First of all, I thoroughly enjoyed my membership, and I thoroughly enjoyed the people, the colleagues that I met. Really good friends from all over the world. Smart people. But I was encouraged, when I was chair of the AZA the first time, I created the long-range planning committee, looking at the future of the AZA. Well, a lot of our colleagues, a lot of my colleagues felt like WAZA needed to do the same thing. They were very short-term-focused. So my involvement, my appointment or election, I guess, initially to the WAZA board was an initiative of a number of American zoo directors saying, “You need to put this guy on there.” And I moved up through the chairs, and every year that went by as I moved further and further up, I realized, and this is a terrible thing to admit but… They moved very slowly, those Europeans.
