Conservation on the ground in the wild habitat takes a lot of money and we did not have a lot of money to spend on conservation, even though we spent percentage-wise the same as some of the bigger zoos, it wasn’t nearly the dollar volume. So we had to pick and choose and be very careful what we worked with. We are right on the coast where the Kemps Ridley sea turtle nests are traditionally nested. And at one time back in the 1940s, there were film records of 40,000 of these animals coming on shore about 200 miles, south of Brownsville at a beach near LA marina and Aldama, where they would come in, lay their eggs, and then go back out to see these called aribados when they come in. A few used to come along the Gulf Coast, but not nearly so many because of the tourist development, the traffic on the beach, things like that but the primary focus was in Mexico, a few miles south of us. A gentleman named Peter Pritchard, Dr. Peter Pritchard was instrumental in realizing that this was probably the world’s most endangered sea turtle. And so he started a program back in the ’70s for trying to preserve these, and it used to be, he would handle it. He worked for the Otoban society in Florida, but trying to have logistics from Otoban society in Florida, working on a beach 200 miles south of Brownsville, Texas was difficult.
