. “Those animals that are too injured or won’t survive, they’ll keep them at the orphanage.”

Skinner said many of the people she met in Zimbabwe see encounters with animals as a natural result of human encroachment on animals’ habitats, and not the other way around.

A man she met on a plane told her about a leopard that bit his friend when he got too close, breaking his arm.

The men let the leopard escape back into the forest, a different reaction than the one many Americans would have, she said.

Skinner said she returned to the U.S. after weeks without internet access to hear about recent incidents like the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla that grabbed a child that fell into its exhibit and a crocodile that killed a toddler at Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

“People love to go on these adventures and see the wildlife,” she said. “They don’t want the reality of it, and that’s where the animals get hurt.”

Skinner is majoring in animal science at the University of Vermont, with a concentration in zoos and exotic animals.

She spent last summer working with a New Mexico organization that trains wild mustangs that would otherwise face slaughter or mistreatment in government holding facilities.

She wants to continue working with animals once she graduates, she said.

“My main goal would be to work at some kind of wildlife sanctuary or conservation,” she said.

She said she wants to focus on training big cats to make giving them medical treatment easier.

“Even though I hate the idea of captive wildlife in zoos … it would make whatever life they have there better,” she said.

m.shanahan@theday.com