It’s one thing to have somebody that’s skilled in a certain niche of research or a certain niche of education or business, but you still have to understand your animals. And if you’re gonna work with them, I think that may be in some ways, the pendulum went from just curatorial at AZA to all these other related facets of zoo operation, and maybe somewhere we’ve lost a little bit of that essence of saying that the new young mammal curator and bird curator should know a lot more about that particular group of wild creatures. So I think that somewhere, somehow that balance may swing, but today my thought would be that it’s important to get people who care for and about animals. Who bring some advanced educational knowledge to their care and are given equal credit that the animal curatorial staff should read right along with the marketing, and the PR, and fundraising, and education, and conservation. All those things are good and necessary, but the core still has to be the care of that collection.
