Animal actors are safe at work.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

You see the sentence at the end of almost every movie: "No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture." The American Humane Association is the only organization that can give that credit to a film. Its animal training experts monitor the movie industry to make sure filmmakers aren't harming animals.

Tonya Obeso is one of those watchdogs. She's been on the sets of Hollywood films such as Evan Almighty and Diamond Dogs. Obeso spent two years studying animal behavior at Moorpark College's Exotic Animal Teaching Zoo program. For the past nine years, she's put that education to use as an American Humane certified animal safety representative.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

American Humane oversees more than 1,000 film and television projects every year. Obeso has been sent around the world to monitor movie sets. "I love the fact that I go somewhere new every day," Obeso says. "I love the change and variety ... I love being there for the animals and making sure they're OK."

Obeso upholds a basic rule: Any animal that arrives on a movie set will do its job and leave the set unharmed. She makes sure the animals are comfortable and well fed. She also monitors the health of animal actors and pulls any animal from a movie if it is too sick or-weak to work.

Obeso is also in charge of keeping people safe from the animals. On the set of Evan Almighty, she had to remind the camera crew not to chow down on juicy cheeseburgers when a tiger was on the set. Hollywood animals are well behaved, but a hungry tiger is a hungry tiger.

Obeso's clients aren't all big and furry. "One day we had 500 hissing cockroaches on set," Obeso says. Every animal deserves protection, no matter how creepy. When the script called for actors to step on giant cockroaches, Obeso made sure that the only bugs crushed were the special effects props.