And after the second or third such visit, the doctors realized that this was a plus, rather than a minus. And when I’d arrived there with my animals, the doctors and nurses would greet me at the door and they would take the animals and bring them around to the kids. And once word got out that this was going on in Chicago, next thing I knew right near us at Lincoln Park, we have a very world renowned children’s hospital, I was gonna say Children’s Zoo. But we had the Children’s Zoo, but children’s hospital. And so they said, well, “If La Rabida can do this safely, we can too.” And the next thing I knew, we went to county hospital and we started sort of our own Traveling Zoo, but these were cases where we put the animals in little carrying cases and went into the hospitals. And to me that was a very meaningful and happy breakthrough. And all the years that I’ve been at Lincoln Park, I can look back on the number of times that I would bring a little animal, and it ended up primarily rabbits and Guinea pigs. I used to think an exotic snake and a bird, and that would be kind of fun for these sick kids, but they wanted something soft and cuddly and safe.
