So I met Dave Wilt when I went up to Steve Seger’s place who was doing some, a veterinarian doing work in reproductive physiology, and Dave Wilt worked for him, and Dave and I just kind of hit it off. We started doing laparoscopy together, and then basically we looked at, started talking, and we had shared a lot of the same interest in, you know, assisted reproduction, and things like this. And we were starting to look at cheetahs, you know, to see, because cheetahs were not doing well breeding, and so by looking at both the sperm, and from electroejacutaion, we found very poor sperm, which is now well-known, and laparoscopy, we looked at the, we could look at the ovaries and classify how the ovaries looked. So it kind of just kept building up on that, and we did more and more kind of collaboration. We went around to various zoos, and did studies, and then we went to Africa, because we’d went around zoos, oh, probably for three or four years looking at cheetahs that, you know, trying to get a baseline of what the reproductive status of the captive cheetah population was at the time. And we traveled, I don’t know, I’d have to go back my logs, but many zoos in the US, maybe 10, 12, looking at cheetahs, both laparoscopically and by electroejaculation, and Smithsonian supported that, you know, that we could go and do the traveling. But then it kind of came up, we got some money available for, out of our friends for our National Zoo started making grants, and so I requested a grant and got it that we could go over to Africa, and look at some cheetahs there, ’cause then a previous trip I’d went to the Vilt, and met the veterinarian there, and talked to him about some collaboration. And so we went over to the Vilt, and when we got in there, I think one of the first days we had eight cheetahs under anesthesia at the same time collecting data from them, and that was about the number of cheetahs that we had in our whole six or seven months of traveling around the zoos, and at the zoos, they’d always short of course given us the problem breeders of the ones that had never bred, because they didn’t want us messing with the ones that were trying to breed.
