architects have common sense. That’s what my philosophy was, if you take anybody that designs a hospital should have to go work with an animal, should have to clean cages, should have to shift an animal, should, you know, be around and work and see what the problems are, and not put the drain at the highest part of the floor, and make a drain for a giraffe house that’s smaller than the drain in your shower, you know, with, and there was just multiple problems with hospitals that I’ve seen built in Thailand, which I’ve tried to correct, but I think I had worked without a hospital for probably, well, five years or so in Baltimore, and three or four at National when I had a marginal hospital there, that I knew what I wanted, but to put it in perspective, a hospital needs to be built to meet the needs of the collection and also to some extent to the veterinarian there, because certain veterinarians have certain things, and they wanna build ’em certain ways, which is a little bit difficult, because veterinarians do change, and so somebody’s hospital may not suit the next person. My hospital had all the observation doors into the hoofstock at about six feet high, and my technician is about five foot one, so she had to carry around a milk crate with her to stand upon to check animals in the thing, but that’s not much of a problem. But no, they used to people, after I built the hospital, people from other zoos would come around, and look at the hospital and the first thing I’d tell ’em is say “The worst thing you can have in planning a hospital is an architect”, because they wanna go off and do all these other things, and make it real look fancy instead of functional. I think there’s a nice balance between function, and that, I would look at a plan and they would build an outside flower garden, that was three feet deep, and 14 feet long and I’d say, “No, close the wall out, and I’ll take that space for storage, since you’re already have it under roof and everything else” and turned it into our surgery storage, which we needed. You know, just things like that that we kind of looked at and processed, and of course you’re always gonna make mistakes when you build hospitals, and the first thing somebody says, “Well, where do you do the surgery on elephants and giraffes?” You know, and there you don’t have a big enough surgery. Well I don’t know of any surgery that I would take a giraffe or an elephant inside to do it, most of that’s done out in the field, so you don’t build a hospital that, you know, is gonna take care of every contingency, you have to be realistic, you could build an elephant hospital, but it would be astronomical, and I don’t know that I’d ever used one in the years that I’ve practiced with elephants.
