Booking Jack Hanna

Jack Hanna Biography

American media personality and animal expert Jack Hanna was born in 1947 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Jack grew up surrounded by the animals on his father’s farm, and so it wasn’t a surprise that he became an animal lover and advocate for animal welfare. At the age of eleven, Hanna began volunteering for a local veterinarian, and he credits those early experiences as having informed his understanding of animals.

After graduating from Muskingum College in Ohio, Hanna moved to Florida in 1973, where he began working for the Central Florida Zoo. After discovering that his young daughter was suffering from leukemia, he accepted a position at the Columbus Zoo, largely because the local hospital had one of the nation’s best treatment programs for the disease. While working at the zoo, Jack Hanna developed a television program for the local CBS affiliate; “Hanna’s Ark” became enormously popular and led to national attention for Hanna and the Columbus Zoo.

Thus began Jack Hanna’s role as a television personality and one of the world’s most recognizable authorities on animals. Since the early 1990’s, Jack Hanna hosted various syndicated television programs, including the long-running Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures and more recently, Jack Hanna’s Wild Countdown, which began its run in 2011. Hanna also regularly appears on television programs such as Larry King Live, Maury, and Nancy Grace.