Some came from captive breeding, some had never bred. And the feeling was that this group were to tell other institutions how to move their animals around to encourage the national captive breeding program, and to minimize inbreeding. The problem with the gorilla SSP that I ran into very quickly. And I hadn’t really thought about it until it happened was that every community in town that had a big famous gorilla didn’t wanna move it. In other words, the guy in Kansas City said, “You can’t take our male “and send it to the Bronx Zoo in New York “because that’s part of the community.” And my reaction would have been the same, I think, if someone had told me Sinbad had to go to another place because he was kinda one of the stars of the collection. And so we really had some interesting early resistance from various communities trying to do what we thought was zoologically important and conservation-wise correct, but politically incorrect. And it took some years of nudging, and cajoling, and pushing, and working with different communities around the country. We even ended up with one lawsuit.
