Dr. David Jones

Well, I’m David Jones, and I was born in the north country in England, in Cheshire on the 14th of August, 1944. So I’ve just had my 80th birthday.

And who were your parents and what did they do?

Both of Welsh, the whole family, both sides of Welsh extraction. Father was an Anglican minister, a rector in the Church of England who had a parish, started as a curate, a junior priest where I was born. And then at my age three we moved, we moved down to a, a village in the London area. Mother was a teacher, both of them from North Wales, both from farming families. And interestingly, both those families, the broad, you know, the broader family are still farming the Welsh Hills today. So they’re, these are, you know, cousins twice removed as it were, but still very much involved. And of course, having a farming background, being a, you know, being a a coming, a farming stock, that was part of the reason for being interested in the, in the, the countryside. Anyway. Tell us a little about your childhood growing up.

Were animals part of your life?

Yeah, very, very much so. I mean, we, we had, when we’d, obviously from the time I can remember, I was in this village to the north of London with, and it was the house we lived in called the Rectory was one of those lovely Georgian, completely unhealable houses, beloved of Jane Austen novels. You know, you, you’ll see them on these sort of Sunday night, you know, BBC documentaries, very much of that large house built 200 years before old stables and all of that. But had about 10 acres of land called the glee land, G-L-E-B-E, that went with any, any parsonage in Victorian. And earlier times, of course, the youngest son of the lord of the manor typically went into the church. The oldest son managed the estate when father died. But the youngest son went into the church. So very often they were quite substantial houses and with land adjacent, big gardens, mother was a keen gardener.

And so, you know, from a very early age at a time and of course security, children’s security, nobody really worried about it. So my brother and I have one full brother to a half, brother and sister as well, could roam at will. And there was a stream, a creek, not far away, lots of woodland. So the interest in wild things, surroundings, you know, wild surroundings, animals in general, plants as well came at an early age. So that, that was the sort of beginning. And then we used to be, brother and I used to be farmed out literally to these family hill farms in, in North Wales for Easter. Much of summer, not so much at Christmas because the 12th century church that father was rector of, it was an absolutely gorgeous Flintstone built church. Started in the 12th century, was extremely popular for baptisms and weddings.

So father used to have, you know, he would have a two on a Sunday morning, we’d have two or three baptisms in a row on a Saturday. He’d have three weddings in a row ’cause of the picturesque nature of the church. And so we boys were sort of basically thrown on the good offices of aunts and uncles. But that again, was very, you know, was very influential in, in sort of developing that interest in the countryside. And I think to some extent, you know, having that broader interest in countryside things than just simply the animal or plant species. And then later on at, I went to boarding school at a fairly, fairly early age, actually eight in, I was eight years old and had a, a sort of possible treble voice. Got into St Paul’s cathedral choir in the city. And it was a time just, it wasn’t long after the war, second World War, it was in 1953, end of 1953.

And there were still bomb sites everywhere. The cathedral stood isolated, literally in a sea of bomb sites. It was a pretty dramatic sort of place for a young person to be made. One very homesick because I wanted to be out in the green fields, 40 miles to the north. But the bomb sites were actually great wildlife venues. So we as choir boys for our exercise, ’cause there were no playing fields or anything in the middle of London would actually take walks onto the bomb sites to see the plants. And actually amazing bird life from Peregrine falcons down to Robins Reds, you know, all sorts of things. So that further reinforced the interest in things wild.

And then when I moved to boarding secondary school, high school had a a a major had a, both a young farmer society and a, a natural history society, which I got very involved with and led them both at one time or another. So keeping everything from jays and mag pies to, you know, chipmunks and frogs and you name it, every sort of small critter imaginable. So very, very, like the background of many, of, many zoo directors. Quite a, quite a heavy animal background.

Before finally, you know, in finally applying for vet college, What zoos did you see growing up?

What impressions did they have on you?

Well, very, very familiar with, with Whipsnade, particularly because the little village Cheney’s that I mentioned, where I grew up just north of London, was only 20 miles maybe from Whipsnade. So visits to Whipsnade on a more or less a couple of times a year were common. So I knew, I knew Whipsnade very well to some extent London Zoo, but didn’t really have, you know, the other big zoos that actually a lot of the zoos in Britain that are there now, the smaller zoos were not there in the 1950s. You only had, you had London whip sna, you had zoos like Chester, Bristol, Edinburgh, couple of which were quite young. Chester had only been going about 20 years before that. So I didn’t, I didn’t have a lot of access to zoos per se, but whipsnade rather interestingly. ’cause I had no idea the role it would play a bit later in life. But I knew, I knew Whipsnade and London to some extent.

What kind of formal schooling do you have?

Formal schooling? Formal, Well, from eight, from eight to 13 until my voice broke as a treble at St. Paul’s then went to a boarding school in Surrey St. John School, Leatherhead, which was, which was a school largely for sons of the clergy. The reason for that was financial father did not earn very much as a parish priest. And luckily we had a couple of ladies, wealthy ladies, widows in the parish who actually paid for all of my mine and my brother’s education. And so I was at boarding school from 14 through to 18 when I, you know, when I joined the Royal Vet College.

Did any teachers have an effect on your life?

How? Well, interestingly, the, probably the first one was my main teacher in the little village primary school I went to from age about five to eight, where I remember to this day remember one very sort of tyrant style teacher who was very highly disciplined and needed that discipline from the kids. But that taught me, I mean, it was a tough, it was tough love, really. So that, that partic Ms. Howe, I remember Ms. Howe was, was a toughie, but extremely good at sort of instilling a discipline into those kids at St. Paul’s. We had, we had some amazing, I mean St Paul’s, the Cathedral choir school was only 38 boys. It was 30 boys in the choir and eight probationers who waited a year in training to join the main choir. And, and we had 11 teachers to 38 boys, simply because we sang something like 1517 services a week and had the practices to go with them. So a typical day would be getting up at six o’clock in the morning, breakfast at six 30, walk on the bomb sites, six 30 to seven. First practice of the day is seven to eight.

Matins at 10, lunch at 12, another practice at one o’clock, even song at four o’clock to bed at six. It, it was quite a and a Sunday we had anything up to, you know, five or six services in one day. So, so that sort of, you know, that, that certainly instills a discipline into, but we had some amazing teachers who, and particularly obviously music teachers being in that sort of environment. But it was basically a ratio of one teacher to four students. No student in 180 years history of that school ever failed into getting into the secondary school that they were allotted never fail simply because, ’cause you spent half the time in a classroom that most kids would’ve done at that age because of the music needs, because of the demands of the music. But because the teaching was so intensive, all those teachers played a very, you know, very significant role on you. And actually St. Paul’s in a way had more influence on my personality and, and look the way I looked at life than my secondary school ever did. Not that that was a bad school, in many ways it wasn’t.

But, but the, it’s interesting that most people would say their secondary school was more influential. But actually my prep school, ’cause it was so unusual, was, was much more influential.

So when did you decide that you wanted to work at a zoo?

Pretty early. I would say in my mid-teens. I thought that I would probably go to do zoology and I don’t know who it was, but I think somebody said to me, and this is, you know, you’re looking at what the early sixties, somebody even then said, you are not either with a zoology degree, you are not gonna get very far in term in terms of a career. So I was looking, I suppose at that time at zoos and agriculture or inevitably ’cause of the, you know, the whole family background. And I was, as I said, I was visiting, certainly visiting whip snag quite often. So probably by 1617 that was, that was an ambition to, to work in the zoo world. And my entry into the zoo world was very fortuitous. And it’s something that I often tell those mothers with their 14-year-old daughters who want to be vets in terms of opportunity. When in my final year at Vet College, an advert came up for the job at Whipsnade.

It was the first full-time veterinary job that, that Whipsnade was, was putting together. There were only six full-Time Zoo vets in the whole of Western Europe at that time. We’re talking about late 68 now, six, yeah, late 1968. And what I did, which I always advise these youngsters and their parents to do, was take the plunge and go find the curator at Whipsnade who happened to be on duty one Saturday afternoon when my wife Janet, who was engaged, we were engaged at the time, let’s go to Waid and see if we can find the curator and pin him down to an hour’s chat, which we did. And we were lucky that he was there. And although I think over 50 people applied for that job, all of them pretty well, all of them, as far as I know, qualified vets already, you know, long outta college because I actually, I did in the end get a zoology degree. I broke off from the veterinary course halfway through, took an extra 18 months and, and did get a zoology degree and went back to the veterinary course. But because of that and my knowledge of whips made, fortuitously, we created a very good bond even even with that afternoon with him.

And so he held the job for me until, I think that was a sort of October, November. And he said, well, as long as you come and work with me over the Christmas holidays and then join me after you qualify in March. And I did. And that, that was how I started in the Zoo Worlds. It was a, a lot of luck and just happened to be the right person in the right place at the right time.

And who was the, what was the name of that person?

Victor Manam.

And who was the director who was in charge of Webster?

Colin Rollins was the director at the time. There was a, a triumvirate of directors. It was a, it was a rather odd setup. Prince Philip was chairman of the ZL board at the time. Lord Zuckerman was Secretary Soly Zuckerman. And there was a close relationship there. And Zuckerman had decided for whatever reason, I don’t know, to have three directors. So there was a director of zoos who was Colin Rollins, a director of administration lady called Ms. Owen, can’t remember it, Christian name now.

And, and a very good director of science, Len Goodwin and Len, certainly Len and Colin were very influential in, in my career. They were the two who really sort of, you know, were very good at pushing me forward.

So what kind of, when you start in 1969, what kind of zoo do you find at Whip State? Can you describe it?

Sort of a large farm. It was nearly, nearly all the keepers had come from farming backgrounds. Very, very different to today when, you know, many keepers start with, with already a first if not a, a, a a, you know, may another degree. So they came from a farming background and what had been a converted farm, and that’s exactly what whips made, was when it was purchased in 1926 as the first sort of open style zoo in, in Europe. It was paddocks with relatively simple agricultural buildings, nothing sophisticated. There was no, even though there was some technology, early technology available, no small species, not really. There was a small children’s center which had some invertebrate, some some herbs, but it was very much a collection of large, large mammals. Any, anything over the size of a spaniel.

I mean, we even had, you know, several hundred wallabies just roaming free within the, the fenced 600 acres. But it was very much a matter of managing 3000 animals between the size of a wallaby and an and an elephant.

Now you were the only vet?

The only vet, but I was the fact previously, and it was still the case at the time, most zoos were reliant on local veterinary practices, you know, who were agricultural or mixed small animal agricultural. And London had had a full-time clinician and a full-time pathologist for quite some years. But whips had depended on local practice. Victor was a vet, but, but actually had other, you know, largely other things to do. So I was the first full-time veterinary officer at, at Waid Park.

What were your responsibilities?

Ba basically it was managing, it was much more than just veterinary. It was managing the entire collection. So here was this 24-year-old coming straight out of VE college into, you know, into a situation where almost immediately I had to manage, I mean, there were what they call overseers. There was no curator, but what you would call a curator today was, you know, was called an overseer in those days. But again, they were largely, largely farm background people. Very, very good, very practical, but, but not, with, not a huge amount of knowledge apart from their own experience of the zoo. So I was thrust into the middle of managing in the, in the broadest sense. But the veterinary side of it, of course, was particularly challenging because we had, there was no established, there was certainly no established zoo medicine at the time.

You, you simply drew on what little experience?

There were one or two publications you mentioned. We were talking earlier about Lee Crandall, Murray Fowler, but they were the only thing, there was nothing like the sort of specialist veterinary care that there is today. And so we had, we had to wing it and because it was large mammals, most of which were completely un handleable, you know, in a, in a physical sense, although that’s what they’d had to rely on in the past. So we, we got pretty heavily into the, what was then the new field of, of tranquilizers dark guns and, and animal immobilization sometimes, sometimes anesthetizing, immobilizing 10 to 15 animals a day. So in my, and I, I kept notes of all that. I think in the period, the seven years that I was the veterinary surgeon there, we, I think wem mobilized over 5,000 animals. And many, many of those species like moose and muskox were, were probably the first time they’d ever been immobilized. And no, we all, we all we could do was draw, draw from domestic animal data and, and trial and error.

And fortunately, not too much error over those years. Lot of trial. Now many of these species are brand new to you.

Oh, absolutely. Fresh outta school. Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. How did You start coping with, they’re not cows, how did you start coping with some of these unique illnesses? Yeah, or, Well, I had What did you refer with?

Because, because I’d got this degree in zoology halfway through the veterinary course, I, I actually was eligible for Fellowship, scientific Fellowship of the Zoological Society of London, which I immediately joined. And also I think, you know, through my teens, my interest was very much in Hoofstock. Still is, I mean that’s my sort of specialist area, if there’s anyone at all. So I was interested in antelopes and deer, particularly from a fair, a fairly early age. So when I went to Whipsnade, I, I actually knew quite a bit about the bi, not so much the management of them, but certainly the, the biology of them. And I, I think that’s one of the reasons why Victor Anton and I hit it off so well to begin with.

So tranquilizing was still a pretty new science when you were there?

Very new, yeah.

How, what prepared you to do this, if anything?

Was it all trial and error?

Well, there was, there’d been a fair amount of work for some years by a guy called Tony Harthorne in South Africa. ’cause obviously managing, you know, managing those parks required that sort of knowledge. But the drugs were fairly, the drugs at the time were not particularly effective. And, and until these very powerful morphine-like drugs came on M 99 ine of course a drug we hear a lot about now fentanyl a a bit later, which were very effective. And then when combined with sedatives as well, different groups of, of those drugs actually became very, you know, very, very ubiquitous really. And used particularly with, well anything from el most certainly with herbivores, not so, it became more difficult with carnivores. But, but then, you know, we gradually built up a, an armory of drugs for those as well. But it, it was very, so I, there was a, there was minimal literature, there was a bit, there was some, but nothing like what’s available today.

So I mean, in, for example, I remember we had a, a particularly ferocious muskox bull. We had a little group of muskox and, and one, I remember one day when the keepers came running to me to say, the muskox bull has broken out through the roof of his shed. So I went down to the muskox exhibit and there was, and this was a pretty simple sort of cow shed really with a, with a couple of stalls and the muskox head and shoulders were sticking out through, through the roof with this animal sort of bellowing away. I mean, he wasn’t actually gonna be able to get out like that. But clearly something had to be done. Nobody, there’s no literature. I don’t think anybody had ever immobilized the muskox before. You know, this is 19 69, 19 70.

So what do you do?

So you have to, you know, you think, ah, well if I, if this was a cow at 600 pounds, what would I, what would I do with that?

Let’s, let’s give it a minimal dose and see, see what happens. And it just happens. Muskox, actually, I would rather sensitive oversensitive to these drugs. So the first, so I thought, I’m gonna have to give this animal maybe two or more darts to make sure I’m not killing it. And so the first dart actually worked extremely well. So the moscot sinks down back through the roof and, and goes to sleep. But that was the case with quite a number of species that had never, never really, nobody had ever had the technology to do that before.

You have used the phrase, in a competitive world, look for every opportunity to build your experience and showcase it pro proactively to a prospective employer. What did you mean?

Yeah, no, that, that comes back to mum with the 14-year-old daughter. And, and I think all of us in the zoo world, and, and I found, particularly in the veterinary world, talking to my own sort of veterinary colleagues or folks who qualify with me, it’s much the same. ’cause a lot of, a lot of youngsters want to get into the veterinary field is my, my main advice to them is get as much experience as you can in the animal world. Doesn’t matter, it doesn’t have to be in a zoo. But certainly in, certainly in, if you’ve got a local veterinary practice who’s willing to take you on, if you’ve got a farm or a stable or a, a a, a kennel, you know, get involved, do something, build up experience because that’s what a career in the animal world, whether it’s in the zoo or veterinary field or whatever. That’s what’s going to be needed. And if you can, once you get, you know, get to the point where you know where you’d like to get that experience, then find out who runs it and ask them if they, you can come and talk to them. And I think a lot of people are quite surprised at the, the fact that many many folks in a senior animal position are actually delighted that some youngster is gonna come and talk to ’em about them getting into the world.

And that’s a, that’s, you know, a lot of kids, of course are very shy, often their parents are not, which can be a, an issue, it can be a challenge sometimes, but, but I always say to any, any youngster, teenager, you know, look for experience and look for the people. Look for the people who can really help you get that experience and ultimately, ultimately help to find you a job. Talk about tranquil, lightly sedating chimps or umbrellas for a trip from zoo to zoo. Yeah. Any unique stories? It sounds fascinating to me.

Was it best practice at the time?

No. And, and, and folks today, particularly on a, you know, just on a safety and public health and your own health point of view would be horrified at some of these stories. But we obviously, we moved an, well, we moved animals fairly frequently between Regent Spark and whip snake inevitably. And we also moved them between London whips snake and, and other collections in the country where the distance was not too great. We would often, particularly in the case of say, chimps and, and the grillers is actually move them, just move them lightly sedated in. I mean usually it was a, something like a horse, a horse trailer, something like that, you know, adequately equipped with places to sit and make sure the animal was, you know, was, was fully sedated. But we, there were a number of occasions because lung London and whips, they were only an hour apart. And there were several occasions when we would actually sedate a chimp or a gorilla, have a technician sitting on the backseat of the car, strap the gorilla in the passenger seat and drive. And, and of course, by the time that we were more confident in the use of these sedatives, we, I mean we actually got to a point, and I’m sure you know, the vets in places like Brookfield today are very refined in the way that they can do this.

But we got to a point where we were very confident that we could keep an animal just lightly sed sedated enough that it wasn’t, I mean, still sort of awake, but, but not, certainly not aggressive or frightened. And, and you can imagine some of the looks that we got driving up, you know, the outskirts of London through some of those busy streets and stopping at a stoplight with, with a gorilla looking at them out of the window. And then we, and, and then we used to drive other, you know, hoofstock, we would take in horse trailers and remember, you know, moving things like camels around. If you had a camel in a horse trailer with its head over the back, it was a great way to get through London traffic because nobody, no car coming up behind you would go anywhere near a camel about to sort of spit at you over the back of the horse trailer so that it can, can imagine today what the, the sort of comments we’d get about that sort of thing. You talk about the foods and, and exotic diets are something that you’re have dealt with extensively.

Can you relate the story of how Missouri Foods was started?

Yeah, we, there was a BP British petroleum, which most people are familiar with, the one of the local garages selling them gas, bp and I think they still do, had an, has an, an animal nutrition department. And, and what happened there was the fla, we had several groups of flamingos at whips, quite a big collection, 40 or 50 in each group. And I could never really understand why the, the sort of pundits in the zoo animal world reckoned that the way you kept flamingos pink was you actually fed them a mixture of minced up shrimp and carrot juice. Which now, of course, knowing the exact pigments that are in bird feathers and certainly in flamingo feathers is, is completely, well it’s not entirely incorrect, but, but certainly not quite the right types of, of pigment. So I had a friend in BP Nutrition who was actually the guy in charge of the veterinary side of it.

So I gave this idea to him one day, can we not, ’cause you know, how flamingos feed by, you know, dabbling upside down, could we work on, could we use a floating diet?

Could we establish a floating diet that contained the right sort of pigments and, and floating in a way?

So it had to be sort of fat covered so it would float. And at the time, BP were producing a lot of new fish foods, which would actually float. And they also produced a floating poultry diet as well. So by combining the idea of a small pellet that would float, but containing what, what we then used was probably a poultry nutrition formula. ’cause we didn’t know any better, but we put into that formula asan thin cancer, you know, all the component pigments of feather coloring. And, and that worked extremely well. And from there we went to producing what to be looking at. Now, probably the seven, this is the seventies and early eighties with BP Nutrition, a whole range of carnivore diets of herbivore diets as knowledge became more available, diets that were suitable for browsing, ungulates diets for grazing, you know, but they were probably in the end, 10 or 15 of these.

And then BP Nutrition decided they were gonna sell and who did they sell out to?

But Missouri who were also interested in that same, and that’s how, that’s part of, I wouldn’t claim total responsibility at all, but that is how Missouri diets came about. They, it was act it was actually as an extension of what VP Nutrition had started, oh gosh, 40 years ago. Now when you’re in Whip State, you lived in the zoo? Yeah, In a house in the zoo.

Were there goods and dads living in the zoo?

And did everyone live on the zoo?

No, no. There were a few, there were a few houses for mostly the more senior keepers, the ones, ones that might be needed in an emergency. And Whipsnade had, and still has what they call the Bothy, B-O-T-H-I, it’s a name for farm workers accommodation. But we had a, a range of cottages so that we had staff, we had about 20 staff both in the park and near the park for all, for all sorts of reasons. And it was all free accommodation to those folks. And so I had a house, which actually was a direct, was the London Zoo secretaries, this is going back into the 1920s, was his summer home on the edge of Whipsnade. And there were, there were certainly great advantages of living in the park because you were, obviously, you were on site. My three boys were all born as they, they used to tell people between the camels and the tigers when they were telling their friends, you know, where to come. The only disadvantage for them was that of course their friends, their other kids were well over a mile away.

They were outside and they had to go through the zoo gates to, to get to those kids and vice versa. But of course, the other thing was that those kids and my kids grew up in the zoo. So when the park was closed after closing in the summer, they had 600 acres of zoo toro in. So as you can imagine, although any one of them has actually sort of followed the biological side, they, they have a, you know, very strong connection with, with, with the zoo world. But on the whole note, it was a great advantage and it was a gorgeous place to be.

Now you move from Waid Zoo to London Zoo to Regents Park as a veterinarian, why did you make the move?

Is this a promotion?

Well, the, the clinician at London was retiring and it was, the first part of the move was actually to, to take over the clinical, not the pathological side.

And so I I, as far as I remember, I, I simply asked, I think to, you know, would I become senior veterinary officer?

Would I take over the veterinary department as a whole?

And we appointed, there was a, a follow on to me in, in whip who I was responsible for. So in, in a way, after seven years, it was a natural move to take on the London side. And I, I still lived in the Park whip snake and commuted daily, fortunately at that time, commuting in and outta London provided you did it early in the day and later in the day was, was relatively easy. I wouldn’t want to do it now, but, so it was a, and I, and I had parking literally by the office door at the animal, very similar sort of setup to, to here. So it was, it was a natural move. And ultimately the pathologist also retired. So I took over the, the entire veterinary, little, little veterinary empire. And at that time we were beginning to deal helping a number of zoos, particularly in the Middle East.

So not only did I have the veterinary responsibilities for ZSL on site London and Whips node, but also for the veterinary aspects of three or four zoos in the Middle East as well. And that responsibility expanded when we at one point were actually managing a couple of those zoos entirely.

What kind of zoo did you come to when you arrived now at Regents Park?

What kind of zoo was Regents Park?

Well, it was, it was still living in that sort of rather competitive era. We, we act, we had one gorilla guy, the gorilla. And I always, I always remember having to remove his last teeth, poor animal because he’d been given too much sugar. But it was, it was still very much in the traditional role, hasn’t really changed very much. The exhibits have improved, a lot of the exhibits have improved, but because of the restrictions on space, London Zoo today is still not very different to the London Zoo of, of 50 years ago. Very much convened. I mean, it was very much sort of ruled by Soly Zucker by Lord Zuckerman, who was a, originally a, a professor of anatomy. So he, he was very much into the medical sciences and one of the great things he did while he was there was found the Nuffield Institute and the Welcome Institutes of comparative medicine and, and and physiology.

And this was at a time in the late fifties when, because there weren’t a lot of other things for people to do, London Zoo was getting something like 2 million visitors. So it was making a lot of money and, and it was that money that was being used to fund the, these quite large medical institutions. And so the zoo, London Zoo itself remained pretty conventional in, in the way that it was operated. Not much in the way of new exhibits. And, and where they were new exhibits, they were using the same footprints. So they weren’t, you know, they weren’t any larger, they weren’t any more spacious. And unfortunately a lot of the money that was being made was being plowed into the science, which was great in a way, but of course it was not being plowed into the improvement of the zoo itself. So it was a very sort of conventional, very hierarchical structure.

I remember we, we, we gave up after a while doing it, but we had a, a senior staff lunch table in the Fellows restaurant where anybody sort of a curator level and above was supposed to go every day for lunch because it was a way that also we could, you know, compare notes. But it was very, it was very much that only certain people could go and have lunch in the fellows, in the fellows restaurant. So it, I mean, thanks to the three directors Rollins and Len Goodwin particularly, it was, it was a very good, it was actually a very good environment to work and learning, but it was a very tightly controlled environment in terms of, let’s say a sort of entrepreneurial futuristic approach to where London ought to be going. And that, you know, that remained to the, up to the time that I, that I left London.

Did you ever have to bring in human medical doctors as Consultants as often For your medic, your dealings with the animals Procedures?

Yes. And, and, and they loved it. Not medical and dental. I mentioned guy, the gorilla unfortunately had all his teeth removed at one time. We had to feed him largely on yogurt for his later, you know, yogurt and bits and pieces put in the yogurt to make it easy for him to, to digest or to to chew. Yeah, we did a lot of that. And particularly with things like orthopedics, with eyes, any specialist surgery, any sort of medical issues that we couldn’t solve. We brought, you know, London being a major human medical center, you know, big, big teaching hospitals, there was never any, there was never any difficulty finding somebody who’d give up a few hours to, to come and come and take a look. But there were also occasions when we took animals to the hospital and, and equipment to the hospital as well. We were the, the time that I was senior veterinary, obviously we did a lot of early laparoscopy work with the, with the very first laparoscopes that were, that were like, you know, hose pipes.

I mean they, they were huge, but the very early ones and the, the people that were developing them, the companies developing them, all that equipment was based at the London teaching hospitals because we, either we couldn’t afford it or it wasn’t available at that time. And we built a relationship with the Middlesex Hospital, which was our nearest London hospital to use their laparoscopy equipment and experimental laparoscopy equipment to start doing laparoscopic surgery at the zoo. And it was not unusual for us to be using it in the morning. And it then went to be sterilized and used in human surgery in the afternoon, which a lot of people find horrifying, but it actually provide, providing the sterilization process was all right. And then when we had pandas, we had, you know, the last two pandas that were a gift to Edward Heath when he was, when Heath was Prime Minister Heath and the queen, they, the female was very sickly from the moment she arrived. And we used quite frequently used to take her quietly on a stretcher after hours after rush hour to Middlesex hospital x-ray department to see what was going on. And she had a major gut issues to see what was going on Okay. Going on in her digestive system.

So she would be sneaked in on a human stretcher covered in a, you know, to make sure I can imagine this panda’s head, you know, sticking outta the top of the, of the, of the cover of the strike being taken into the X-ray Department of Middlesex Hospital. Now you mentioned pandas.

Can you relate the history of pandas at the London Zoo, your role and why in some ways you say it’s a cautionary tale?

Yes, it’s a, it’s a tale I’ve told several times to young Pando watches, you know, in the last 20 years. And it, it’s a, it’s a tale really of where cooperation failed and where people couldn’t see why cooperation in zoo species management was so important. We had this particular pair of pandas, when I say that the female was, the female was never a very good in, I had to anesthetize her over 300 times in her lifetime, mostly for just intravenous feeding. I mean, just, just to give her some sort of nutrition. And in the end, I, I euthanized her. There was no future for that animal. But we did have a very healthy male. And at the time, of course, this was the time when pandas were political gifts, so I think Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Tokyo, there, there were four or five other zoos that had pans, all of which had been political gifts.

And Mexico City had also been given a pair. And, and they were one, I think at the time they were the only pair that were breeding and they produced the whole succession of females, four or five young females and then lost their breeding male. So, and they didn’t approach us. What I, what I felt was, look, we’ve got a viable breeding female, if we’re gonna get anything moving in the panda world, they’d been the story of chichi and anan, you know, the Moscow Panda and the London female and all the sort of hullabaloo over that in the, probably in the fifties, fifties, sixties, that hadn’t worked out apart from a lot of diplomacy and, and obviously some of the other zoos were pretty reluctant to move their pandas around. But what I suggested to Mexico City was we would give them the London mail, but on condition that the, the facilities of Mexico City were, were rebuilt because they were, they were pretty awful. And so it was that we came to a deal with Ed Raska at Cincinnati, that he would take our male panda for six months, would create a big sort of marketing hullabaloo around it raise, I think at the time it something well over a million dollars anyway from that exercise would then use that to rebuild. And a million dollars went a long way. We are looking at, what, nearly 40 years ago now, a million dollars went a long way in Mexico City.

So they built, completely rebuilt those facilities. I mean they were being loaned the money to begin with and then the mail moved to Mexico City and they, and you can imagine the sort of how the London Press dealt with this and our other zoos couldn’t quite see what on earth we were up to. And my own, my own board originally were pretty skeptical, but in the end, actually they were very good about and said, you know, because I was making the argument, this is not correct, not right that we should keep this single animal when clearly, you know, we can do a lot more good by sending it somewhere else. Anyway, so the animal lands up in Mexico City and breeding starts again. And I can’t remember, I think about, I think there were probably two progeny from, from our male. We made no conditions on that male being given to them because had we made conditions, I don’t think the deal would’ve happened. You know, if we’d said, well, you know, you breed and we are gonna own half of them. And all the, you know, the usual argument we made no conditions because it, we felt it was the right thing to do.

But the expectation behind the scenes, certainly for us and others in the panda world, the western country, panda world, was that some of these animals should be, and from Mexico should actually be distributed. Particularly where again, I think there was a male left in Berlin, there was a male left in Madrid, no, a female in Madrid and a male, I think, in fact they were odd animals. And so if one of these zoos was breeding well then it made sense for them to send whatever was needed to these other institutions. But unfortunately, what then ha happened, I think at one point Mexico City had something like nine pandas, eight or nine pandas, most of them females and young ones do. And then our male died and several of the other animals, several of the other pandas died in pretty quick succession. So the author and we, we’d sort of gently and others had gently said some of the American zoo community saying, you know, you really ought to send one or two or three of these animals away. But then what happened was, politically, it was a good example of the zoo director in Mexico City at the time being totally controlled by the city mayor. So there they were with sitting on all these pandas and of course other Mexican zoos wanted these pandas for no, no good, you know, certainly no good conservation breeding reasons.

So this debate went on for quite some time. And in the end, in the end we lost that opportunity. And I always reckon that actually had that worked and those, some of those pandas from Mexico City had been distributed, we’d probably have a hundred pandas in the west now 50 to a hundred pandas in the west now. And we would not be messing around with this renter panda nonsense that’s been going on the last few years. You, you mentioned that Lord Zuckerman was able to get projects funded by private individuals and that the London Zoo is the national zoo, but it’s not funded by the government.

Can you discuss how the London Zoo was able to raise money?

Well, with, with a lot of difficulty, I mean yes, yes. Soli Zuckerman was very good at, because he was a great networker, and particularly within his wealthy Jewish community, Jewish friends, they, the claw and the cottons in the exhibits named after those guys that, you know, wealthy businessmen contributed significantly, very significantly to some of the new building that did take place at London. But what happened in the 18 six, well, I think twice in the 19th century, the government actually offered the Zoological Society of London. Now the Zoo, zoo Society of London was founded in 1826 and was very much supported by private individuals to begin with. And then in the mid 18 hundreds did, did run into some financial problems, was offered help by the government. And this was at the time that the Royal Botanical Gardens at q the Great Natural History Museum, the science museum in, in South Kensy, new London, all of which were getting substantial government funding. But the zoo, the zoo turned around and said, no, thank you. We want to remain independent.

And, and actually right now we are okay financially. And they were fi they were okay financially up until, up until really the early fifties when so much else was available in the way of days out for the, the London and surrounding public. And of course the late fifties, early sixties, with the advent of many, many more privately owned motor cars, London, London City, in its broadest sense geographically had had many, many more things to offer. And so London’s fortunes in the sixties began to fail, and attendance started going down from 2 million towards about about 1.2, 1.3 million. Not helped, as I said, with the advent of the science institutions, which which were great. They were a great way and very, and today really vital because their, their agendas now are totally focused on field conservation, not on, you know, originally solely saw them very much as sort of by much more sort of anatomical and physiological experimental institutions with or without animals on site. I mean, they didn’t use zoo animals, but there were quite a lot of animals in those. But they were draining a lot of the funding from the society.

So when we went back in Mag Maggie Thatcher’s time, we went back to Maggie and said, look, we, we, there’s no way that we can survive. This institution can’t survive without similar funding to the other great biological institutions in the, in the, in London, which were, as you say, the national, you know, we were, and the, they were the national institutions of their, of their type. But Maggie was quite sort of, Maggie Thatcher was very penny pinching. And I remember taking her around the zoo once and, and sort of raising this subject with her. And in the end she gave us, there was some money left over from some other government budget, 10, 10 million pounds, which is quite a lot of money. And what we wanted to do, the, the relatively young management at the time, what we wanted to do was do one spectacular exhibit. And I dunno, you’ve been to London Zoo and there is a, they were built in the twenties, a sort of concrete mountain. And the idea was that we would create the world of wan.

We had the pandas and the idea was knowing what was going on in American zoos at that time. We are looking now at the sort of 80, really the eighties, late seventies and eighties. What was going on in American zoos in the way of investment in, in better exhibits was to have one spectacular exhibit that would show our public, our audiences what could be done. ’cause nobody really had seen what could be done with really well-designed exhibits. But unfortunately the governance of the, of the society at the time decided that they, they wanted to dissipate that funds into a whole range of other things. And so we, in a way, we lost that opportunity to, to really showcase something that London, which could tell people what could be done with further investment. You talk about in the seventies and eighties, London Zoo had contracts to design and stock some zoos and wildlife parks.

How did that happen and why London Zoo and then can you relate a specific instance of you having to literally build an entire zoo?

Well, we had, we were lucky enough at London to have a very well staffed architectural department, which was there primarily for our own purposes. But because we had those skills on site, we were approached by, over, over the, over a period of years, approached by a number of zoos, particularly in the Middle East. But we actually had, we had zoo, I remember Tripoli, Libya, Cairo, all the Emirates, Saudi, Iraq, Baghdad, a number of Indian zoos all asked for help over, probably over a period of, oh, something like 15 years. And so our own architecture department helped by us animal people. And in many instances the marketers and you know, one had a pretty comprehensive staff at London in terms of, of the variation of skills. And so we started building up a consultancy business with, with many of these institutions, which involved, well everything really, from either initial design through much more complex detailed design through supervising the building of, now usually we worked with other mar other, particularly other architectural companies. ’cause there was no way, there was no way that our small architecture group could, could handle all of that. So we landed up with quite a number of different partnerships, mostly of architectural groups and in some cases with other colleagues zoos.

And, and in one or two cases, Doha and Qatar was a particular example where we actually went through the whole process and then, and then in the end managed that zoo for about five years. And, and at that particular time we, I was also for a short period of time managing the Kuwait Zoo and one in Bahrain and the wildlife big breeding center in Saudi Arabia and the Doha Zoo were all, all under Zs ls management at one, at one time, not, not for as long a period as the Saudi arrangement, which is still on, on today. But the Doha Zoo was quite a long, quite a long process. And it was a, it was really, well, looking back on it, it was, it was am very amusing and, and pretty and, and look, you know, wonder how on earth we ever got involved in the request that we had. Because what happened, the emir, this is in about 1983 or four, I think the then Emir Qatar was about to celebrate his 25th anniversary on the, on the, you know, as the boss. And this, the zoo that we’d designed and, and helped with had been finished about a couple of years before the re the request that he came with.

And for some reason or other it had, it had sort of, maybe he had some other interest at the time, but came to us and said, or brother, his folks came to us and said, look, could you, could you have our zoo up and running in two months, eight weeks to be exact?

And so, goodness, that was why. But we said, yeah, we’ll see what we can do. So it landed up with organizing 800 animals. Now some of them were Liz little lizards and frogs and tiny little things. Some, some invertebrates right up to white rhinos. They already had two elephants that had Indian government, I think had given them. And these were duly loaded into a rented jumbo jet. 7, 4 7 and flown the Holts had pulled together over a period of about eight weeks with various of our colleague collected collection zoos holding various animals for this purpose.

We did involve, and of course they were quite active at that time, some European dealers. And we did also find animals in the, actually in the Middle East that we were able to, to get some from. But in the end, it landed up with a jumbo 7 4 7 full of sort of Noah’s Ark animals taking them all to Qatar over to arrive deliberately at three o’clock in the morning when the temperatures were not a hundred degrees with 12 London and Whipsnade zoo keepers. Half a dozen of them were then going to stay there for a while and a big batch of Filipino and, and Indian guys who, who had had a little bit of animal experience, not a lot. So this sort of menagerie put together, which would absolutely appall the, the zoo planning, collection planning people today as it was a pretty, a pretty motley collection. But it did actually, it did fit the exhibits which we designed. It wasn’t that the plan was that they would not be what was going to be there in the longer term, but they, they adequately, they were adequate for the purpose of providing a good, a reasonably good varied collection. And it opened on time. And the, the Emmy was quite pleased.

I can’t imagine London Zoo has a major zoo library. Yeah, But there’re not many zoo libraries in the United States.

Why Age of the, of the London Zoo?

And also, if you think about it most, a lot, an awful lot of key zoological literature, and I’m talking about books mostly were written during the early years of those, of those scientific societies in London. So not only London Zoo, geographical society, the ones I’ve already, people like the Royal Botanical Society and so on, so long before there were, I mean there was certainly a few Philadelphia, one or two other large city institutions in America that were starting in the mid 18 hundreds anyway, but probably at the time didn’t have access to some of the book collections that were around and certainly didn’t have access to a lot of the people that actually wrote those books. So people like Darwin, Darwin had a quite a strong relationship with, with the London Zoo Society and many, many authors, zoologists scientists at that time had, you know, had a relationship of some form with the new, what was then the new zoo. And so the founding of a library really became, you know, almost a necessity for that sort of scientific institution. So, and that, that of course over the years then that was built on because a a we had a lot of, a lot of those volumes contributed. The zoo was buying, you know, it was obviously buying volumes at one time. So it’s, it, it’s largely, it’s largely a matter of age really. And how long and the, and the sort of people that were associated with, with the Zoo society, you know, early, you know, early in the 19th century There starts to be more cooperation between zoos.

When did that start and what prompted this kind of collegial change?

This is the London Zoo, was it with all zoos or just Marwell Zoo?

Well, it started really with, with the relationship with Marwell John John Knowles, who I, I know you, you’ll know the name that John died a few years ago, but he had begun Marvel Manor as a private collection, firstly of wild quid species. He had one time, I think he had all the, all the sort of ex extent wild quid species in, in, in what was a private collection. And then he, he decided to go public and in so do, part of the reason for doing that was he wanted to expand into hoofed stock more, more widely. And because of my interest in, in hoof stock, and he’d, what I was the, I was the vet at Whipsnade when Mar started and John asked for help of vet veterinary help really with, with his wild horse collection. That’s how I, that’s how I met John. And then became a board member at, at Marvel and had quite a bit to do with the building up of the Marvel Ungulate collect herbivore collection. And what John and I realized, of course, was that at that time, we’re looking at the seventies now, at that time there were only, as far as I can remember, about three African antelope species represented in the, in the whole of the uk. Eland let red leway, I think, I think one or two, oddly enough of the Diker species, but almost nothing, almost nothing.

And John, who had the resources at the time, John, John ran a, a, a very major poultry, national poultry industry. And, and that’s where he made his money. But he had the resources at the time to start bringing in through quarantine because the, the problem is with the uk it’s not a problem. It’s quite right that they do that very strong quarantine laws about, and particularly about who stopped because of worries over foot and health disease and, you know, and lots of other particularly tropical things. So animals had to be quarantined most of the time in Scandinavia, in Denmark, Aalborg in Denmark were major sort of quarantine facilities, even some of the main, main European countries who had pretty tough laws about bringing animals in directly from Africa or Arabia. And so over a period of years through quarantine, mostly in, in Scandinavia, we built up about 20 species, including things like horned orx and adx and you know, a number of rare species, which we now, the UK zoos have played a major role in reintroducing back into North Africa. And that was, and then of course we ran outta space. So whipsnade and whip, the collection at Whipsnade and Mar were more or less being jointly managed in a, in a species, you know, in a species genetic sense.

I mean, they weren’t, they were independent operations, but because, ’cause John and I had that had that sort of common interest, but then we ran, if you with something like Orx and, and Aax and so on, you want to build up numbers. So what we then did was we got, I think Edinburgh and Chester and Bristol and some of these other places to start taking some of the offspring. And that led to sort of more of a European approach, particularly to joint management of those species, of the, of Ungulate species. At that time cooperation in American zoos was getting a lot better too. And so the habit began to grow on European zoos. So a lot of what we did with that early common management of STO was part of that general movement towards, towards a much more cooperative approach to animal breeding that, that we have today. You now move from your position at London as the veterinarian to the assistant director of zoos. It’s from 82 to 84.

Why did you decide to move away from veterinary medicine to an assistant director position, and what kind of responsibilities did you have?

Well, I didn’t ask, actually. What happened was that Colin Rawlins, who had responsibility overall for the zoos and, and a lot of external activity that Zeiss l was, was involved in, really felt he was moving towards retirement and he felt that he really needed to pass the animal management over to somebody else. And so he, he encouraged me to take on as being as, as well as being senior veterinary officer, became responsible for every, all animal management aspects as as assistant director of zoos. And then when he retired and I became director of zoos, then taking over the human elements as well. So it really started out as being purely animal related management, but, but obviously as you know, that involves a lot of human management as well. But then ultimately as direct zoos took over, all human management connected with both zoos, You mentioned in 1987 the zoo needed to have a new direction.

Why was there resistance to it?

I think, well, there were two factors that were in play there. One, one was a, a very tight financial position. London had been losing, losing revenue for quite some time. There had been this relatively small injection, this 10 million pounds that I mentioned, but that was, felt that that was, it was more important to use that for running costs rather than any major new development. And so finances were a part of it. And in dealing with the financial position, we had to lay off quite a number of people. Of the roughly 500 members of staff in the two collections we had to lay off close to a hundred people. And as you can imagine that cause, and it was a, it was an absolute financial necessity.

And there was a lot of play in the, in the London Press. London Press can be pretty vicious. We think the American press can be, but in nothing compared, compared to Fleet Street and the London media. And of course, you know, oh, London’s zoo’s gonna close down. And of course there were threats that, that might well have taken place and that everything would then move to Webster. What remained would, would, would go out to whip snow. So there was a, a big financial fact and somewhat allied to that was this view. And I, and I was very much at that time, advocate, we’d already moved the elephants in the right, we’d all that had already gone to Snay.

And I was very much of the opinion that we should create a specialist largely undercover, all weather, mostly small animal collection at London and focus attention for the large mammals on whip snow. ’cause at that time it was very easy to get to. Whip still is, it’s only about an hour’s drive except when you’re in the London Russia. And so I had rather strong views and they were welfare, largely welfare. And they were practical based as well, that we should think very carefully about the future of both sues and put investment. There was a lot of, lot of reluctance to put any investment in whips. In fact, nearly all the investment in new exhibits at that time, new Vincent Housing came from the money that I was earning in the Middle East. So the, the the what what I’d founded at that time was what we called the con the Conservation, conserv Consultancy and Conservation Division.

It was a new, new division within ZSL. The idea being that ultimately money we earned on the consultancies we’ve just talked about would be plowed back into conservation. But in the meantime, we almost completely rebuilt the, the Ungulate housing at Whipsnade on the back of what we were earning off these Middle Eastern contracts. So what I wanted to see was Whipsnade built up as the national collection with an, the society owned Waid. It doesn’t own Regents Park and that there should be less emphasis on the big stuff at, at Regents Park, but actually create a rather interesting, you know, with covered walkways between the different, and there were a lot of exhibits and still are a lot of exhibits that could be converted quite easily into a, a more specialist, small mammal birds, reptiles and so on. But there was huge resistance to that from the scientific fellowship. Now, now as I, as I think I mentioned to you earlier, I, I had become a scientific fellow before I became an employee at ZSL on the back of a a a a zoology BSC. And so you could become a scientific fellow for, you know, without any particularly strong credentials.

And sadly what happened was that there were a lot of loud voices within the scientific fellowship who, for their own agendas, some of, some of the leadership actually were people who had applied for jobs at London Zoo and were turned down for very good, for very good and in any competitive situation for a job. But they actually had been turned down and were very resentful of that. So you had a group of people like that plus the zoo, the, you know, the, well-meaning zoo buffs who didn’t want anything to change at Regents Park. And were much more interested in having a row of 20 species of owls and 20 species of parrots and what, you know, just lit and literally in, in pretty small cages. And were not in the least bit interested in, in the, in the word welfare or, or anything that would move the, the bigger animals out to whips as far as they were concerned. Whipsnade was out there somewhere. They were interested in the London Zoo and all of this came together in about, yeah, about 87, 88 when I, I, in my view, a very weak board listened too much to this group of scientific fellows who, to put it rather rudely, couldn’t run a piss up in a brewery, had no management experience whatsoever doing anything. Many, many of them were sort of junior academics, but who wanted to see the status quo retained and were not in the least bit interested about, you know, in, in, in the sort of where we should be going today, 1987 today with the zoo world.

And I, and I, I’d met said, you know, probably not, not accepted well that, that the London and which they zoos needed to change, that we need to lead the way in how zoos were run, were designed with, you know, how they looked at their collections, how they looked at their public. And that was not a very popular thing to do. And what then happened was that the, this board, the board at the time decided that they wanted, which was a very old move, decided to split the society into five divisions. So it landed up with a director of, of, of science, a director of the zoos, a director of the library was another director. And that, you know, and so, and, and another one over whips note that did not survive for very long as you can imagine. ’cause there was no one person really in charge. And, and in the end I was put in charge of all of, all of that, but the debate still continued. So I opted in the end after a lot of debate, lot, a pretty heated debate to concentrate on the new division, which I’d founded the conservation and consultancy division and continue to build that up.

And that department is, is actually the basis, it’s the foundation of the great work that ZSL all over the world is now doing today. But with, but with a lot more support Now you have another promotion called General Director of Zoo. That’s what the CEO position was. Yeah. And, and that is, the position lasted a year. And then ultimately, which we’ll discuss, you move from that position at the London Zoo or the Zoological Society of London to the North Carolina Zoo. You may have already discussed this, but the reason you left London or had, would entertain other opportunities was because, Well, it, it had a lot to do with a number of my American Zoo colleagues is what, because when all this was going on at London debate about London’s London’s future, you know, how it would be funded, what ZSL should be doing in the conservation. All of that was fairly well known by, you know, by many of my friends who you know very well, a lot of them who, you know, when I was attending ZA conferences or coming over to a ZA conferences, that the whole situation over the London Zoo debate was well known by them. And so what happened was when the North Carolina Zoo was looking for a new director, one of the, bill Conway was one of those, and George, I think George Rab was too, actually said to, there was a Secretary of Environment at the time in North Carolina who, and they put what, what happened, they, they’d put, as happened so often, they’d put the recruitment process out to a commercial agency.

And the agency then heard from some of our American Zoo colleagues that, oh, well that guy Jones is, you know, there are things going on at London, which you might wanna talk to him. So I got this call outta the blue from actually gov governor Jim Hunt was the governor, North Carolina at the time, great guy.

And his, I had a call from his office one day in London saying, you know, would I mind coming coming to North Carolina for a long weekend and seeing if I had any interest in becoming the director of the North Carolina Zoo?

And that’s how that all happened. But it was very much, very much through the zoo world, knowing, knowing well what was going on in the, you know, with the debate in London and, and some of my colleagues, people like John Knowles in, in the UK saying, you, you saying, you know, you you, you’d be better off outta all this, all this nonsense. And, and immediately I went, you know, went and did my long weekend of discovery at North Carolina. You you, the what what was great about it was a new, and it was only 18 years old at the time. This, you know, the zoo was only 18 years old. Fabulous site, big site, young staff, very keen, no historical baggage, which of course I was dealing with 150 years of it in London, no historical baggage.

And basically an open book as far as where do we take this place?

And and luckily at the time, both the, you know, the senior staff and the, the secretary and the assistant secretary, the guy, the assistant secretary was actually a lady, a woman who was responsible for the zoo and the museums in North Carolina. Both not zoologists, not biologists, but very, very broad minded base and hunt. Jim Hunt. And basically said to me, okay, we built it, we built it, this wonderful facility. Now tell us what we need to do with it.

You know, how, how do we need to use it with the taxpayers who paid for it?

So that was, that was really my entry into, into the NC Zoo and set about finding many purposes for it very quickly.

Who was the director you replaced at the North Carolina Zoo?

That’s a, you know, that’s a good question. I meant to, to look into that. There were two directors before me. One was Huff Bill Hoff. Bill Hoff, yeah. And he very much had to do, he, you know, he came out as, you know, came outta the zoo world with a lot of experience and he, he really was our, he helped a lot in the design of, of the zoo and then was with the zoo, I think quite a short three or four years, something like that. And then, and, and goodness, I should remember then, and, and I don’t know quite how it happened, but a major from the Royal Army Ordinance Corps was appointed. I think he was, he was an ex-army man. Anyway, was appointed to the directorship, but didn’t, and I, and I, i dunno, it’s easy enough for me to say it was a, an odd appointment, but never really played a very, he attended meetings. ’cause I remember meeting him, you know, years before, but never really figured anywhere in, in that sort of zoo community.

And I think, I think when he retired, the, the powers that be there, the depart, the environment department as it was at the time, were very keen to get somebody who had long, who had direct practical experience both in the zoo world, in the biological world in general, and very much in the field and with the sort of networks that we’d been talking about earlier.

So what type of zoo did you find when you went on your initial journey to Sea Zoo?

Yeah, what kind of zoo did you find Gorgeous. Just very unusual for, you know, comparison to most of the zoos that, that I was familiar with. Huge sight, heavily wooded, quite hilly, but with a lot of natural features late, some of them natural, some manmade wonderful horticulture department. There. There’s no, and I’m, I’m bragging a bit, actually I wasn’t the one that said it up, but, oh, I think at the moment, something like 45 horticultural staff, which most of our zoo colleagues would die to have. But you needed them in a big, you know, what was 500, 600 public acres inside this 1300 as it was then 1300 acre park, amazing horticulture. And I’m talking now about outdoor, not, not so much, not greenhouses and certainly not sort of standard municipal plantings. Very good, very good skills with enhancing natural planting, whether anything from the tree cover to the, the water plants, to the na native flowers and so on. It is North Carolina Zoo now is well known as being a, as much a botanic garden as it is a zoological garden.

So that was very impressive. The exhibits that I saw were, and of course they, they should have been right up to, you know, being only 18 years old, most of those exhibits were less than 10 years old and they were just finishing off the North America area at the time. So coming from London with all its sort of baggage and problems and debate about whether it should or should not do something different or be something different, it was, it was really an open, you know, an eyeopener as to what a, what a good zoo could be and b what what could be done potentially with that particular place. Now, now you indicated you didn’t start the, the gardens part that it was already there.

But one of the things that you did start that is fairly unusual in any zoological garden was the art program, Right?

Can you talk about how it was developed and your vision?

Well, we had both retired now, but we had a, a extremely good head of horticulture and a and a a, a really good head of the design department. North Carolina Zoo is very, it, it it’s endowed with an extremely skilled group of design and construct and talking about exhibit, detailed exhibit construction style. There are about 15 of them that do nothing else but this, and the folks over the years, and particularly when I started, were came out an arts background. They came out of both fine arts and, and, and you know, the sort of constructive arts if you like, and the haw and, and there was also very strong support within the other senior star, both the animal staff at the time. And it, it was a collection of particular individuals that felt nothing new about art in a zoo, of course, but particularly felt that in this major part, large park that various forms of art would be part, particularly where they enhance the exhibit that they were next to. And in fact, nearly, nearly all the artwork is either, it’s either related to the exhibit they’re near or goes back to something we were saying earlier, or is very much attempting to interpret a broader relationship between species in general. So it’s, it’s artwork, which is talking about nature as a whole. We also had, well, what also happened was it does, it’s not on the books right now, but the state in building the first new exhibit actually appropriated about 10% of the money for a new exhibit into artwork associated with that exhibit.

So even before this sort of major staff interest in building that arts program, there had been a sort of embryo arts program that the state itself had started. But this one particular individual and, and of course I, you know, I’m also very keen on the arts and that’s another of the things that I’ve played a big role in locally in the, in our local arts scene. So I was very encouraging of this. So we, we built this quite major arts master plan in which we didn’t, we didn’t define fine in detail what we wanted for each exhibit, but we created a theme, we sort of suggested a theme to which artists could submit work that seemed to fit the theme. And fortunately we had a couple at the time who were very interested in, well they, where, where it started with them was that they came to us one day saying there’s no, you know, here’s this amazing place and you, you drive up to it and there’s absolutely nothing that says you’ve arrived at this amazing place. There’s no no big sign, there’s no, you know what, what There’s no art thing. So there was a big competition with about, and this is, you know, you’re looking at 25 years ago now with about a $3 million budget, you know, big, big budget, 3 million in today’s money and about, I think there were over a hundred applicants for it. And anyway, landed up with a set, a a a group of full-size bronze elephants, which now adorn the entry as a long entryway up into the North Carolina zoo.

’cause it’s so big. It’s, you know, quite a, quite a sort of roadway. And these adorn it. And then they, the couple paid for that. And then they came back and then they came back and said, we’d rather like this, so we are gonna give you sum of money every year for arts. And that, that then snowballed somewhat into, not, not the amounts weren’t as great, but lots of other people then took an interest in that. So we built up an art budget, which, you know, and because it’s, it’s, you know, how these things snowball and because what people were seeing they liked. And there’s, and there’s some pretty amazing pieces, very, really unique pieces in and around the park where I think about, there were 90, I think about 92 themes that we, that we wanted Phil ultimately, and, and I think there’s something close to 50 now have actually been, been done.

Now is this arts program in all types of art or is it exclusive to Sculpture?

Yeah, mul multimedia. Mul multimedia for, you know, in different ways. So, so bronze is, yes, woodcarving amazing, the sort of panoramas in glass where you walk past them and they move with you. So everything which, which are main arctic exhibit has these wonderful panels, which as you walk past them, they’re actually seals swimming and polar bears walking and you know, that, that sort of thing to artwork in the pathways sort of looking like streams as if you were going walking with flowing water. It’s a whole range and paint and, and quite a collection now of paintings as well. So yes, a whole range of different things that even, even non-art people remark on them.

So do you have, so do you have competitions for the art every year?

Do you have calls for art?

Do you have an artist in residence?

How does that, you said you purchase art every year, are you, you have, We, and we encourage, and we, well different ways. We’ve had, we’ve had people, individuals and companies coming to us saying, you know, we’d like to sponsor a, a bronze at the giraffe exhibit. And not necessarily a great big thing, but something, something that kids could actually touch. And in fact, we’ve had, you know, situations where we’ve been asked to do something for blind PE that people can actually, you know, feel and the texture changes with some of these. And then, and then at the other end, yes, we’ve just, we are building a, a Asia whole continent as Asia at the moment. And so there was a competition put out recently for the entrance artwork for, for Asia. And I think again, you know, something close to a hundred people apply, you know, sent in ideas and won a tiger. A tiger, one of a group of tigers has been chosen.

And what, what they did interestingly was they shortened the team, the, the sort of arts team with, with other non-arts input, chose five and then put it out for public debate. And, and this, this particular, this particular model came back as being the one that they wanted. So it’s a, it’s a large sculpture of life-sized tigers, but yeah, competition. I’m not sure what the budget was for that, but it will have, they’re bronze, so it will be pretty considerable, Sue, it’s not in a highly trafficked urban area.

What are the advantages and the disadvantages?

Yeah, my, I mean when I first, that was one of the things I wondered when I first went, why Ashbury is right smack in the middle of the state. There’d been in the seventies, had been, you know, debate seventies into the early eighties about having a state zoo. North Carolina didn’t have any, any zoo at the tiny sort of zoo at the time, and six communities competed, but they had to provide a thousand acres minimum. And I think something like half a million dollars, which obviously then was quite a bit of money. The community had to come up with it. So you’d think that Charlotte and Raleigh particularly being, you know, big, big city, pretty big cities by any standards would be the ones that would, you know, win that competition. But we had a group of local businessmen, one in particular who was absolutely determined to get the zoo to Ashbury. And he raised, we bought, well of course one thing was that buying a thousand acres in little Ashbury was much easier than buying a thousand acres on the outskirts of Charlotte for, for all the obvious re even, you know, even in the eighties.

So they had, they got the thousand acres without too much debate. The 500,000, the half million was a bit more difficult. But they did get it very, very determined. And so in, and I think also at government level, state government level, they, there was some good foresight in thinking, well, you know, this state’s one of the fastest developing states in the country. I mean, even in my time it’s gone from something like 7 million to nearly 10 million North Carolina. And here’s, you know, Ashbury is smack in the middle. It’s, it’s in a tri, it’s at the bottom of it. It’s, if you put the microphone there, it’s, you’ve got Greensboro High Point, the triad as they call it there, Raleigh here, Charlotte, there all roughly equidistant all within about an hour to an hour and a half drive on good roads.

Four lane, four lane highways.

So there was a, I think a lot of wise thinking that, well it may not be the obvious place right now, but you go a few years and it will be, and they were dead, right?

The, you know, because what we’ve been seeing is a lot of, a lot of development coming out of, particularly Raleigh and Charlotte. It’s happening now in the trial coming towards us. One of the reasons why, you know, I wanted to get all that extra land for, for the, you know, to add around the outskirts of the zoo to prevent any development encroaching to near. But it was, it was a great choice.

Not one at the time, but absolutely the right choice. Now How does the zoo prepare for natural weather disasters?

Well, we are pretty prepared. I mean, being a highly tree site and much of our woodland is fairly mature, so it’s not always gonna be, you know, standing upright. In fact, we’ve had, you know, we’ve had several storms in my time, which have downed a lot of trees, you know, a couple of hundred trees on a, on the big site. Some of fortunately never, never cause major damage. But we are, you know, we have plans for, you know, plans for dealing with a major storm. Fortunately that site will not get flooded. It’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s a, a site of four to 900 feet above sea level quite, you know, quite hilly. And so we’re not gonna see flooding.

We do get the occasional minor earthquake. Never, never done any major damage winds can be quite strong at times there. But we have in, within the horticulture department, we also have a specialist tree team for people who do nothing else but look after the trees and shrubs. So there is a, there is a plan, we work very closely with our, our local emergency responders in all respects, you know, whether it’s public safety or something like, you know, something like a, a heavy storm. So yeah, pretty well prepared. Now you’ve mentioned North Carolina’s a state zoo.

How does the funding come to run the zoo?

It’s about 50 50 state and run run from income on the zoo site. So the state, as you can imagine, depending, depending on the state’s overall financial condition, we’ve, you always, as a director, and this is one, you know, it’s common to all directors, but particularly if they’re dealing with municipalities or you know, other public entities, there’s always a debate both about the funding needed to maintain it, staffing levels and, and inevitably capital improvement. And it was, it was a real Marlo it’s a, a minor struggle. It didn’t worry me too much, but, but in my 22 years there, we, most of the money that we had for any new exhibits came from private pockets, the wall state, some state money, but not a lot. And we did struggle at times with getting enough for maintenance. Now because of the amount of federal money that has flowed into the states post covid, what what is happening in our situation is that the state now has a lot of state earned funding tax and because available for capital development, because a lot of those costs in recent years have been covered by a lot of federal money coming in. So the zoo in the last three years, the zoo actually has had committed some something around $150 million for new development. And the zoo society is well on target to raise another 50 million.

So, which would never have been, never have happened in my time because, you know, because of all the reasons I’ve just said, but there’s 200 million, $200 million, three quarters of which is state money coming in for this new con Asia’s then, then gonna go into Australia and and so on. But it’s, but in broadly speaking it’s half earned and half from the state, the, the, the running costs every year.

Do you feel your history of whip state helped you focus on a philosophy for the large acreage of North Carolina?

Yeah, I think it did. I mean I could, you know, in managing whipsnade, I mean particularly for the larger mammal species there, it, you know, it really drives into you the importance of space for those animals. But also, but also because the people appreciate animals in space. Now there is a downside to that in that we frequently get comments, oh, you know, we can’t see all the animals ’cause they’re so far away. And, and the answer we have to give to that is, well, okay, it’s not that sort of zoo, you know, if you, if you want to see all the animals, you’re gonna have to come several times and different times of day and different seasons of the year. So you might as well become a member and then you can come anytime you like for 80 bucks a year, whatever it is. So yes, the whipsnade experience certainly, certainly said to me, you know, the zoos of the future, particularly if they’re keeping large mammals, have really got to be, they’ve got to be size, they’ve got have sizable acreages. Now you, you indicated about the size.

What exhibit considerations did you have to take into account for visitors viewing species in a large space, and how was it achieved?

Yeah, well we have I think a pretty good transport system in, in North Carolina. It was, it was and whip side the same. We, we also had road trams basically in Whipsnade. We have similar buses and road trams in, in the North Carolina Zoo, we’ve talked about overhead railways, but of course they’re, they’re a expensive, difficult to maintain and, and are visually can be quite a problem, you know, floating overhead. So we get in that 600 acres, we get those folks moved in a, in a ma you know, fairly long, long distances to a limited number of stopping points, expecting people to walk in between. And that is a problem for some people. And it’s comments we get about the distances they have to walk, but it’s all done, it’s all done by trams and buses, obviously varying in frequency depending on the, the number of visitors and the time of year.

What, what type of visitors amenities would you say are important and are they different?

In North Carolina because of the size of the zoo, You have to have more of them simply because of the distances between exhibits, so things like restrooms, snack, you know, snack type food, places to sit many and particularly a larger zoo. It, that’s a bit of a challenge in a way because you, you know, you’ve, you you’re the smaller zoo, it’s not so bad. You can, you know, you can, it’s being fairly compact. You can find sitting or build sitting areas fairly well, a bit more of a problem in a larger zoo. But that’s something that we are getting better at, put it that way, at finding more places in shade that people can sit, because obviously North Carolina gets pretty hot certain times of the year. So things like the, yeah, the restrooms, seating, snack, food, water. In very busy days we can put out cart food carts, but then you also have to have the backup in a, in our particular case, like probably the same in most main zoos is a main restaurant and then some subsidiary restaurants shops at both ends. People are basically not gonna buy much in the middle of the zoo, certainly in the big zoo where they’ve gotta walk several miles, they’re not gonna buy stuff in the middle of the zoo.

So the shops, you know, all your retail needs to be obviously at, at both ends, mo mostly as they’re leaving.

Can you describe your management style both at London Zoo and North Carolina?

Same or different?

No, same. I would say it’s, it’s, it’s sort of congenial and inclusive in the, I’m certainly not autocratic. There are times one has to make a decision that people don’t like as, as any, any, well, any director of any organization has to, but I strongly believed in passing responsibility to the people you trust and the first thing you do is try to build a team around you that believes in the same things as you do and that you, you can feel comfortable devolving most responsibility onto. I mean, I, I’ve seen some of my colleagues who directors and at curatorial level keeping most decision making close to hand and there are occasions when that’s needed. But very much my style in both places has been very much to give, I had nine department heads in, in North Carolina is making sure that they have the opportunity to make decisions that I know they’re capable of making. And so that allowed me to keep the 30,000 foot view, the big picture view without getting involved in a lot of the detail of that. Obviously one expected to have a regular reporting mechanism, the usual weekly meetings and one-on-ones and all of that. But very much, and I know, you know, I know the generation older than me in the zoo world that I responded to when I first joined the zoo world, many of them were absolutely autocratic. You know, you, you some of the German Zoo directors I remember, you know, first impressions of them, you know what I, you know, what I say goes, you’re not, you know, nobody, nobody says anything different.

But I don’t, I don’t believe at the end of the day that that’s good management and the way that you build up succession to yourself and that we are talking earlier about, you know, training younger staff, gun curators and so on, is you give those, you give them as much responsibility as they’re capable of taking. So you are, you are, yes, you are there as the, the figurehead, as the guy that ultimately has to make important decisions, but frankly, most of the day to day running and most of the month to month running should be done by that senior team. So you let them, and if, you know, and you, you sort of take the attitude, well I’m trusting you to do this. If you can’t do it, then okay, you need to go and do something else, but we’ll, you know, we’ll give you time to make a couple of mistakes, but don’t make them too often. So, but it’s, it’s very much a devolution process of letting other people have that decision making capability.

How do you think your staff would describe your management style?

Much the same. I think as, as I’ve just described, you, you know, we talked earlier about being sort of on the grounds every day and of course our, you know, as I said, a zoo was so big North Carolina that it was quite difficult to be on the grounds every day. So certainly I would have had comments and did get comments that, you know, can’t he be out more with us, can’t he, you know, I haven’t seen him for three weeks. You know, that sort of, that sort of comment. And usually because there was, you know, so much else going on. But no, I think, I mean, I, I still see most of my, and some of ’em are still there. I see most of my senior team fairly often, either socially or around town. So I still live, you know, in, in, in Ashbury not far from the zoo. So I see a lot of them and I, I, I still get the impression they actually quite like, still quite like me.

I hope. So.

You didn’t think about having a, a home on the grounds That would’ve been impossible being state property?

There was, we don’t, there’s nobody living on grounds and certainly not, you know, in a permanent basis. Obviously we, there are times one has to have people on the grounds for in hospital situations or hand feeding, that sort of thing. And, and in emergencies nearly all the staff live within probably 10 miles. But no, I wouldn’t, there, there are advantages of course in not, not being on the grounds as I was at whip snags, I was basically on duty for 24 hours a day. Although it, it never really impinged very much on, you know, on private life, family life and so on. It was, it was part of the, part of the part of being there in that situation. But I’m now about 10 miles, no, maybe eight, 10 miles from the zoo. That’s about, you need to be near enough to be there if they need you, but you don’t wanna be so near that they can literally get you on the walkie talkie.

Now, when you first came, what were your first priorities when you first came to the zoo?

North in North Carolina? Yes. I think to build, to build the programs, the, the exhibits were in pretty good shape and pretty up to date, pretty well up to date in terms of, in terms of their design. Now that doesn’t mean to say that there weren’t some gaps that we needed to fill in terms of exhibitory and later of course in term, you know, in terms of re refurbishment and expansion. But the main priority there, and I think that’s one of the reasons that I was appointed there, was to build a more substantial education department and in particular begin field, a field conservation program. Not only, not only with outside the country, but also very much regionally. I mean North Carolina has a, a very good, well, it has several departments that are responsible for things wild. And it also has a very strong private, the sort of la you know, in individuals joining things like the Nature Conservancy, things like the land trust, things like natural history trusts and so on, all of which we needed, the zoo needed to play a role in it touch, it touches a bit on what we were talking earlier about developing those relationships. So that needed to be developed.

The relationship between the department, which was then we are now under the Department of Cultural Resources, NA, natural and Cultural Resources, a lot of the environmental, particularly the sort of the water, water quality, air quality, that’s the thing, has gone into another, another division now. But they, that department, what I found was needed to do a lot more with their sister departments. I could see opportunities to, for agriculture and Environment department and Department of Commerce and, and some of these others to do, to work much more closely together in regional tourism, for example, in building a whole tourism package, much of which was connected with the natural things around them. So there was that, there was the whole sort of field input. We have see the, the, the n czu not only owns the state owned, well state and private owned, the society owns a lot of it, the immediate 2000 plus acres. It also owns 700 more acres in the region, which are what I would call sites of special scientific interest. There are, we, we own, for example, the largest longleaf pine forest in North Carolina. Re these are remnant remnant forests that used to exist before they were all cut down for the Tarheel state tar production.

And quite a number of wetlands specialist areas, particularly for rare plants. A number of others with small wetlands with Sal and North Carolina is the salamander, is the capital of the salamander world. Basically 40, 43 species, some of which are not found anywhere else. So lots of opportunity, which, which we are very much involved in. And then the Africa programs, we now, and the, that unit, that conservation is now expanded to other continents. But the, the, the original Africa programs very much started on the back of the My Africa network through the organizations that I’ve also been involved in my connections with, for example, places like Kenya and Uganda and the cam Cameroons countries in West Africa. When I was chairing, for example, when I was chairing the Conservation Committee of World Wildlife Fund in the uk, well, wildlife Fund UK was responsible for the funding of all WWF activities in West Africa. What it doesn’t matter what the country was.

So you can imagine as chair of that group, and we were funding something like $20 million a year into, in, into both UK conservation and into West African conservation. So I knew all the key characters. The, the then head of national parks for Uganda was one of my year in veterinary college. So using those sort of contacts and networks, that was how we got involved in those, in those programs. And they are all in existence today. They’re still going 25 years later. They’ve, they’ve evolved obviously, but, but they’re still there.

That’s what, that’s what, as we were saying earlier, that’s what’s so important about long-term relationships, building those long-term and keeping them, Does the zoo have a master plan?

And what do you think the shelf, what is your opinion of the shelf life of a master plan?

Mm, not long. It did have, right at the start, the idea was to build representation of all seven continents. Thank goodness that has not happened. It’s not, it’s not the problem, of course, well, it is the problem with capital money, but that’s not the real issue. At the end of the day, how do you maintain seven continents on 2000 acres in, in a, in a state like North Carolina, which growing fast as it is, is still not going to produce right now more than about a million visitors. Now that’s gonna climb, I think to probably one and a half million in, in fairly quick order. But there was a master plan which had that in mind. And to some extent we are following that master plan, but only in the sense of the, of the subject, you know, of a continental approach to that master plan. So there was always a plan that, you know, one would build representations of all seven.

So that, that’s the only sense it’s being followed. There is, there is no, unless I’m outta date, and I don’t think I am the, for this, for this anyway, there is no set master plan. But in recent years, the building and Asia continent and then an Australian continent have been top of mind. So in that sense, there’s a, there is a plan, but it’s not, I, I, I couldn’t say to you that there is a book that I could hand to you saying this is what we are gonna do for the next 50 years. And I, and I agree in the implied question, which is that master plans really don’t last very long and they, and of course they change very much with changes in management. So you’ll have one zoo director and a set of senior staff who will have one idea about where to go. And that may change quite dramatically. It may change dramatically also as governance changes as well.

You know, whoever, whoever or whatever that form of governance may be, they may decide on something different.

Did you have a good relationship with the press and, and how did you nurture that relationship?

Very different between London and North Carolina, because in London, London you were dealing with a pretty vicious media overall wasn’t helped of course, by the, by the anti zoo lobby figures like Zuckerman and others. Good, great though they were for the, for the society were controversial figures in many ways.

The fact that London, you know, any institution which is venerable and you know, very much in the public eye, but at a time when also there was, you know, a lot of, a lot of, you know, why, why should we fund London Zoo?

Either more important things to do. So dealing with the media through that period of time, really the 10 years or so that I was in charge, or certainly supporting the in charge people dealing with the media was quite a challenge. It taught me a lot. But how to deal with them going on from that period. But a lot of it was fed, of course, by, either by the anti zoo lobby or by or by people connected to the society who didn’t want it to change in any way. Didn’t want the zoos to change in any way. So it was a constant, I mean, we were trying to be good upfront communicators about what we thought should happen to London Zoo in particular. But of course there were always people who were in the, you know, in, in that debate who were, were very willing to talk to the press and, and, and misrepresent actually what, you know, what most people would’ve wanted. On top of that, in London, particularly in Regents Park, in the Royal Park, we had of course, very well-heeled neighbors.

The the zoo, if you, it’s actually divided into three parts. The zoos, you’ve got a road running through the middle of it, the the outer circle re spot, and a canal running through another part. So you’ve actually got three bits. The canal is, is very popular from a public point of view. We wanted to use that a lot more to do, to actually do shows. Light shows animal based, conservation based light shows on narrow boats. You know what I mean by narrow boats of these sort of specifically designed seven foot wide, 50 foot long, what used to be cargo boats on the, on the British Canal system. And the idea was to use those to sort of do interesting displays and have people sitting on the banks of the canal watching these things at night as one of the sort of novel ideas that, that we came up, which were, were very popular and would’ve done very well.

But you can imagine what all the millionaire neighbors sitting in houses overlooking Regions Park thought about that. So there was, and, and, and then of course you had this, this, this other problem of having so many buildings that were the first in the zoo. Well, so you had the first parrot house, first reptile house, you had Victorian telephone boxes, all sort, even the bridges over the canal had been built in, you know, 1830 or something like that. So all of them were protected structures. So if you put all that together, dealing with the London media was quite a challenge. Very different. North Carolina, very different. It’s not to say that we haven’t had our critics from time to time, but there, well there, you know, very mild and nicely mannered compared to the likes of the Times and the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail coming out, coming out London reporting. So with the, we are very, very, very strong relationship with the media in North Carolina mainly.

’cause we, you know, we, we not so meant much at the moment, but we had a very good guy in the marketing department who was a very good presenter. And so he and I and other staff used to do, you know, regular TV programs talking about what we were doing, lot of stuff going out to the, the, the press, the pub, the pub, you know, the published press. So a lot of upfronts that we weren’t constantly, you know, on our back heels being bombarded and having to defend us. So the, the certainly the, the relationship with, with, with the press for the, for our zoo North Carolina is, is very good. And of course with what’s going on now with all the redevelopment going on, you know, a lot of, creating a lot of excitement in the media. So it’s, it’s a very different picture to what I started out with, you know, 30, 40 years ago.

How can, how do you feel new technology can assist in promoting zoos?

There’s Twitter, there’s Facebook remote cameras to draw attention to wildlife. Is that the upcoming thing or is it just part of Of broader Yeah, it’s part, it’s part of a, a broader sort of portfolio of, of, of information. I use the word deliberately information rather than education. Education rather implies a sort of strict educational process. It’s certainly part of that bigger toolbox, but it isn’t, it isn’t replacing more traditional methods. You still have to have that mix of person to person of written materials. But of course what these tools do, they can, people can take home these tools, they can see a lot of what’s happening in our zoo at home with remote cameras and so on. They’re doing, you know, a lot more information that they can gather through their phones and, and in all sorts of other ways.

So yeah, they’re, they’re very valuable, but they’re not a complete, you know, I think it’s a mistake imagining that, you know, if you’ve got screens everywhere, and of course we are all using screens for various informational purposes, but that if you’ve got screens everywhere that somehow is gonna replace well-written labeling. So yes, they’re a tool, but they’re not the total answer.

And did you get the community, what were your strategies to get the community to embrace the North Carolina Zoo?

Well, I think in the early days there was, you know, because the state had no, no u unlike most others, the, there was a huge sense and still is a huge sense of pride in, you know, in this zoo, you know, this is our zoo. And that has continued as we’ve expanded and it, it’s quite funny really that, you know, we do, North Carolina Zoo does promote itself as the world’s, I think it actually, it’s the world’s largest natural habitat zoo open to the public, which it is. I mean obviously it’s, you know, I have to smile saying this, that obviously not all of that is exhibits. Thank goodness we don’t have to maintain 2000 acres of exhibits. But there is a pride in our zoo being, being large, being very beautiful. There’s a lot of pride in it, not just being animals in it, being plants that we put there and plants that, you know, the o what I was saying earlier about the overall environment, the overall natural experience that people get when they come, come to that place. So there, there is a very, there is what I find is a very possessive, a, a, a good, a nice possessive feel by, by the people that come to the zoo. We have a, a very strong zoo society, you about 35,000 households who are obviously a, you know, a principal support.

But even, you know, what I find go going around the state that even people that have never been to that zoo since childhood are very aware of it. And, and there is a sense of pride from what they hear that this is, this place is unusual and it’s in North Carolina. You’ve mentioned that zoo directors should be expanded, be members of boards.

What does that mean and has it been done often or not?

Well, I think one of the ways of getting or audiences outside the zoo world to really understand what the, what the zoo world is trying to do is for not just directors, but also senior staff members within the zoo community to find a way to get involved with either local, it might be land trusts, it might be a a a, a branch of oron or, you know, anything like that, that they can ultimately join the board if they can. And, and, and very often these organizations are quite keen to have somebody from the local zoo on, on their board. And it doesn’t, and, and, and obviously, I mean, in my case it was easier because being at London Zoo, London had these connections around the world, so it was much easier to get involved in both, you know, both the welfare world and the, and the, and particularly in the conservation world. And so I’ve, I’ve been involved with, well, wildlife Fund and Foreign Floor International for, for many years that it doesn’t have to be at that level, it’s just that getting involved with local conservation bodies, whatever form they may take is, gives the opportunity to talk to them about the importance of the zoo community. And, and equally for them, you know, to them to learn about the zoo world was, I think the problem. A lot of the problems have been that because we haven’t been good as a zoo community of engaging with all these other people, whether they’re pro zoo, anti zoo, or neutral. If we did more, I think to get involved with some of these organizations, I think we, that would be a huge benefit in terms of, of understanding what modern zoos are all about and in particular how they can contribute to, to conservation. And of course, those, those networks, those connections then very often deal become partnerships in, in working together on, on particular issues, whether they’re local, national or, or international.

You’ve had a long and storied career.

If you could go back in time, what, if anything, would you have done differently?

Not a lot. That sounds a bit sort of arrogant, you know, it sounds as if, well, you know, everything I did was fine. It was a wonderful life. I wouldn’t change anything from a personal point of view and I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have missed a moment of it. Even when many of those moments were, were, you know, maybe quite, quite worrying, I would’ve, I think I would’ve pushed the board at London to have done much more about moving the large mammals to whipsnade and of changing the emphasis at London into a, a, a much more specialized, smaller collection. I should have pushed probably a bit harder on that. But we had, you know, we had a quite a lot of people, zoo members, a lot of them who just didn’t want London Zoo to change. They wanted rows of parrots and rows of monkeys. But I think how, looking back, I probably should have pushed a bit harder at that time, but there was a prospect of coming to North Carolina, the governor’s office had already invited me to come and take a look. So the temp, we’re gonna deal With that Later.

The temptation of that sort of, you know, rather, rather overrode the, what I would probably have done if I’d stayed at London. So that was, that was certainly one, you know, one regret. But I don’t, I don’t have any major, I, there are not many things that I would’ve changed.

Are there programs or, or exhibits that you would’ve implemented that during your tenure that didn’t happen?

Well, again, going back to London, I certainly would’ve, would’ve moved if we’d had the resources to have fewer, better exhibits at London and then pushed a lot of those resources into whips. That’s one thing here in North Carolina. I would, I’m trying to think, sorry, can you, can you redo that question? Sure.

Are there any programs or exhibits you would’ve implemented during your tenure that didn’t happen?

Well, here when at North Carolina, one of the things when I first went there was the idea of having a major interpretive center, both the conservation center combined with a, a, an interpretive center showing the globe, you know, broader global issues at a time when there was still a lot of focus on individual species. And we did actually draw up plans for something called the Earth Resources Center, which was going to be sort of the introductory center to, to the zoo. But painted right at the start of people’s visits actually painted a much broader view of this, you know, what I call this jigsaw of life, which would’ve shown the, the exhibits would then have amplified that, but it would’ve shown the importance of individual species within ecosystems. But it, it would’ve been a very expensive exhibit. And at the time, what was interesting, and I think it was probably symptomatic of the era talking about 25, 30 years ago, was that the emphasis was all on new individual exhibits. And a lot of folks did not understand at the moment the importance of trying to link all of this together in a, in a sort of broader message as to how it is that species survive, can only survive within a, within a whole sort of panoply of other biological and physical factors. So that was, I think that’s the only exhibit I would’ve liked to have built had I had, we had the resources.

Are you’ve seen many zoos throughout your career, are there any zoos in the world you particularly admire?

And why would that be and where are they?

Well, the one, the ones I’d be most impressed with have actually been all little ones, small zoos and particularly specialist ones. Places like the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum for example, or Karen Susman’s operating, know those sort, those sorts of operations. Not, not certainly, yes, of course some of the larger zoos, Brookfield being one of them, have wonderful, wonderful exhibits, wonderful resources. But actually the most impressive have been these smaller specialist collections, often of birds. The UK has several really, really good sort of bird specialist bird exhibits that one or two on the continent as well. So it’s, it’s the smaller ones and the way that they’re presented. And, and again, I suppose because of my bias zoos that actually have, have, have taken on this job of showing animals and plants within this broader context.

Given your experience, what is your view regarding zoos, maintaining elephants and how it should be done correctly?

Well, I’m, I’m not one of those who think that elephants should never be kept in zoos. I mean, you only, you only have to listen to that eight or 10-year-old looking at a good elephant exhibit. And I think we do have a good, a good one at North Carolinas. We’ve got the space and the way that they’re impressed by the sheer size and, you know, uniqueness of, of, of the, of those species. But I, I, I think I predicted about 10 years ago, I remember talking at it at an a ZA retreat once. That probably what I think at that time, 15 years ago, maybe about 70 zoos in the US that actually had elephants. And, and my prediction was, and I think it’s probably happening, is what you’re, ultimately, what you’re gonna see is maybe 20 or less, all of which have much larger groups of elephants in much larger spaces in, you know, in their family, in their family groups. And although you’ve got, there’s some resistance still to some zoos, you know, moving their animals, that’s, that resistance is largely being overcome.

So I do believe in, in having really, really good exhibits for elephants, I certainly believe that elephants should be in zoos, but they’ve got to be kept in not, not only the, the two dimensional large spaces, but also all the other aspects that you need to, you know, to, to give elephants the, the sort of biological needs that they have.

What was the most important piece of advice that you received that has stayed with you throughout your career?

Tolerance I think is probably the most important message that I will have got from other, other leadership tolerance and the, and the ability to deal with people at all levels. It almost nothing to do with the animal side of it. It all has, comes down to people in the end, how you handle people. The fact that nobody is ever perfect on the fact that you’ve really got to make allowances at, you know, in a whole range of managerial aspects that, you know. But I would say the thing that I’ve learned most from other people is, is tolerance. And the fact that, particularly here in, in the, in the developed western world, having traveled a lot in non developed countries, is that we are extremely lucky to have the resources that we have, the skills and the knowledge that we have and we need, we need to make the best of it. When I, you know, when I’ve traveled in some of these other countries and people are dealing with epidemics, people are dealing with, you know, earnings one or $2 a day and you realize just how lucky we are in, in a country like America to have the sort of resources for the zoos and everything else that we do have.

Would you recommend the zoo and aquarium field to a young person with a sincere interest in wildlife and conservation today? And why would you?

Absolutely never a dull moment. I mean, that’s, you hear, you know, you hear so much from, from young folks about jobs that are boring jobs that, you know, because so many young people want to be sort of on the move subject wise, they’re always looking for something new. There’s no better world than the zoo world, frankly, for something new because nothing will be the same from one day to the other. Now that’s a challenge for some people. Obviously a lot of people are much more comfortable having something they can predict on a day-to-day basis. But the, but if somebody, and it’s happened a lot, obviously, usually, usually moms with a 13 or 14-year-old daughter who want to get in the veterinary field, want to become a zookeeper, whatever. And, and when they ask why, you know, why should I, you know, this is a, it doesn’t pay well, you know, it’s, you get, they get dirty hands, you get all sorts of things. But as a satisfying job, as a job with change, the job of challenges as a job, if given the responsibility you can really take a pride in, there’s nothing to touch a career in the zoo world.

Nothing.

Does euthanizing of endangered species, surplus genetic issues still pros a political problem for zoos and Aquarius?

Yeah, yeah, very, very much so. I think it’s, it’s posed a lot more of a problem I think here and in the UK than it does in, in much of Europe. You, you have national attitudes really to the way that handles are animals are, are dealt with. And it, it has nothing to do. See a lot of people say, oh, this is bad welfare if you, you know, if you have to euthanize an animal. Now we, we all know that there are times in an animal’s life when frankly there’s not a lot one can do for it. It’s quality of life is poor. And that’s as, as a veterinarian by background, that’s obviously a time when putting an end to that life is critical.

The question of euthanizing surplus animals that cannot be part of the breeding community is an ethical one. It’s not a welfare one. As, as a veterinarian, I don’t have any problem with putting animals down, even healthy animals if it’s done properly and humanely, yes, it’s an ethical issue. Personally I don’t like it. But I think if one, if one is serious about managing captive populations, there is a limit to the space that you have. And therefore you’ve, you, you’ve, there have to be bad, you know, difficult decisions from time to time. But the, but the whole question comes down to is it is the welfare of that animal under consideration. And as long as it is, as long as it is, then personally I don’t have any issue with, with animals being, if they can’t be found a decent home, I mean this, this is the problem with the criticism of this, that then folks say, oh, no animal should be put down.

It’s wrong. And there are situations where such animals can be found homes. We’ve, we’ve done this within wild welfare where we found animals homes. But very often in situations where surplus animals are found homes, the situation for them, the surroundings, the environment that they then have is, is awful.

And therefore, you know, they have to ask the question, well, is that really the best thing for that animal in terms of quality of life?

So how should zoos deal with surplus animals?

Well, I mean, one thing is obviously to make sure that you don’t breed. If you can make sure, make sure you don’t breed any animals that are not gonna find a home or not find a good home. And this, that, that is a big challenge, of course, is that you can, you can often assume that, let’s say surplus lions, if you, if they’re bred, you’ll be able to find a home for those. And that may not be the case, not in terms of a good one. So the first thing is to make sure that breeding programs are only producing the animals that you know you are going to get a good home for. If, if not, then one has, again, it comes back to your, your particular audiences. You have to explain, and it’s a difficult one to explain to those audiences why from time to time you have to put a healthy animal down. But I think, I think zoos have to tackle that one head on.

There’s no way you can’t fumble it. You can’t sort of get around it by all sorts of lame excuses that, oh, I, you know, I we we will find them another home. It’s, it’s absolutely critical that if, if there is nowhere good for those animals to go, then it, it is better, sadly better at the end of the day that those animals are put down. But a very good, very good example going on right now with, with elephants, where you’ve got two very good one in particular very good sanctuaries that are able to take elephants that are no longer either, can’t be kept well or are ancient and, and, you know, have problems. I world welfare, one of the board members of wild welfare US is the director of the Tennessee Elephant Sanctuary. And I would challenge anybody to go to that place, roughly 3000 acres. Elephants are kept under the most amazing conditions. And so that’s one, that’s one species or two, three species, however you argue it, where there are homes and there are plenty of spaces for those.

The problem comes when you, you know, coming to other, say other who, you know, not, not the elephants are, but for large ungulates, large hoofstock, large herbivores where space is very limited. Again, coming back to our conversation about private ownership, very often a lot of those surplus animals are, can be kept quite well by private owners. But when it, when it comes to say like things like primates and big cats, very often because there’s, they need specialist care, it’s very difficult to find them home. So it’s a combination of being careful about breeding, being careful about where surplus animals would go. But at the end of the day, having to take a hard decision that some animals will have to be put down.

What would you say is the role of conservation breeding in zoos relative to other conservation activities?

Do you mean in terms of the emphasis put on it? Yes, yes. I don’t think it’s as important as it used to be. I mean, it start when zoos started talking about their role in conservation. Very often the conversation turned quite quickly to, oh, we are breeding such and such an endangered species for reintroduction. It quickly became evident that a lot of those projects were not viable ’cause there weren’t really any places for those animals to go or they were not suitable candidates for reintroducing. And then I think, again, what’s happened in the last 10 to 15 years is that zoos have become zoo people, staff have become much more aware of the bigger issues that were arising around this whole question of, of environmental sustainability. So climate change being obviously a very big one. ’cause climate change course feeds into so many other things, energy use, weather changes, all of that.

And those, I think quite rightly, the, although most zoos that are breeding for good reasons, endangered species are continuing with that, we are now seeing a lot more resources put into the messaging and the field involvement of zoos in these, in these much wider issues and particularly within their own communities. I think it comes back again to what we were saying about how can zoo people, zoo senior staff, zoo directors, get involved with other organizations. And one of those ways is to play a conservation role in helping regional, local organizations deal with some of these bigger issues that may not be a re that may not be putting money into it necessarily, but certainly putting skilled knowledge and staff in into some of those, some of those wider fields is something that zoos can do a bit more of. So it’s not doing away with the, with the endangered species breeding, it’s bringing on board acceptance of the important role of some of these much bigger issues.

Do you feel we need, or do we have a charismatic and committed heroes to help shift public opinion for conservation?

Obviously Jane Goodall is an example, Jacque au Do we have any now? Do we need them?

Well, to be honest, I’m IDI, there are many and younger ones coming on, I don’t know them, but there, there are certainly, from what I’m hearing, there are quite a number of young, younger, I’m talking now about late teens, twenties and thirties, something that, you know, that are principle target audiences can relate to that. There are a lot more of those people, but sometimes being taken on as ambassadors of individual organizations where they’re working with maybe a zoo like Brookfield, New York, North Carolina, or sometimes where they are helping to interpret some of these larger issues. But I’m, I’m not familiar currently with, you know, the names. I mean, I knew, I know David Attenborough pretty well and worked with him over a number of years and Jane, Jane Goodall as well, not so many times, but I know that generation, but not, not so much the younger ones, but I know they’re there and, and lots and lots of very good communicator, young communicators who are, would love to take that role When a zoo spends multi-millions of dollars on a carral exhibit and an elephant or a tiger exhibit. And critics ask why this money is not used to help the animals in the wild.

You say what?

Good question. The, the, the reality is that the sources of money to build an exhibit, an expensive exhibit and the source of money to help in the field are usually from completely different people. So very often the people that are generating or finding the resources to build that exhibit are not necessarily going to be keen to pump a, a large proportion of that money into the field. Now, what is happening in some zoos, and, and we’re certainly doing it in North Carolina, is that where we are building expensive exhibits, we are also building conservation programs around those, talking about field conservation programs, building conservation programs around those. Because apart from anything else, what we’re showing in the exhibits are interpreted in one way, interpreted much better by showing that you are doing something in the field. And those in those in a way can be reflected in the exhibits. So I think there’s much more of connection of what you’re doing in the field with what you’re showing in exhibit. Very often the choice of species connects those two, I’m a strong believer in that a proportion of funds going into an exhibit should be channeled into, into field work. Now what it, what that should be, I mean, a lot of the anti zoo, a lot of the critics are zoo saying, oh, you know, it should be at least 10%, 20%.

Now these are the ones that are thinking clearly there’s obviously not gonna be, it never is going. The, the realism is that you are never going to move 5 million bucks from one exhibit into field exhibit. There’s, there’s recently a report come out done by born free of cats, big cat keeping in the uk it’s come out literally this week. And what it’s saying is, it’s actually, what it’s done is it’s picked up on the, the cost of some of the big cat exhibits in, in UK zoos and, you know, three, four, 5 million pounds and said, well, white, you know, that would’ve paid for three years of our work with such and such. But it’s totally unrealistic now to say that, can we, can we work with you where we provide a proportion of that funding into the field, then that, that is realistic. Now there’s another argument too, as to why the exhibit may actually be more effective in conservation than putting that money into the field. If you have a really good exhibit built and interpreted in the ways that we’ve been talking about, and you’ve got a million visitors a year, you may no proof be a very interesting test, you may actually be influencing more people about the needs for global conservation with that exhibit, then you are going to save one particular environment with, with probably what is a relatively small money in terms of what’s needed in the field. So you could argue that a really and built exhibit, designed exhibit actually has greater conservation value than pumping that same sum of money into into field activities.

It’s, that is a very debatable one, but it is an, it is an argument that can be made.

Are you concerned about zoos and aquarium staying viable and pertinent in the next 25 years?

What do you think, what direction do you think would help them stay relevant?

I think some zoos will remain viable. And now I’m, look, I’m looking at a sort of 30 to 50 year timeframe. What we’re going to see is a much greater understanding on the part of the public as to what zoos should be, and particularly in terms of welfare and standards generally, and their relevance to society in general. I think we’re, as a result of that, we’re going to see tougher regulations applied and really talking now about western zoos, it’s gonna be much more difficult within the developing world to, to get that sort of movement for all, for all sorts of reasons. But in the, in the develop, if you take, take the, just take the US or Europe, the, the reality is that the big ones will survive generally if the resources continue to be pumped into them that they are at the moment, but where the standards are continually being pushed upwards. What, and, and this may not be a bad thing, which isn’t a bad thing, is that the, the zoos stand, the zoos with standards at the lower end of that spectrum are ultimately going to close down. So I would see fewer zoos in the future, not necessarily based on size, but, but the best zoos than the ones that are doing all the things that we are talking about will survive because their communities will want ’em to survive. But because of higher standards, we’re going to see a lot, I think of smaller zoos, particularly smaller zoos closed down.

What are your thoughts about private zoos owned by people of means?

Will they survive the length of time municipal zoos have when you have people who have great wealth and open up a zoo?

Well, I think women Are no longer around. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that’s, that’s one of the, I mean I think there are two big issues here.

One is that do they, what are their purposes in having those private collections?

Are they anything other than sort of egotistical, you know, I, I have such and such a collection and that’s, that’s why I have it. But if their, if their objectives with that collection are aligned with the public zoo, the, you know, the best of the public zoos, then they will survive and they will, as many are, they will become partners. But then the other problem is, as, as you are, as you are suggesting is that as change fads. So I’ve seen several situations where you have a wealthy person taking on animals and then 10 years later they’re into art or they’re into boats or so there’s something else which has taken their fancy and the zoo is no longer of any interest to them. And that becomes, that becomes a big problem. I’ve seen that two or three times. So it’s, you know, it’s really a question of what is their ultimate purpose and if they go, or if they lose interest or they die. And you know, what then is the sustainability of that collection and, and often how do you deal with that collection if indeed it’s, it’s not gonna remain intact.

How do you deal with that collection?

Well, it depends a bit on what the collection is. If it’s as it is in most cases of quite important species, species that are important to the, the main, the mainstream, the mainstream breeding programs, the mainstream reintroduction programs, whatever the purpose of that plan may be, then, then it’s not too difficult to find homes for those. I mean we, for example, I mean, white oak decided that they were gonna focus on black rhinos, but had quite a bunch of white rhinos. So we, North Carolina took that, that group of white rhinos from them, those are species that are not difficult to find homes for. If you’ve got somebody with a thousand black buck, a relatively common Haitian Indian species, very few people are gonna want to take those.

So you come back to the whole question of, well, is it, is it a euthanasia issue?

So it depends a lot on what that collection consists of. And we’ve got this big issue right now with this. You can’t call it anything less than a breeding farm in South Africa with 2000 white rhinos just being taken over by Africa parks, thank goodness, goodness know, goodness knows what would’ve happened otherwise they probably would’ve been sold to China mostly. But they now have this huge challenge and they probably breeding 150, 200 youngsters a year from that, from that population, certainly a hundred plus. How do you distribute that population in, in a reasonable timescale and to places that are likely to look after them. So that, that illustrates very well that the, the, the problem with some, you know, rare, rare and endangered species.

What do you know about this profession that you’ve devoted so many years of your life?

What, what do you know about this?

Do you mean what in in what way?

As it affects you personally?

You’ve spent all these years working in zoos.

What Do you know about this profession?

What have you gleaned from it personally?

It’s always friendly, always welcoming. I think any, any group within the animal world, I, I found that with veterinarians, with zookeepers, with zoo directors because there’s a commonality of interest and, and often a commonality of humor and of, and sort of life experiences. I’ve always found my colleagues in the zoo world to be always to be very engaging and very, very warming. It’s quite interesting, the way that’s changed. If you think over, over the 50 years that I’ve been in, in that, over 50 years in that world is when I started at London and Whipsnade, it was a pretty competitive industry. So you had situations where the major zoo directors around Europe were, yes, they were friendly when they came together for their annual meeting or whatever, and, and indeed, you know, on individual visits, but behind the scenes they were very competitive. So there was, you know, if you had a gorilla or group of gorillas, boy that was not going anywhere else. And now, you know, there was a, there was a lot of that sort of competition 40 years ago that began to change because they knew it had to change because many of these other than group management of these feature gorillas were a very good example at the time.

You’ve just, you’ve got to start managing them as a single population. And, and what’s happened now 50 years later is that that community is, is much, it’s much more transparent. It’s, it’s, it’s not competitive in the way that it used to be. I’m not saying there aren’t one or two that on, but generally speaking it’s not competitive, very friendly to one another. It’s, it’s just a, it is a great community to be in. As I say, really the whole animal world is, is a great community in terms of its, in terms of the people that work in it and the way they interact, act.

How would you like to be remembered your legacy?

I think my work in welfare particularly, and especially the last, well 20 years, but certainly the last 10 or 15 with the founding of, of wild welfare, still the only organization in the world with, with zoo background, people working to help zoos that are substandard. I’m pleased that I doubled the acreage of the North Carolina Zoo, which was already quite big, about 1300 acres when I joined it. We’ve doubled that acreage since largely to protect its environment, but also to give successes down the line. 50 years, a hundred years from now, a lot more options. You know, we talked earlier about the difficulty of space for many zoos.

So I’m glad that we, that I took that step and it wasn’t, it wasn’t actually a very easy step because I had the likely funders of that, both the state and of, and it wasn’t mostly the state, it was mainly private individuals were quite cynical about, you know, why do we need more acreage?

We’re already big. And so accepting the idea that actually having more acreage gave you more opportunity and it certainly protected the rather unique atmosphere of, of, of that particular zoo. So I think, I mean, those are the two things that I most would like to be remembered for. Well, welfare and having a, a realistic attitude to what, what the next generation of zoos is gonna have to be like.

What made you a good director?

Well, I grew up in a very rural area north of London. And in one of those sort of Georgian rectory, my father was a, an an andan priest with lots and lots of land woodland time when of course one could roam freely as a child. And my, all my family were, were Welsh farmers. And so an interest in things, biological things wild, was sort of inbuilt into me. And I chose to go to veterinary school originally I didn’t think I’d get in ’cause my equivalent to high school certificate was not terribly good. I, I was gonna go back, but went to veterinary school in the end and just at the time that I was qualifying the job as the first full-time veterinarian at Whip Snowe London Zoo’s Country station came up and that, and then it was a progression through six stages before finally running the Zoological Society of London, basically as their CEO, which included being director of both London and Whipsnade Zoos. But we’re gonna talk about all that.

But in, in your opinion, what qualities did you have that you feel made you a good director?

Well, first of all, a good background in one of the two main knowledge bases that you really need to be a zoo director. You either, you either need to have a good biological background and, and the reason for that is, of course, that you can participate sensibly in, in the discussion of where the zoo is going. The other one, of course is a background in administration and management. My background was the biological. And so building the experience, not only of that, but also managing people over a period of years then led me in, in, in becoming, led me in, in being interested in becoming a leadership of, of a zoo itself. So obviously a knowledge, a background in knowledge doesn’t have to be everything, but it needs to be a basis in one of those two main areas. I think a knowledge, a sort of broad understanding of how the world ticks. I think it’s really important for a zoo director to travel a bit to work with folks at different social levels because you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta deal with that when you’re managing through people.

So a broad background, a personality which is tolerant of people and understanding of the way people tick and knowledge these days. Very much of fundraising, of marketing didn’t have to worry about that too much going back, you know, 50 years, 40, 50 years. But all of those skills together, you ideally you have to have, if you’re going to lead any, any organization, zoos or otherwise.

So when you started and a new zoo director today, those are the things or other things that you would say you need in your skillset young man to be a zoo director today?

Absolutely, yeah. And, and there are additional ones as well. I think you, you know, most of us are dealing with boards, they’re dealing with some form of governance. And so it’s really critical that you understand that if whether you are, you know, city owned or in the case of North Carolina state owned or, or you are a private, not-for-profit with a board, you’ve got to be able to understand your role in respect to that board. The governance mechanism, in other words, as well as the ability to not only manage your own staff, but also to have to build relationships with other institutions. Not just those, but with other institutions that have a bearing on how you function. So that might be, it might be local authorities, it might be, it might be other biological institutions, it might be partners in other ways, not not just necessarily biologically or zoo oriented, but folks in your sphere of interest who you’ve also got to relate to. So there’s a wide, you know, a large group of people that you’ve, you’ve got to have a, a good sort of sense of dealing with other people. And, and you mentioned other zoos, you were in a relatively large zoo.

What can a small or a medium-sized municipal zoo do today to be involved in wildlife conservation?

Whether it’s national or international?

Yeah, what Can they Do?

A, a lot. A lot. And I think a lot of, a lot of these smaller zoos don’t realize often what they can do. I think there’s a sense of sense, well, you know, we are far too small, we haven’t got the money, but there’s several ways that they can get involved. One of course is to join with other smaller institutions, particularly, particularly the zoos that have a similar interest. It could be hoofed animals, it could be reptile birds and so on. But join together and form a consortium that can then provide enough facilities in order to carry out field conservation. Another way, of course is to join with a bigger institution, although very often the bigger institution sort of swamps you in terms of, of, of acknowledgement of the, of the effort that you are putting into it. So there, there are, there are several different ways of, of, of involving.

So even, even if their resources are relatively meager. And the other, of course the other thing is that smaller zoos are some of the best institutions that dealing with local conservation issues. A lot of people when they talk about zoo conservation mean gorillas in Africa or wild dogs in, you know, wild dogs in India or something like that. Whereas actually a lot of the smaller institutions can do great things with smaller animals locally and with local institute, not just zoo with land trusts, with local natural history societies and so on. So there’s, there’s a lot more they can do. A lot of it has to do with creating relationships, of course with those, with those institutions.

Now you had mentioned financial, considering that financial resources to many small or medium zoos are limited, what would you think should be the focus of the collection of those types of zoos?

I still think that all zoos should have a broad mix of species. Now there’s a lot of emphasis today on keeping endangered species, and that’s certainly part of the portfolio, if you like, of any zoo that should have a focus on some species that need extra protection, let’s say. But I think if you’re going to appeal to a broad audience and create your messages, your education messages, your let’s say sort of getting, getting your audience involved in what you are doing is you need, if, if you were starting from scratch, and even if you are a, you know, a long established institution is to have a collection which actually serves the purpose of interpreting to your particular audience, your local audience, the messages that you want to get over. So even if you’ve got meager resources and, and even if you are a much larger institution, I think the mix of species that you choose should not just be, should not just be endangered species. It should be a, a broad spectrum of species. Other end of the coin, the zoos in, in many cases today seem afraid to confront animal welfare or rights groups that are against zoos. We even have people in top positions in our field who seem in line with these non biologists what they have to say.

Can you give us your thoughts on how best to deal with these groups?

Well, very, I I, what I’ve found is within the zoo, well, and indeed within the biological community, generally a lot of people cannot differentiate between what animal welfare and animal rights. And what you have is a, is a sort of spectrum of views. I’m talking about views from those outside the zoo world, from genuine animal welfare folks who, who want to see better conditions, higher standards of welfare in zoos. And I’m talking about the global picture now, not not just within the US or Europe. And then right through to the end of the spectrum where you’ve got animal rights people, some of whom, not all, some of whom are rabidly anti zoo, and you’re not gonna be able to cope with them, frankly. And I’ve, I’ve had a lot of experience of dealing with this whole spectrum over, you know, over many, many years. The folks at that end of the spectrum, the sort of rab anti zoo folks, forget, you know, don’t even be worried by them. But the trick with all of this is you find people within the animal welfare community who genuinely knowledgeable about animal welfare and what that really means.

And you create a partnership, you, you build so much of what we’re talking about is to do with relationships you build a relationship with, with those people. And what you find is that if you’ve got those folks on side or at least understanding what you are all about, what you are trying to do, you know, bear in mind that almost all zoo people always want to improve their welfare and other standards. So you’ve got an audience within that spectrum that you need to try to encourage. And what I’ve found over the years is that if you develop a relationship with the folks in that, shall we say more supportive and thinking end of the spectrum, actually you can sideline those people. In other words, if you are talking to that group of people and you are, and, and it is known that you are actually including those in the discussion about any form of welfare, zoo, animal welfare being one of them, then generally speaking they help you to sideline the extremists. So in the end it’s, it’s about building, developing, finding people who are interested in what you are doing and are willing to listen and join with you in, in improving standards. And there are many people out there who will do that because in the end they, they are the folks who, they’re the folks who can actually help you. And they’re also the folks that actually at the end of the day don’t want to have any dealings with the extreme views.

Anyway, it, it’s a complicated, very complicated world.

Did you find it important that you brought those people to your facility?

Yes, absolutely. And, and we always, oh, I mean I, going back, gosh, for over 40 years when I was at London, when I was director at London and, and when I was senior vet before becoming director at London, was very much the height of the anti zoo lobby, if you like, in Europe. It, it was particularly bad, much worse in fact than it is today. It’s still there. And what I found is that I initially did an awful lot of waste of time TV discussions with mostly sort of minor film stars who, who were very anti zoo animal, you know, didn’t want any animal in captivity and they, so, so it was a sort of fighting time when you were actually debating with them to no great purpose. But what I then found was that if, if you then found those middle ground people, if you identify those middle ground, brought them to see what you were doing, made them aware of the issues. So the issues financial, in the case of London, very much historical baggage because you know, a place like Regents Park, London Zoo, 37 acres, huge traditional collection, something like 60 structures including lampposts and post boxes that were protected because of their architectural interest. Once you start bringing in people and saying, look, we want to do, we want to build a better penguin pool, we certainly don’t want this row of monkeys and primates. So we’re, we’re, we are aware just as much as you are that we need to do something about, but here are the practical issues that we need to face.

And I think if you approach it like that and, and not just discard these folks, I mean that’s what’s happened a lot in the zoo world over the years. I think it’s better now in terms of building those relationships. But in the past there was a tendency to say, we don’t like criticism so we’re just gonna push these people aside and let them go. Absolutely the wrong view. There are some, a few in that world, in the antio world who as I say, you’ll never deal with. You know, you just have to, you just have to forget it, not lose sleep over it and build the relationships with the people in the middle who will come and see what you’re doing and will listen to the issues that you also have to face. From a a zoological standpoint, some complaints from zoo directors are that there are two few good curators in the community.

Do you think that’s a problem?

And what’s your take on how curators should be trained to do what’s expected?

Well, I’m, I’m a little bit out of the current situation having, you know, been retired a few years ago, but I think it’s always been an issue as to, you know, are there, are there folks we’re talking here about animal curators, I presume there are always, there’s always been difficulty in recruiting someone say in their late twenties, thirties, early four, that sort of age group who that already has had some experience with animals. ’cause you’re not gonna presumably appoint an animal curator unless there’s some background there. The difficulty is then, because there’s so many of those folks are very much animal oriented that they haven’t had much experience in dealing with managing other people, for example, building relationships at all levels, whether it’s above or below them. So it it, it is an issue. It’s, but you can, you can fill in those gaps by providing individual training and experience for younger folks who clearly have that leadership ability. And most of the time it’s going to be a managerial administrative financial background or, or experience that you want to, that you want to build up. What I’ve found, and it’s also true of people wanting to be zoo directors, there, there are not all that many people who want to be zoo directors either, probably fewer than want to be curators. And what I’ve found, if people, particularly if folks are coming through the system, you know, they’ve started out as, as a keeper, clearly have ability to become curators, but actually they don’t want to become cur, they don’t want the extra responsibility.

And very often what I’ve found, some of those younger folks initially don’t want to be until you start giving them or training them in ways that they build up a, a much broader ability to manage not just animal, the animal management is relatively simple. It’s the human management, not only of the staff that they’re responsible for, but also for the, the folks around them maybe outside the institution that have some influence are gonna have some influence on the way they work. And then it becomes even more intense if, if you are looking for people who are gonna make good zoo directors. ’cause I found more and more over and I right now I’m not sure the situation is any different that curators, a lot of curators don’t want to become zoo directors because they’re very happy with where they are. They want to stay in the animal management. They do not necessarily want to take on the human responsibilities. I always, I was 15 years as as a zoo vet and then sort of was asked to take on additional responsibility, which then involved running London and Whipsnade zoos. And I remember several jokingly say to people now, you know, I was 15 years in a, in a, in a profession, the veterinary profession, which I really enjoyed working with animals.

And then I made the huge mistake of moving to manage people. Big mistake for some people. And, and I think there’s a lot still in folks who don’t actually want to take that extra step, whether it’s from keeper, curator or curator up to up to zoo director.

What changes have you seen during your years in the zoo field regarding visitor attitudes?

Hmm, I, I don’t think attitudes visitors have, have not changed in the proportions who are interested in support the zoo world versus those who are to one degree or another not happy about zoos. We talked about those extremists, there are a few of those, but it, they have not increased. Now there’s a middle, there’s a middle group of, of visitors who I think largely because of other forms of information and education are much better informed about the natural world than they were, you know, even 10 or 15 years ago. And that, that’s obviously because of the different forms of media that they’re now exposed to. So there is a greater, i I don’t, I think we’ve got a similar spread of visitors, you know, liking to disliking, coming to a zoo. But what we’ve now got in the middle are a lot of people who are better informed, scientifically better informed, more concerned about environment and animal biodiversity, loss, loss of, of species than, than was ever the case in the past. So the attitude, the different attitudes is that middle group of people who want, are better informed, want to be better informed, want their kids to be better informed and their expectation of standards within zoos in terms of keeping animals, whether it be standards of exhibits, standards of interpretation, or whether above all standards of welfare. And I think that’s where the difference is.

It’s not, it’s not in the numbers who are pro or against the zoo world.

What issues caused you the most concern during your career and how do you see the future regarding those same concerns?

Sorry, those same, What issues caused you the most concern during your career and how do you see the future regarding those same concerns you might had?

Oh yeah, yeah. Well I, I mean the big one is for, from, in my experience anyway has, has been financial in trying to make sure that you’ve always got the resources both to maintain and to build new exhibits. So that’s, that’s one concern. Another one is actually governance. I’d be having, I mean I sat on the boards of 24, 23, 24, not-for-profits over the years, nearly all of them, biological, some not chaired 12 of them, I think I was about half of them. And, and what I see is an, a need for much better governance of these organizations. In other words, the right choice of people with the right mix of skills. So that, that is another challenge, which I think, you know, trustees, whoever is managing the management, if you like, whoever is who, who, whoever is governing an institution need to be very careful about the, the makeup of that governance mechanism. And I think there’s a lot of improvements and I, that’s been a big concern of mine with some of the institutions I’ve dealt with.

There needs to be a great deal of improvement in, in governance and that means often training those people in, in better governance. And then other things are more or less, we touched on a little earlier, is finding people to manage our institution, to manage our zoos that have that good mix of backgrounds and if not are properly trained to do so.

So the, and and, and of course in addition to, in in, in, within all those concerns, you’ve got one or two of the things we’ve just touched on, which is the, what will public attitude be to zoos in the future?

Will it change, will it, you know, will it, will it improve with the way that zoos communicate what they’re doing to their audiences?

So in the future, what issues would you like to see Zoos address Much more partnership with other outside in partnership, obviously with other zoos where it’s appropriate, but I’ve been a strong believer in, in zoo directors, making sure that they’re also involved in, in the governance or in some other way, partnership with institutions around, there could be other biological institutions, arts institutions who can, who can help them understand what their, what, what they running an institution are there for, why, what is the purpose of that?

So that’s, that’s one, one concern is building those relationships with, with other people.

Sorry, can you, can we just give, can you just repeat that question?

Yes. What major direction must zoos be taking?

What issues would you like to see zoos address in the future?

Well, as I I mentioned just now, I think, I think certainly being more aware of the outside world and the other institutions that they could partner with, that that’s certainly one thing that they should be doing. Clearly they’ve got to try and address their, their audience, which means they’re the audience that is actually visiting them, addressing, making sure that they understand what your institution is doing and why it’s doing so there’s a, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of potential still in the way that we get our audiences to understand what we’re about and and what we’re trying to do. I think a lot, I think a lot of it has to do with just a steady improvement in all the things that the zoo world is currently doing much better at. And that is, you know, a broader understanding of the outside world, a better approach to their own audiences in how they address them and how they bring that audience into understanding what they’re doing. Financial obviously need there. There’re gonna be quite a lot of zoos coming up I think in the next 20 years that are gonna run into much greater financial problems. And so finding a stable financial backing is, is gonna be, is gonna be quite a challenge for them in the future.

And, and you’ve had some experience, do you think a zoo can build any kind of insulation against interference from politics?

No apol interference in a sort of broad sense too. I, and I think it depends what your mechanism of governance is and also you know, how financially strong you are and it, it comes back again I think to the quality of governance. I had big issues in London with a governance mechanism that were largely the body that the board largely consisted of people who were pals of other members of the board and were not necessarily, not necessarily the right people to, to be be in a position of governing the zoological society of London. So, so, so, so sorry, I’m gonna, I’ve lost the track of that question. We were talked about the politics in Zoos. Yeah, the politics, yeah, You can, Yeah, It’s like a state zoo. You obviously had politics. Yes, that’s right. Now in, in the, and certainly in North Carolina it’s, it depended the, the amount of involvement that the state itself took in the management of the zoo depended a great deal on who was actually the secretary of environment or in, in the case now secretary of culture, how much interest they took and what, what that form, what, what it, what form that interest took. So certainly when I started in North Carolina, there were very, a very, shall I say, sort of broad, sensible folks running the department who basically say we’ve, you know, we’ve appointed this guy, let him get on with him, but over the, and of course the politics change every two or four years.

And so one had different, different leadership, some of whom wanted to get too involved. So trying to get that balance where you have to sort of, you have to have a good relationship with that form of governance, but you don’t want, particularly if they’re not knowledgeable on the subject, which many of them were not of, of a sort of level of interference, which was, which actually put the institution back rather than trying to move it forward. So you, you’re never going to get rid of political influence, whether that be from a board or from, you know, some form of local or local or state or even national government. But, and, and again, it comes back to how do you, how can you form a relationship with those people and, and how you can deal with that relationship as it changes with different people. That’s quite a challenge.

Do you think, how do you think private breeders, can they be partners with zoos?

Absolutely, yeah. And I think with some species, groups of species, birds and herps particularly, a lot of private breeders have done a much better job than, than some of the zoo well have both in, in the ways they keep them and in the conservation value, the breeding value of those species. I, over the years, again, not so much in North Carolina, but with London had quite a lot of dealings with private individuals who had, you know, because they were specialists in what they were doing, whether it was, you know, and particularly with smaller species, one or two with hoofstock, with larger mammals as well, but particularly where you’re trying to build up numbers. Some of the private breeders are really quite critical in that no, no zoo, no zoo is gonna keep the numbers that you actually need to maintain, you know, a good genetic stock. So there’s a huge place for private breeders providing two things, providing they have the same objectives as you have at the end of the day and, and also that they’re gonna be financially okay in the long-term future, but very much so that is a, is a good place for private breeders as long as they follow your lines of interest. The adopt a national Park concept seems like a natural for zoos to assist the wild.

Why have zoos not picked up the challenge in more numbers?

Is it still viable?

Yeah, no, I think that, I think that’s a great concept and it is beginning to happen. There are, there are a number of zoos now both here and in Europe that are partnering in some way or another with, with a national park. And I, I’m presuming here we’re talking really about national parks in, in the developing world in Africa or parts of Asia. I think the problem is, ’cause I, we certainly had some dealings with that, with National Parks, even helped to found one or two when I was at London. But I think the difficulty now is a lot of, a lot of smaller institutions don’t have the networks to know what might be available in terms of a partnership. Obviously the financial side comes into it as well because it can get quite expensive, particularly with some people’s expectations in in, in some of the African countries particularly. And perhaps the most important thing is, is it’s sustainable. So I think a lot of, a lot of our zoo folks are a bit nervous about that type of partnership if they don’t know what the commitment is going to be.

There’s been a, you know, not so much today, I think mo I think many zoos have become very aware that short term projects going into somewhere for a year or even three years, very rarely works. You, you’ve got, if you’re gonna partner with someone like a national park or a far an overseas government, you’ve got to be prepared to go into it for the long term and that that can put a lot of people off.

What’s the long term for you?

What, what does that mean to you long term?

20 to 30 years?

It, it depends a bit on the situation, but you, you, if you go into a partnership with, you know, whether it’s with a national park or whether it’s with a, let’s say a wildlife department purely, you know, just a department dealing with, let’s say with primate conservation in Africa, each situation has its own exit strategy. So nearly everything, and this goes for the same with, with some of the welfare work that, that you know, that I’ve been doing is you go into it after negotiation of not only what you are going to do initially and as the project develops and hopefully leads to their being able better able to manage their own facility without outside help, then there has to be an exit strategy as well. But it’s no good going into these partnerships expecting that you, you know, you, you dump a sum of money for one year. Some of the, I mean certainly with North Carolina’s work right now, the projects that I started nearly 30 years ago are still ongoing today. They’re, they’re still there. They’ve developed, they’ve got larger, but they’re that because of those long-term relationships, they become much more successful than they will be if you’re any unit for the short term.

What do you think is the most difficult concept for zoos to understand and implement regarding their relationship to observation?

Some of that is, is is rather the same as as what we’ve just been talking about?

I think it’s a, there’s a nervousness about the financial aspects of it. There’s a nervousness often about the people you are dealing with. I mean, I’ve, I’ve had several instances over the years where you’re dealing with pretty corrupt people at the other end, again, again, I’m talking about helping mostly underdeveloped countries. So, you know, there’s a weariness I think about moving into a partnership where you don’t know that partner particularly well. In some instances you don’t have the skills that they really need. And we, I’ve seen many situations where folks put the wrong people and the wrong skills into a partnership thinking, you know, they’re thinking that’s what they want, but actually they want something and need something quite different. So there, there are a lot of aspects of that that make, you know, make a zoo direct a bit, a bit wary. And again, it comes back before getting involved in these sort of projects.

It comes back to building the relationships with the people and very often identifying who the movers and shakers are in those situations.

Because again, some projects that I’ve been involved in, for example, in Southeast Asia, in, in Malaysia, in Vietnam is you, if you take a, take a zuzu where we’ve been helping with Hanoi Zoo, for example, so the director of Hanoi Zoo may say, you know, can you send someone to help us train our primate keeper?

And we are willing, we’ll we’ll pay for your hotel, but you’ve gotta pay for the airfare. That’s a, a common request. And you go in and then you find actually the director of Hanoi Zoo doesn’t, doesn’t necessarily have the power to make some of the decisions that you are asking him to do, him or her. The power comes from the city mayor or somebody else outside who actually is the one who’s, you know, who’s drawing the puppet strings.

So in developing these relationships, you’ve got to, the, a very important question is who, who actually is the person in charge?

If you are, if you are, mate, we’ve had, i I know situations in Indonesia for example, where we’ve been helping zoos there and you go in and expecting that most things can be decided on site, they can’t, somebody else is making those decisions or is, is involved in making those decisions. And it’s not only building the relationship with that person on site, it’s also building the relationship with the folks who are often politically interested in what’s gonna happen at that zoo. And this is particularly so where you’ve got zoos that are under pressure from the anti zoo lobby saying, this place should close or this exhibit should close.

And, and you go in and you think, well, yeah, maybe, you know, maybe it should, but it’s not going to, so how can we improve it?

But then resources are needed, so you have to go to that higher power if you like. So again, relationship building to the right person or people is really critical in, in building those, those sort of projects.

Is that a delicate question to ask people?

Who’s the decision maker?

Yeah, no, I mean very often, but you don’t ask it quite like that. You, you very quickly, if you, if you, if you put the question, okay, we’re gonna need some resources, we’re gonna need some money funding to do something with this exhibit in, in a roundabout way, you can soon find out who actually they’ve gotta go to and who’s gonna have to make that decision. And it’s particularly difficult where there is, and I’ve seen it many, many times, it, it is particularly difficult where there is a lot of public pressure to do something and the leadership, wherever that may be is, you know, is not, not in tune with the public interest or indeed with the interest of, of the zoo staff, the zoo director can be quite tricky.

Does, does space in, in, in zoos, in in general continue to be a problem for zoos and aquariums?

Yes, it does. Well in, in many ways. A lot of today’s, especially the older zoos, of course, are, are having, and, and particularly city based, central, city based London, great example, where there’s no way that, that they can expand. And so you’re bound to have exhibits that are simply not up to today’s standards or expectations. I pushed for, one of the reasons that I left London was that I had pushed for years for the 37 acres in London Zoo to become a specialist, smaller animal collection all year round, mostly undercover, but concentrating on the things that it could do well and put all the larger animals, larger species out at largest species out at Waid, where the society had 600 acres available. And, and you can imagine that the sort of pundits who did not want to see anything change with London Zoo wanted things to stay as they were. And so, and, and, and so the space issue, the space issue became quite a, you know, quite a problem there. So it’s space, it’s space for the right sort of exhibits. It’s space for reserve exhibits and it’s space to create the right environment around those exhibits.

This is, this is why the thousands of acres, 2000 acres that North Carolina has fortunate to have is it’s not just the exhibits themselves, it’s the, the total almost rural experience that you get around those exhibits. So, I mean, if you’ve got exhibits that are crowded together, which many city center zoos are, there’s not all this, there’s asphalt pavement between them. But actually creating the, the sort of all day environment that, that visitors really like that, that if you ask visitors to North Carolina Zoo, what they like most the day you ask them, they will say the Poe Bear exhibit or the gorillas, you ask them that same question a month later and what they will say is just a beautiful place to come to. It’s just the whole surroundings, not just the exhibits are really, really great. So space obviously plays into that as well. So I would, any, any, I would advise any zoo director today if they have the chance to buy land around, you know, if they’ve got the resources to do that, to always do that. But we have to face the reality that so many, so many of these places just don’t, there’s no way that they can expand. And if they try to, of course they often get, they often get sort of antagonistic responses from the local community.

But that’s why so many zoos over the last 50 years have created an, an outside the city zoo as well, in addition to what they’re doing inside or in, in a few cases, I’ve actually moved outside, which is what London should have done a long time ago. You indicated surveys, so my assumption is North Carolina conducted surveys that told you these things you were mentioning.

Did those surveys about visitor attitude help you as director start to shape things or see things and the directions you might want to take?

Do you think that’s a good thing for other zoos to be doing?

Absolutely. And particularly with their, their, you know, their audience, their local audience.

I always went, you know, when people ask me the question, what’s the purpose of your zoo?

It isn’t primarily to breed a lot of endangered species, that that may be a part of it, but the, the most important function is, are you serving the purpose that your community wants you to serve within reason?

And how are you doing that? How are you engaging them?

If you, if you are engaging your audience more effectively, then your long-term survival is going to be more assured than it is if you’re not bringing them in. So finding out what they feel about your zoo, their zoo, you know, it’s that it’s your audience that you need to survey a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of surveys that you see, not just about zoos, go much broader beyond the audiences that they’re necessarily addressing. So yes, in, in, in our particular case, we did quite a lot of serving of what our audience felt about what they were seeing, and particularly that point I was making just now, not so useful what they saw, the, you know, when you question them going out the gate has some use, what’s really important is asking those same people, if you can get to them a month later, what they, what they remember and what was most important to them about their day out, that actually gives you a lot more information than the day that they actually came.

So you had a plan in order to get to them a month later?

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, capturing, obviously capturing names and addresses as far as far as we could. I mean, you had some reluctance with some people, but being able to get to at least a proportion of those folks a little bit later to ask them what they felt. It’s not, it’s not actually that difficult, but it does need some manpower to do that time. It takes time basically. And collection of, of information about where these people are and how to get to them.

Do you think animals need to, in the zoo, need to earn their keep?

Yes. Give Example, I would use the example of animal rides, animal shows, but you do feel, why do you feel they need to earn their keep?

Well, I don’t, I don’t think, I don’t think they need to earn their keep as show pieces. I, I mean, yes, of course there are lots of ways in which one can demonstrate animal behavior, all sorts of aspects of, of animal biology in, in what one might broadly call a show a demonstration, whether it be education department or whether it’s sort of a, a set piece show. But how I would interpret that you, you know, do animals need to pay for themselves has more to do with the fact that obviously most zoos do not get their finances paid for by somebody else. So you are dependent at least largely on that audience, on that local audience to keep you in business. But it, so it has more to do in terms of animals paying the way has more to do with the quality of exhibit, the quality of the day out, which might include some form of show providing that doesn’t have welfare implications, bad welfare implications. And that’s obviously a, an issue, debatable issue as to what doesn’t, what doesn’t, but it, it has more animals paying for themselves, if you like, I think has or should have more to do with the overall quality of the exhibits, the way you interpret them and, and the sort of total experience of the day out rather than simply, oh, they’ve got a, a primate show or a, you know, or a, or a bird show or any, or any other form of, of, say, an animal, animal use, which, which of course 20 years ago, particularly used to was all the rage. You always had to have some sort of show that would, you know, would bring in more people. But so many of those shows were, were very, had a, a huge adverse welfare impact.

So how do these animal presentations, we’ll call ’em, have to speak to animal welfare, you mentioned?

Well, the first thing, I mean, if you’re using, a lot of people now are using domestic animals, which obviously are, are much used to being handled by people. I mean, North Carolina has gone over to actually a very good dog show and is not doing any shows with, you know, with non-domestic animals.

But if you are using non-domestic animals, then the whole question is, does what are you actually demonstrating with that animal?

Does it fit with firstly that animal’s comfort level?

A lot of animals may seem to be comfortable in human presence, but give signs that they’re not, does it, does the show, does the show display behavior which is unnatural for that animal?

So the question that any animal handler, anybody conducting the show needs to ask is, is this an appropriate behavior to encourage the animal to do, or are we asking it to do something which, which is simply for human entertainment, is not really telling the audience anything valuable about what it is.

And even if you’re doing that, are you quite certain that that animal is comfortable in that situation or, or are there aspects of welfare where, you know, over handling a snake for example, that you know, is not used to being handled by a lot of people for six hours?

I mean, I’m just just quoting the extreme there, but there are lots of things that have happened in the past. I think today both the zoo world and the audience is much more aware of whether an animal is comfortable or likely to be comfortable or not. So there are questions that need to be asked before one starts any sort of demonstration that involves non-domestic species.

So what factors did you take into consideration when you said North Carolina has a dog show?

What was the purpose? A dog presentation?

Well, it, it is, obviously it does. I’m, I’m not sure that it actually attracts any extra people. It is an addi, it’s an additional fac very family oriented additional facility, which, which provides an added dimension to the day out. And obviously many of the people coming to the zoo have dogs and and are probably rather amazed at what some, some of these dogs can do. So yes, I mean it adds to the day out. The dogs clearly enjoy doing it, so they’re very used to it. So there isn’t a, there isn’t a welfare issue in that, but, and the purpose is to, shall we say add, add something to to, to a particularly a family day out.

Do you believe there’s still a wild out there or have the majority of wild spaces been turned into managed wild zoos?

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a good question. There, there is a wild, it has to do mainly with, with just area, you know, acreage, to put it, to put it mildly, where, where there are areas that are largely untouched by humans and are big enough to still be mainly unmanaged, but still maintaining their animal populations. They are still out there. I’ll give you a great example. I worked for some time or was responsible for some time for a, a major biological study in the southern Sudan, in the Johny region. The World Bank had decided that Southern Sudan was going to be Arabia’s bread basket, huge wheat fields. Thank goodness it never happened because of the Sudanese civil war. I’m talking now about 40 years ago, and we were involved in a study supported by FA Food and Agriculture Organization in the United Nations in looking at the migration of antelope species across what was gonna be the line of a canal linking parts of the Nile River. And in that, and, and it’s still the same today, vast, vast area, something like two, 2,000,002, I think something like 2 million square.

I mean, it’s a huge area, not 2 million, but 2000 square miles practically untouched because of civil war had really, nobody had been in that area, it was just unsafe to go into. But recent surveys show it to be pretty well unchanged over, you know, over a period of time so that the larger the area and they still exist. Yes, it is wild, but as you come in, most of these parks now are not enclosed, but they’re, they’re a very sort of defined boundary. The smaller you get, the more managed they become. So if you, if you look at, for example, the South African national parks, that national and regional park situation as, as just as one country example, most, although some of those areas like Kruger are, are vast, but there is has to be a level of management for all sorts of reasons in, you know, in, in maintaining the integrity of that area. So the, the answer is sort of yes and no. There are fewer truly wild places, but they do exist. But the smaller they get, the more managed they have to be.

There are certain species, you mentioned finance, there are certain species that it seems might be good if there was a national program to, to, to do things.

Yeah. Why do you, why do you think that zoos did not implement a major elephant national breeding program?

I thought they did, at least. I mean there there’ve been efforts over the years to try to coordinate well a number of larger species. And obviously moving elephants is a, is a big issue. But a, I mean a ZA does have a ZA does anyway, have a program for the, the national breeding of elephants where animals are being moved. I think we felt a new bull elephant just arrived in North Carolina. So under the rule, under a Z’s conditions, I’m talking about one association. Obviously I think the situation is similar in Europe where there is a pretty high degree of involvement of zoos in a, in a concerted plan. Now it’s a bit like used to be the situation with say gorillas.

At one time, certainly in my early days in the zoo, oh, if you had a gorilla it never went anywhere else. You, you know, you had to, you know, there was no sort of no no getting together. That’s obviously changed dramatically over, over the last 30 to 40 years. And, and there there are going to be people with elephants who don’t want to part with them, but as far as I know, there is a good plan at the moment for elephant breeding, both in Europe and in the us.

How successful do you think zoos and aquarium have been in achieving the reintroduction of species back into the wine?

Yeah, actually pretty good. And, and this is, this is one of the, one of the things the sort of anti anti zoo lobby keeps going on about is that, well, there’s been very few of these circumstances. I think the thing is that most, most of the really successful programs have been very much with smaller species. So everything from invertebrates, you know, rare crickets and butterflies in the case of some of the zoos in, in the UK for example, and they’re not the only ones dealing with that sort of animal to small rods. And even in, in one or two cases with, with big cats, particularly with cheetahs, cheetahs and then again with another kind of wild dogs have been quite successfully introduced. And there’ve been some, I’ve been involved in some of them very successful programs with some of the, some of the ungulate species who start particularly with desert species. Arabian orx of course, is the one that a lot of people know. But now with adx similar horned orx with, with gazelle a number of gazelle species and with, even with things like European bison for example, which, and I suppose you could even give the American bison as as a, as a an example way back of, of captive breeding, contributing things like the Blackfoot ferret is a great example of an animal on the bridge of extinction that was entirely re entirely zoo.

Well not just zoo breeding, but other, you mentioned private breeders, in this case a government breeder bring breeding animals together in a consorted effort to put them back in the wild. But the main, the main examples have been with small, small animals, birds, a lot of birds, the Hawaiian species, for example, some of the Pacific Island species now being now being reintroduced once they get rid of some of the predators on those islands. So the, the answer is quite a, quite a wide range of species. And there’ll be more, undoubtedly You’ve been involved with the Species survival program from the Zoo Association.

Has the selection criteria to decide which animal species become part of the program met with what you envisioned?

Well, I’m, I’m not a big expert on, on the species survival program. I mean, I’m, I’m aware it’s there and some of the species that that that we’ve been, that I’ve been involved in both, both in London and and over and and North Carolina, as far as I’m aware, it’s, it’s going strong and the, the, the number of species are gradually increasing. The big challenge of course is finding people who are willing to take on the stu bookkeeper role and in some cases because, because it gets very complicated once you’re dealing with hundreds and hundreds of animals. Not just one person, but a number of people have to be involved in it. Far as I’m aware it’s, it’s going well. I wouldn’t, you know, I wouldn’t presume to judge it, you know, with a, with a lack of knowledge about specifics of it.

What has been the greatest area of development in the way zoos have interpreted their collection to visitors?

Well, you know, in a way, successful interpretation has, has rather gone round, full circle years back. The best way always was having a living human being, preferably a member of staff or, or a docent interpreting an exhibit live to somebody. But of course, because that’s expensive on time, other methods were developed, mostly written notices, which a lot of the time don’t work because unless you’re really, really interested in that particular animal, nobody is reading a lot of these, you know, a lot of these very beautifully produced notices. But with the advent of social media, with apps on where you can actually, you know, many zoos now have their interpreted basically in a way that you can carry your phone around and see them. That given that as we know only too well that you young people can’t be detached from their phones, that has been a huge help. The, the way that signage has evolved in many zoo has improved considerably in as on the back of the understanding that you, you nobody is going to read six paragraphs of why this lion, you know, where it comes from and, and all the bylaws. So most writtens who interpreters now have, have condensed that to key information and made it attractive. Some, like we North Carolina, we do use video screens quite a bit and have information covered, little information points where people can go to and press buttons and, and see something.

But at the end of the day, and, and we are coming back round to that now, I think at the end of the day, and usually it’s gotta be volunteers, there’s no absolutely no substitute for a live person, person to person that is far more effective than, than any other interpreted method, however sophisticated they become.

Do you think zoos have solved that problem of interpretation?

It’s an ongoing, it’s an ongoing science really as to, as to how to do it well, particularly if it’s, you know, if you’ve got the people who can actually provide that service, the person to person service, that’s great. But, but obviously a lot of institutions either can’t afford that or don’t have the number of volunteers and certainly not the number of staff to be able to do it. But certainly modern ways of communication have helped a great deal. I think the, the challenge is, I mean, most people of course you’ve got that small number of people who are very zoo and species oriented and because they’re going to lap up anything they can, they can learn. But for the vast majority of zoo visitors, they’re coming for, they’re coming for a good day out. Yes, they want the kids to learn something and occasionally even the mums and dads want to learn something as well. And so they, they will use what limited facilities there are as interpretives, whether it’s a, you know, a written notice or a a screen or something on their phone. But how much they’re actually absorbing from all of that is, is still an open question.

And I know no amount of that sort of interpretive is going to, you know, is going to be optimum in terms of making sure that people understand what is, who’s trying to do what an exhibit’s trying to tell them. It’s a real challenge. Did you find that your technical interpretive, you mentioned screens and things stood the test of time or were they constantly being fixed, Constantly hammered Yes. By the, by the, by the group of teenage school kids who happen to come around showing off to their friends. No, you’re absolutely right. And, and because not only zoos I, museums and other institutions have a real, real issue. And the trouble is the more sophisticated they are, the more they tend to get, well, not only broken, but of course maintenance on them and so on is, is considerable. I don’t, I mean I, I, there probably are zoos that have maintenance staff capable of dealing with these more sophisticated interpreters, but I know we didn’t have that, the London would’ve been way my years at long way before some of these techniques were developed.

But it, it’s a, you know, North Carolina where we, we are lucky enough to have a quite sizable design and building department, which is also responsible for the interpretives and they will have had a constant challenge of trying to keep up with particularly anything, anything electronic. You talk about four keys of conservate, four areas, key areas of conservation.

Can you talk about them as it affects wildlife?

Do you, you say I talk about Four keys of conservation?

Hmm. Not sure what you mean by that or what the question, what the question is.

I i, I dunno, where have I put something down somewhere?

You did, I didn’t write it down David. I’m sure we could find a later.

Regarding conservation, what worries you and what gives you hope?

I know this is a bit of a cliche, but I think a, a new generation, a younger or two, two generations under one a generation that’s now young parents and a teenage generation, folks that are now in that sort of age group that are much more interested in things environmental, by that I mean not not just species and species protection, loss of diversity and so on, but also much broader interest and understanding in, in the bigger changes that are happening. Obviously climate change being, being the major one right now and, and the whole question around energy production, marine issues that nobody really thought much about 20 years ago. So, so young people have a much, much more interest and concern about what they as adults are going to find. And that, and that obviously involves the things that we are most interested in the zoo world, which are our animal charges. That’s what, that’s one thing. I think the many of the institutions that are and have been for a long time involved in conservation are much more effective than they used to be in their political handling. They’re, and they’re up against, I mean, I, just to give you an example, I’m on the board, I chaired it for a while of Environmental Defense Fund. The Regional Environmental Defense Fund is based up here in the northeast, but it’s, it has regional offices, which I chaired the board of more or less for the southeast region.

And EDF is largely concerned with, with things like climate change, with energy, with water quality, not so much with species as such. And what we’re seeing now, and EDF just as one example, well Wildlife fund as well, others Nature Conservancy and so on now have not five, they’re not 5 0 1 c threes, but they are, they have a pol if you like, a political lobbying wing, which are being fairly well funded now by those who, you know, folks who can afford to. So in terms of, of addressing the much heavier duty lobbying of things like the energy lobby, marine exploration lobby. And so, so you’re seeing a far more effective political input from the conservation world than you ever saw even 10 or 15 years ago. So I think that is, that’s one thing. And the other, and, and the third thing, which I think a lot of people don’t realize is that actually a lot of the positive changes are coming from industry itself and driven by two things. One, that a lot of, a lot of parts of the industry are beginning to understand that actually it makes commercial sense to do things in a more environmentally sensitive way, but also because of public opinion. So a lot of energy companies, I mean, for example, in, in EEDF in North Carolina, we work a lot with regional electricity boards, smaller, they, they’re not generating power, but they’re selling power and they, because they’re dealing again with a local audience who are buying the power from ’em, they, they’re listening much more to their customers.

So you’re beginning, you know, within say just take the energy industry for example, you’re beginning to see not so much from the really big players and particularly from the fossil fuel guys, but you are seeing a lot more interest from the smaller players because of the pressure they’re getting from, from their particular audiences. So young people much more, much more interested and, and understanding and wanting to know more industry actually playing in many ways. You don’t hear the good stories for industry actually doing quite a lot of good things. And, and the force that public pressure and more political pressure by, particularly by the bigger environmental organizations, all of that is playing a, a positive role in, in the changes that we’re seeing You have worked in Africa.

How important do you feel tourism in Africa is to protect species long term?

Vital, absolutely vital. I have a son who actually is at the only one of my three boys who’s followed broadly, you know, my, my area of interest. And he actually is working currently with a number of countries in Africa where the tourism aspect has not been developed that, well, parts of Uganda, for example, which Uganda is sort of the, the less well known of the countries that people tend to go to for tourism. But in most areas in Africa, tourism now is the major source of income, particularly for rural communities. The only thing is that the challenge is actually making sure that enough of the resources that are generated by tourism are actually going into those, into the local communities, which then makes it worthwhile for those local communities to be protecting, you know, what they need to protect in order to maintain the, the tourism industry. There a lot of that, there is some feeling that in, in many of the more remote areas that well conducted game hunting does contribute, but it’s, it’s an industry that is very open to corruption, you know, because of the high large figures involved, large monetary figures involved often find their way into pockets where they shouldn’t. But there is still some evidence, good evidence that in areas which are not, don’t have good road contacts, don’t have good good communications, that commercial hunting properly conducted can also be a good generator. But it’s a small industry money-wise compared to the much larger tourist industry.

One of the challenges now is that the supply in African tourism is not keeping up with the demand. So whereas when I’ve been taking groups to Africa now for, oh gosh, 40 years probably, or certainly all the time I was in north, in North Carolina, the North Carolina Zoo. And the thing that that I’ve really noticed is whereas 30 years ago you could make a booking for six months in advance to, you know, to go almost anywhere. Now it’s a two year booking. You, you, you cannot get into some of these places now. And it’s the reason, the problem is that 30 years ago we never saw Chinese Indian, Southeast Asians coming on safari today. They are. And so, and many of them very wealthy and well able to pay the enormously increased fees that getting into some of these tourist camps have. And so because there’s a limit to how many of these facilities you could build, one of the, one of the things that’s happening right now, and my bought one, you know, one of my sons is doing just this, is finding areas in places like Uganda, which have not been involved in the tourist industry, but are well capable of supporting it, but doing it deliberately with the local people, not through often several middle people.

So, ’cause often these lodges of course may be managed locally, but they’re often financed and run by somebody else. And that may link back to somebody outside Africa who has a financial interest. So the, the key now in African tourism is to find the places which have not been overrun by tourism and to build, build in for not necessarily highly sophisticated facilities, but facilities that actually can be run and benefited from a local audience. So a lot of it, a lot of it’s going on now is training, just training local people in, starting up their own tourism enterprises. But yeah, absolutely essential to rural economies in Africa. You have mentioned this word before, I’m gonna take a leap here. Tell me about the wow impact in exhibit design and how you try and achieve that. Well, as you, as you know, well, I mean I, and certainly when I started 50 odd years ago in the zoo world, the, it was okay to keep big cats in cages, concrete and metal.

But today we’ve got to be designing exhibits that actually put whatever species you’re showing into some sort of visual and biological context. So exhibits need to be be because we’re also trying to tell people, not just, you know, this animal weighs, you know, 300 pounds and you know, lives for 20 years. We are trying to tell people, yeah sure, it’s, it’s an interesting animal, but actually it’s part of a jigsaw puzzle of environmental factors, bits that fit together within, you know, with, within a particular habitat or environment that this animal is a key player in. And so what you’re trying to do in the design of exhibits now is, is create a visual feel where the audience are getting some understanding of how and where that animal lives. And also quite importantly, is giving that audience a sense of comfort with that exhibit. So, because obviously today, when, when the animal rights people are absolutely correct is we’re still seeing too many exhibits, too many zoo exhibits, which actually don’t tell that audience anything other than the fact that we are containing that animal behind wire and concrete. It’s not, it’s, it’s not, it’s not a visual experience which the, the onlooker can actually get very much idea about what that animal, its environment looks like. So the prime, the prime thing is to try and create an exhibit which not only is good for the animal in, in, in, in many different ways, but is also good for the observer in terms of understanding that animal and its, and its biological context.

Why do more zoos have sister zoo relationships?

Its starting, but it’s, it’s actually quite difficult in the, the charity that I founded about 12 years ago now, and, and I, we’ll probably get onto this later. That’s exactly what we started trying to do was to, if we were going into, let’s say, let’s say somewhere one of those zoos in Indonesia we mentioned earlier in try and trying to improve them mostly by training, mostly by training ’em, by pointing out things that they may not have understood. And then the plan always has been still is to then in our exit strategy of the team go to help initially is then to get somebody, get a, a mostly a ma a major zoo simply resource wise to get involved in the longer term with keeping, keeping an eye out, keeping giving them help when they need it.

But it comes back rather to, what we were saying earlier is that there’s a weariness of the cost of staff being seconded for long periods of time and of, you know, what, what’s the exit strategy?

How long do we need to get involved?

’cause it’s a bit like the national park question is that if you’re going to get involved with the Suraya Zoo, let’s say and give them help over a long period, it’s, it has got to be a longer period because what we find, and thi this is what used to happen before while welfare came into operation, is that many, well-being folks, often zoos, but but often welfare organizations who had no background in, in non-domestic animal management went in for a day, three days, two weeks came out and everything went back again where it was, it’s, you know, you’ve got to have a sustained input. And so if, and we have a number of zoos who are now interested in either, either helping with the Zoo association or with helping individual zoos, but it’s, it’s sort of getting them off the ground and making them feel comfortable that they can actually do, they can create that partnership and run it over the longer term.

And that’s the, that’s, that’s probably the main reason why there aren’t more of them Having worn two hats as a director, what would you say are some of the differences that you’ve observed between zoos in Europe and the United States?

Money? Biggest difference, probably zoos in the US have been really, when I’m talking about the mainstream zoos are not, not so much the smaller private operations, but on the whole, the larger zoos have been pretty well financed by, by, by any global standard over, you know, over the years that they’d been in existence. And many, of course traditionally have been either owned or certainly backed considerably by, you know, by a local authority or some such. I mean, North Carolina is unusual in that it’s one of only two state owned zoos, larger zoos in the country, but it receives half its income. It only makes half, its its annual budget, the rest comes from state government. And so, and that’s a very lucky position. There’s no zoo in in, certainly not in Britain. And, and very, very few throughout continental Europe that have have that sort of backing. So I mean there are a few, so some of the Germans zoos, for example, zoos like Frankfurt, the Berlin, Berlin Zoo do have a lot of municipal backing, but many of them have none of that.

And so when, you know, when I mentioned to colleagues in, in UK that the North Carolina Zoo is in the process of spending $200 million on new exhibits right now, mind you, that’s, that didn’t happen in my time. We were pretty short of money. But it is happening right now. They, they’re staggered. So money is a big issue. I mean if in in Britain, for example, if London Zoo had $5 million to spend, it would consider itself very lucky. So there isn’t, there isn’t the support, public support that there is in in Europe that there is in the us That’s probably the major factor. The other one is, and I think in a way it’s born of that financial problem, is that attitudes to zoo exhibitry are still fairly conventional, particularly continental Europe. I think a lot of the zoos in Britain are beginning to move in the right direction in terms of the visual quality of those exhibits.

But a lot of the continental zoos, if you look at what they’ve done over the last 10 or 15 years for example, are still still very much building facilities that are pretty conventional in the way that they look. There’s, there’s some effort obviously to make the, to make those environments much better than they were.

But I think again, if you look at, if you said to some of the, the European Zoo directors, if you had double the resources or triple, which would be the case in the us would you do, would you make the exhibit different?

Would it, but would it make any difference?

And I’m sure it would. I think the difficulty is, again, I think it comes back entirely to, entirely to finance. You mentioned North Carolina 2000 acres big place.

How important is it for, in your opinion, for a zoo director to make rounds?

Very, and I wasn’t terribly good at it, I think, I think partly because I had so many other involvements and so many sort of networks in the local community that I was sort of juggling. But it is really, really critical I think in North Carolina, because we had 2000 acres, mind you, you know, so 600 acres of that is, is the public area, but it’s still a big area. It’s certainly a big area to walk around. London, I did a lot more of that because you, you know, you only had less than 40 acres to get around. But the relationship between the director and staff at all levels, and this is, you know, we’re going back again to what, what are some of the skills of, of any, any, any senior manager is dealing with, dealing with people, staff at a, a whole range of different levels. So folks who are practically, I won’t say uneducated, but have a very level, very low pace of educational write up to your PhDs requires a level of skill which needs certain things that are different for those different groups. So what, moving around, talking to them about what they feel, getting their opinion from all those levels, not just the top management is really quite critical. Or you have to make sure that that top management is getting those opinions for you, but there’s no substitute in the end for, for, for walking.

Your walking, the walking, walking the roots yourselves and then, and then obviously carrying out, dealing with their opinions one way or another, but dealing with their opinions in a, in a sensitive way. So direct person to person contact. Really critical.

Are there countries at least that you’ve observed outside the US that might assist or partner with zoos that would be in the best use of the zoo’s resources regarding conservation?

Do you mean, this sounds a bit like the national park question, but do you mean governments who would, Well or zoos in other countries reaching out?

Do you find that, aside from a national park where the zoo goes to the one place in Africa, let’s say, do people, have you had any experience where countries have approached zoos to, to help get their assistance in conservation?

Yeah, very, very much so. Probably more much, well more so at London certainly, but in North Carolina that’s beginning to happen. Where, where we’ve, we’ve developed particular techniques of, particularly of anti-poaching techniques, which are now being asked for are now being now being asked for by a number of governments. But at London, particularly requests from the Middle East and North Africa. So over the years that I was in London, we actually worked with 20, about 20 different countries, mostly around the Mediterranean and through, through the, the, the Middle East and the far east with governments asking us to either in, in several cases completely design their new zoos, several cases, Saudi Arabia particularly I, I, I remember, oh gosh, this would go back to the late seventies, early eighties where Saudi was very envious of the conservation programs in Oman on, particularly with the introduction, the reintroduction of Arabian Orx. And they, they desperately wanted to join the club, but they had no facility, they had no camp de breeding facilities that were owned by government. There were a few private ones, they’d no designated national parks. And so they asked for assistance, you know, from a team of people which included ZSL side of London to help them firstly sort of build up their captive stocks and then help identify staff and run their national park.

So, and Zeta is still involved in Saudi Arabia with, with some of that, some of it’s obviously been managed by their own folks now. But there were, particularly in that region, there were a number of governments that came to us asking, asking for help to, you know, to set all that up to get it going. And today of course there’s some pretty good zoos in that part of the world, mainly. Mainly ’cause they’ve got the money to do it. Question that came out of that, you had talked about the Arabian Arts project and that in the beginning there were many private individuals that might have had their own stock.

Do you find that private individuals in your experience, seem reticent to give up their private stock to a government or an NGO or some program to make conservation better in not their area, so to speak, or their backyard?

Yeah, there, there’s very much a tendency I think, but you know, the fact where you’ve got private individuals with the money enough to, to have their own private collections tend to be quite possessive. Now that’s not, I think because they are suspicious of government and very often don’t, they don’t want anybody else to have control over their animals. And it, I think it was quite notable with Arabian ORs that when, when the project was set, when the project to catch the last, or a few of the last remaining orx in Oman was set up, gosh, back in the fifties now, there was no recognition that there were actually pri quite a number of private collections in Arabia that, that already had, already had Arabian arts. They knew that Qatar had some, and in fact Qatar did contribute to the, I think 10 or 11 animals that went to Phoenix ultimately. And there was one from Paris, London had one and three, I think three were actually captured in the wild. But nobody understood until relatively re I’m talking about relatively 15, 20 years ago, that there were quite an array of these animals, quite a number of these animals in private collections throughout the Arabian Peninsula, particularly in Saudi where, you know, they kept things pretty, pretty close to their chest in terms of what they had. And, and of course the other problem was a lot of what they had was not Arabian ORs, but a lot of what they had were illegally obtained. And so there was a reticence anyway about partying with any of those animals For, for international programs that has changed.

I mean a lot of those folks now are taking part in, in international programs.

Do Zeus and Aquas need to be more involved with animal welfare?

Probably the most important thing in terms of changes today, I, you know, again, just telling you a story about my background with it, because of all the, all the antagonism that I had at London over London Zoo, they picked on the anti zoo lobby he picked on London particularly. ’cause obviously it was in the national news a lot and, and it did have a lot of, quite a lot of exhibits that were, were very difficult for us to change, but were certainly not up to standard. And so what I felt, what I, you know, on the back of that sort of anti, you know, bad publicity, what I felt was that the zoo world that I’m talking now about the sort of the mainstream zoo community needed to do more about addressing through some of those people the welfare issues that they clearly had. I think the problem in initially, and it’s still the same today to to a small extent, is that there’s been a tendency with the animal rights people and the part of the animal, the, the more noisy part of the animal welfare community put it that way to either simply ignore them, which is a big mistake or you know, always, it’s always trying to push them off, always sort of saying that we don’t want have anything to do with them, we just disagree and so on. But what is happening now, which is good, is that the zoo community is now engaging with the more responsible part of the welfare and to some extent the rights community in, in talking to them about the, the issues that exist. You see, I, what, what happened when I first came to North Carolina was, and, and I had a lot to do with wa Wza, the World Zoo Association, their animal welfare committee. I chaired the, an their animal welfare committee for quite a while and I suggested to Wza bosses at the time, the, the, the offices of Waza, this is going back 20 odd years, that we should have a welfare, a committed welfare officer in Waza that would begin to look at primarily to look at all the complaints that were coming in from the general public about o zoos all over the world and, and try and address some of those complaints. But 20 years ago was just the time when the conservation need or the realization that zoos needed to do much more in field conservation was rising.

And so the, and so the emphasis was so much on field conservation that welfare was rather, I wouldn’t say pushed aside, but it was rather a sort of, you know, it was, it wasn’t as important to them as the conservation side. Now that has begun to change now, but because WASA was not that interested or the, the, the governance of WASA were not that interested in doing more in a positive sense, building relationships with the animal welfare lobby, then that, that was actually the reason that I founded wild welfare. And it was quite interesting that about that time I wanted WASA to invite some of the more broad-minded members of the welfare community to, to each of the WASA conferences year by year to, and play a role both in the, in the animal welfare committee and also in, you know, just in good making presentations to waza that they, they might well feel uncomfortable with, but at least could start talking to these people. And there was a lot of, a lot of, a lot of pushback on that, no, no, we don’t want these people now, to be fair, that has now changed a lot and in indeed some, some of the folks that one or two of the folks anyway that were involved ultimately in those from the, the welfare community that were involved in the WAZA meeting are now working with me in wild welfare. So, but, but what is happening now is, well, welfare has now drawn alongside conservation in terms of the importance that zoos are playing and part, it’s partly driven by public opinion, but it’s also I think largely driven by a new generation of zoo scientists who, with others have developed a lot more knowledge, you know, real, really real good scientific knowledge of the welfare needs of animals and all of that together, I would say over it’s fairly, fairly new within the last 10 years probably has brought welfare much more into the limelight as far as importance than, than it had say 20 years ago. So it’s, it’s really critical that all zoos now have to pay for, you know, really, really major attention to the welfare of the animals that keep him.

Is education doing any good, particularly in boosting the image of zoos among the public in the face of the anti zoo groups?

Yes, but again, I think it comes back to it’s, you know, education in zoos as, as you know, sort of takes so many different forms from the, the, the quality of the interpretives that we talked about earlier to the numbers of staff and volunteers that you’ve got in the grounds who after all are also educating. A lot of people wouldn’t call it that necessarily, but that’s what they’re doing to formal education programs at, at all levels and certainly, certainly education now in terms of the resources put into it by, by the mainstream zoos is, is a much, you know, is being, it’s being treated much more seriously than it would’ve been 30 or 40 years ago. I mean, LA London had an education department, but it was very, I’m, you know, again talking about 30 to 40 years ago, but it was very formal. It was a classroom education in, in almost a sort of school classroom sense. The thing today with education is to get, particularly the kids, young people ha you know, really interested in not just the species that they’re seeing, but also helping them to understand these much broader issues that, that are clearly affecting species, but building an understanding of things like climate change and o ocean issues, energy and so on, you know, the cycles of things like flooding and, and all of those things and how they fit into habitat protection and species protection. So education has gone a long way, I think in the last, again, in the last 10 or 15 years in terms of its terms of, its sort of appropriateness and relevance, direct relevance to these bigger issues that kids and everybody really need to need to, to understand. So it’s not, it’s not education about lions and elephants and, and and individual species, it’s, it’s building education programs that actually give people a much broader understanding of, of really the sort of the jigsaw of, of, of, of the jigsaw of life in a, in a broad sense and how all the bits and pieces fit together and the fact that when you start pulling bits of the jigsaw out, that is why things begin to fall apart. So I think education has taken a, it, it uses all the modern technology, but it’s a much broader scene in terms of what it teaches now than it used to be even 10, 15 years ago.

Do you have any advice for the neophyte zoo director about the importance of marketing zoos?

What are the most important aspects about marketing?

Yeah, critical, and it comes back to knowing your own audience of understanding what your audience really needs. I mean the, the population dynamics, for example, in rural North Carol, we, you know, we’re North Carolina zoos in, in a very rural situation, so it’s addressing a very mixed audience of folks who are coming out of relatively big cities, Raleigh, Charlotte and so on, and of folks who live in a very rural situation. So the audience mix in summer, like North Carolina is gonna be very different to the audience mix of Brookfield Zoo, for example, where there’s probably a much more city or London Zoo. So the first thing in marketing is to understand who you are talking to, what the education levels are of that audience, understanding your own message, what are you trying to get across through the zoo and its various programs and how do you, if you like, interpret those in the right marketing way to that particular audience. So, so in a, in a nutshell, it, the, the young, the, the first time zoo director particularly hasn’t got a marketing officer who can help, is understanding your audience and understanding how you get to that audience.

What is the medium or media you use to get into that audience and, and what tools do you then use?

Is it, is it newspapers, is it radio, is it, is it social media?

You know, what is appropriate? What is an appropriate mix?

And also, you know, marketing can be really expensive and so, and there’s often a lot of resistance I’ve found to other departments in, in your zoo and to your governing body about spending vast sums on marketing. So understanding the ways in which you market to your audience is really, is really, really critical for your particular institution. Okay.

We talked about families coming to the zoo and how can zoos do you think, improve their connection with kids and teenagers to heighten their zeal and awareness about the natural world?

Teenager are, are really tricky and, and and always will be. And I think even more so now with, you know, with, with social media, with every, everything that they tend to be attached to through our, you know, you know, through our devices of one sort or another. I think certainly my, my experience is that it’s not difficult to engage kids from zero more or less to 12, 12 years of age. Once they get beyond 12 through their teenage years. There’s always a small number that are very interested and will be, but there’s a large number that won’t be, it’s not that difficult to get the early age group involved because there’s so many play tools, outside experiences, all sorts of things because they’re curious about the world in general. Engaging that age group is, is not difficult eng and with in, with all sorts of tools. So whether it’s the traditional ones, whether it’s again through social media, whether it’s through outdoor experience, whether it’s taking them for trips, not so difficult. The teenage market is really, really, really difficult.

And certainly what I’ve found is that you are at that age level and before they reach the young adult and young parent age group where again you can engage them more easily because of the youngsters, you are better off with teenagers trying to encourage those that really want to learn, that really are interested, spend your effort on those, sometimes that will have a spinoff into their companions, but spending a lot of resources trying to get that 30 to 18 age group really interested is probably probably gonna fail. And, and so you, what you’re going, what you want to do is make sure that your resources go into those earlier age groups because what will happen is that they, if they’re really interested at age 7, 8, 9, 10, you will increase the number of teenagers who are, who are interested enough to, to pay attention so that you’re better, you’re better pushing your resources into those who are most likely to be interested and then hope you can pick them up again at the next age group. There are two professionals, zoos in the OR associations in the United States, the American Zoo Association and the Zoological Association of America.

Is there room for both?

Absolutely. But I wonder if in the end they might morph into one, again, a bit of background going back a few years at not so much a ZA big comp, but the, you probably know there is a director’s retreat every, usually every January. And I know on several occasions I and one or two others put up the idea that there might be two, maybe three levels of membership in a ZA and that each of those levels, the, the, the the if you like, the starter level would under certain conditions would then grow into the second level and ultimately into the top level. You don’t just have to, as you know, well, you don’t just have to be big to pass a ZA standards, you know, many, many very good small zoos that can come up to a ZA standards. I think when ZAA was founded, I mean I’m not very familiar, familiar with ZAA, but from what I do know, ZAA was founded largely because they, a lot of them did not feel they could come up to a ZA standards or did not want to put the resource, didn’t have the resources. And, and so ZAA formed created a a a A medium by which they could be part of, of the zoo community but not necessarily up to a ZA and, and the sad thing in a way was, and I dunno what the situation is now, the sad thing is of course that then created a them and us situation. But going back to that earlier thought, what I wonder might and maybe should happen is that, and I know ZAA are building their own standards now and they may not be quite the same as zas, but in due course could these standards be added if there’s a will to do so. So that ultimately 10 or 15 years from now, there’s actually one organization now that’s, now there are two, as you know better than I do, there’s someone like 2000 non a ZA members zoo zoo’s, collections of animals in the us I dunno what ZAA membership numbers are, but there’s still going to be an awful lot of private collections that are not in either of those organizations. So I think that, I mean, the big question I think for both organizations is because a lot of these, I think a lot of these folks, and I’ve seen it in in Europe as well, a lot of the folks that are not in the mainstream by mainstream, what I mean is well-funded large institute, mainly large institutions that have been around for a while, a lot of those folks would certainly love to be a part of that discussion.

They’d love to be part of the team, if you like, but, but simply don’t see how they’re gonna get there. But if there’s a will in both those organizations to have it all come together, in my view, many will disagree in my view. That’s the way it should go is those, those two operations. ’cause actually, I mean one big advantage is going to be if you’ve got an organization with larger membership, then they can afford to do more. They can employ more people who, who can actually help those organizations do more. So it makes every sense. The answer to the question is yes, there is a place right now for them But the other question is, should they be working towards coming together ultimately maybe through a series of, you know, associate membership each, each perhaps with a five year, you know, so certain things you do five years, if it’s consistent, you move up a step. So we will see what happens in the next 10 or 15 years, whether that actually will happen.

Now you are retired from directorship, but to what extent do you continue to be active in, in the animal conservation field?

A lot, but not, I mean, I’m, I’m very much in touch with the folks. I’ve senior staff and my, you know, my successor and I are very close and we meet frequently to talk about how things are going. So in terms of my involvement with the, with the North Carolina doing nothing formal, but a lot, a lot of informal connection. But I, my connection with the zoo community now is, is almost entirely through wild welfare that I founded back in 2012. And, and as I said earlier, that the purpose of that was to try to bring, mainly to try to bring the res, what I would call the responsible zoo, the responsible welfare community, more in touch with the responsible zoo community and to try and get them talking more to each other and to try and get them working more on joint projects together. One of the reasons that I, I mean I’ve, me, I’ve mentioned how while welfare got formed, because the was a, in particular was not keen at that time. It’s not keen, I’m not, it just, it wasn’t a high priority for them to have a welfare, you know, a welfare department. And so I, and certainly two other people, one, one actually was working at the time in one of the main welfare organizations in London, and the other was Dave Morgan, who for 10 years at the time had been the director of the Pan-African Zoo Association.

And he, and I’d already done some work in, in Africa on what happened on the back of my involvement with the Kabul Zoo. You know, after the American troops took over Kabul, we raised funds to regenerate that zoo. And then a little bit too, with the Baghdad Zoo, there was money left over with which we, which we used to help the Cairo Zoo that I’d, I’d had long association with through another organization. And this little group of folks felt much as I did, that there needed to be this, this making of a, of a, of a better, a better community where zoo and welfare people were talking to each other on a regular basis. And so informing what Well, well, what then happened, I think I, I may have mentioned to you that I’ve been involved with an organization called The Brook for 54 years now, and the Brook is the largest international equine welfare organization in the world.

Now, the, the amusing story, I’m going off on a tangent a bit here, but the amusing story is that when I’d been one year at Whipsnade as the first full-time veterinary officer there, I got this strange call one morning from a lady saying, would I go to Cairo and cut the giraffes toenails at the zoo?

This is in 1970. And so, yes, I thought this sounds rather interesting. So I did, and it was funded by this organization called The Brook. It was called the Brook Hospital for Animals at the time that had been founded in the 1930s by the wife of the Commanding Cavalry officer, the British Cavalry after the First World War based in Cairo. Anyway, maybe we can go back to that story later. But the, the, the, the, the long of the short, the shorter part of the long is that I’ve been involved with the Brook now for 54 years, chaired chaired it in, in the UK nearly 20 years and then founded Brook USA. Now, what all that did was bring me into close contact with a lot of the senior figures in the animal welfare world, both, both in America and in Europe. And in fact, we used to meet on an annual basis, I’m talking about the CEOs of Humane Society, the us, the R-S-P-C-A in Britain, you know, the big, the big players in the welfare world.

And they all knew that I was, you know, either running London Zoo or, you know, but in later years after, while Welfare was formed here, here in, you know, was in north with, I was a zoo director. But what that did was create a medium in which I could actually talk to these people quite a lot about zoos and zoo animal welfare and created relationships that then were very useful in informing wild welfare and in getting, opening an awful lot of doors that wouldn’t have been possible without that connection to the welfare world at that, at that sort of level. So while what, while welfare has done really sort of on behalf of the zoo community, it’s still only a small organization, but is now fielding a lot of the sort of questions and comments from the anti zoo lobby. It is working with not only individual zoos, but now very much with zoo associations, particularly the Brazilian Zoo Association and the Southeast Asian Zoo Association in developing not only their standards, but national standards and national laws regarding animal welfare and, and Zoo Zoo Man. Well, a bit like the Wild Dangerous Wild Animals Act in Britain or the endangered species, you know, we are now, we are actually writing the welfare legislation for Vietnamese zoos, Japanese zoos with the Japanese Zoo Association. So we are doing things that actually no other organization is doing, and, but we’re doing, doing it in a way on behalf of the zoo world. ’cause I think what’s happened over the last 10 or 15 years is that the level of antagonism, at least publicly visible and you know, published in papers, you know, all of that has actually reduced quite considerably because there is now an organization within the zoo world. It’s f it’s staffed entirely by ex XI say ex zpi, but folks with a lot of zoo experience, which was the problem when the welfare community tried to do something.

I mean, there were, you know, if they tried to go in and sort out problems with as they saw problems zoo, they simply didn’t have the expertise and certainly not the expertise to go beyond the immediate emergency needs. And so what, while welfare is doing is taking a long-term, look at many of these organizations and helping them not only individual zoos, but also these institutions in trying to build their capacity for the long-term future. So that, that’s my, when you ask the question, what’s my involvement with the zoo world, it’s sort of slightly tangential, but in a way it’s actually a fundamental part of what the zoo world, what the established zoo world should be doing anyway, should be doing, should be doing. I would, you know, go, you know, one or two of the, the, the questions we’ve, we’ve been, you know, we’ve raised earlier, you know, should, should established zoos be helping other zoos in developing countries. Yep. And that’s one of the things that while welfare is trying to get ’em to do, both San Francisco Zoo and Miami Zoo right now have, have a strong interest in, particularly in south and and Central America. We have two zoos in the UK also also interested in, in a similar sort of partnership and then the other. And, and so that’s the sort of direct thing relating to an, to an earlier question.

And the other, and the other part of the question, which is, should, should zoos be doing more in terms of improving the welfare in other zoo?

You know, I’m talking about mostly developing country zoos. The answer is yes, but very often the same issues that we talked about in, in other partnerships is not really understanding what that, what that involves. But what we are seeing in, while welfare is growing interest in individuals within some of those zoos, wanting to take part in what, what, while welfare is doing and in wanting to bring some of their staff in to help with some of that. So it, it’s growing that, you know, the trying to encourage other larger well resources to play a, a role in all of this is cer is certainly improving. And, and again, I would think in another five, 10 years we’re gonna see a lot more zoo to zoo or zoo to zoo association. It, it, it’s amazing how many associations there are in the zoo world that even I wasn’t aware of. I recently, the, the, the director of wild welfare and I were talking about this and he’s, he’s just been invited to give a, give a program to the, I think it it’s called the a, the Uation Zoo Association, which apparently is headquartered in Azerbaijan and, and and includes Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Romania are all member. Some of those zoo are all members of this association.

I I’ve never heard of. But what we’re finding is that those sort of association or those, whether individual zoos or associations are, are want, want more help with improving their welfare. And, and while welfare obviously is a very good way to, to channel that, So is wild welfare, trying to get other zoos into wild welfare, to be partners with wild welfare to that kind of association. S several different ways. Some, some of them, particularly some American zoos are supporting while welfare financially. Now there are two bits of wild welfare. They’re actually separate charities. They have to be by law. So the main, while welfare group is based in the UK and, and is a charity under UK law. And the, and two years ago we founded Wild Welfare us, which has its own board. Chris Veers and Mark Penning from Disney are the chairman of vice chair of that.

But the, the staff of both work together on, on a more or less a single program of, of activity. And what’s happening is that particularly the US one is supported by a number of US zoos. WW always has had good support from about 10 or a dozen of the larger zoos in North America. Calgary is one of them. So not just the us. So, so there’s a, there two, these, these two sort of associated brother sister relationship are assisted partly by the other zoo world from a financial point of view. But then there are, there are two other forms of interest. One is the one I just mentioned about individuals within the zoo community hearing about wild welfare and wanting to do something, even, even people wanting to be employed by wild welfare. But we don’t have those sort of resources yet.

But certainly wanting to work with ’em on particular projects. And the other one is the whole question that we’re, you know, we’ve been talking about, which is one zoo giving help as a zoo to another zoo or to a zoo association. So those are the ways in which other zoos can, you know, can really participate in while welfare’s work.

So does wild welfare then one aspect go into a zoo that needs help and rehabilitate exhibits, give them a collection plan, do they do that kind of thing?

Because it can be a daunting task to correct and move forward exhibitry in a smaller, we’ll say third World Zoo. Well, there, there is, that is a role in some instances where we’ve gone in and given them sort of broad, it’s, it, it’s, it’s always been welfare based, the advice that we give. So sometimes it’s, it’s giving them a full, sometimes it’s auditing the entire zoo. So, so, and we may, it may not, not just be our own staff, it’ll always be in country people with them. But doing a full sort of welfare audit on the entire, you know, on the entire institution or advising on particular advising on particular exhibits or mostly now bringing training facilities in. So we’ll spend days sending maybe two of our staff to do a comprehensive welfare training within either one institution or in many cases now to, to groups of institutions or to association members. So for example, with, with Southeast Asian or with, there is actually a Vietnamese one and a Thai Thailand, you know, smaller sort of sub associations. We will go to their gatherings and actually give them, or a two or three day series of seminars on animal animal welfare.

So a lot of it now involves training. A lot of it, when the Brazilian zoo, the Brazilian Zoo Association asks us to go in, they have 70 odd members. I think there’s about 150 zoos in Brazil, but half of them are part of the Brazilian Zoo Association. They had no standards, no, no, no welfare standards at all when we started. We’ve been working with ’em for three years. Half of those members have now been fully audited. In other words, we conduct welfare audits in all those zoos, give them advice on how to come up to a certain standard. We’ve written the standards for them.

And then in, in negotiation, in discussion, have sort of tweaked those standards. So they now have their own set of standards, which are not very different to, you know, other associations. So we’re getting to the, and there is an exit strategy with Brazil that in another two years we will come out, we have trained eight Brazilian auditors who will then continue and probably we’ll have a sort of annual, you know, annual visit. So that’s the pattern largely of what we’re doing, you know, with, with wild welfare right now. So anything from an individual to a full association. And in the case of Japan and Vietnam actually quite close relationships with government entities in trying to get much more than just zoo standards, but actually national welfare standards for those countries, which will probably spin off from the discussions around zoo welfare. So it gets, you know, it gets quite broad, you know, after you’ve been involved in this sort of thing for a while. You mentioned that the Brook for equine welfare contacted you a while ago to trim some hooks.

Is the brook involved with equine welfare within the zoo world?

There’s no, no, there’s no direct connection with the zoo world at all. I mean, it, it, it was just that, what happened then was that the, the brook in running a clinic in, let me go, go back a step. The founder, the founder of the Brook, Dorothy Brook, founded a clinic basically in, in, in the 1930s in the slums of Cairo for working. And the whole thing about Brook is working, equines working so horses, mules, and donkeys in now in 14 countries. But what was happening there was after the first World War, you know, you’ve probably seen, you probably know the warhorse story in Flanders, where many of the horses that were used for sort of towing artillery pieces and landed up being slaughtered, they didn’t make their way back to the UK and other, other countries they came from. And the same thing happened with the, the Lawrence of Arabia campaign in Palestine. There were about 5,000 horses and the remnant originally were promised to go back to mostly Britain, but actually landed up as sort of carriage horses, cart horses in Cairo, most of them in awful condition. Dorothy, over three years bought up the entire, they thought there were 300, there were 5,000.

And she bought the whole lot in the end over three year period. And then with money left over, founded this clinic, the Brook Hospital for Animals. And that, at the time that I was involved with them, was still, you know, it was quite a, quite a, a major hospital by Egyptian standards. And it was then that they, and they were getting complaints from people, mostly foreign visitors about the zoo in Cairo, about how dreadful the zoo was and all the sort of conditions that were, and, and a lot of that was, you know, the usual things, long hooves and no sort of per, you know, individual animal management. So that’s how I got involved with the, with, with the Brook. And the connection between the brook was, was simply a connection with, with the Giza Zoo. And, and I, I’ve maintained that connection. I still, we’re still trying to do work with the Giza Zoo now through wild welfare.

But the Brook, as I said, the Brook, the Brook was extremely valuable in getting into the welfare network. But what happened then was that I was asked after cutting the giraffes, toenails and a few other things, story in its own right. I was asked to join the then board, it was a, called a committee in London, which was largely Dorothy Brooks Children and Friends. And I was the first non friend or child to get involved with the Brook, ultimately chaired it for nearly 20 years. And then when I came over to the US founded Brook USA, which is now a, a thriving individual charity, but again, bit like while welfare is part of the Brook family. So yes, I’ve been, been involved and have actually won major awards for equine welfare, which, which amuse me for the founding of Brook USA, which rather amuse me. ’cause my own experience of riding horses has been pretty disastrous over the, over the years. So, and again, that’s another story.

But, so I haven’t had actually a lot to do, you know, other than, other than being part of the Brook operation and helping to found, I actually was chairman when we founded Brooke Pakistan, Brooke India and Brooke Jordan and Pakistan, India and Egypt and Ethiopia and now the four big ones, about a thousand staff between when, when I was, when I cut the giraffes toenails and was first involved with Brooke, it was a $40,000 a year budget with one and a half staff in London and about 30 staff in the, in Cairo at the, at the hospital. Today it’s a $28 million budget with a thousand staff in 14 countries. So it’s, it’s grown. Nothing much to do with me, but it’s grown a huge amount in that time. Very formidable operation really. And all with the poorest, the very poorest people in the world, in unbelievably bad circumstances, coal mines, donkeys working 8,000 feet under the surface in coal mines in Pakistan. Can you imagine that? A mile and a half deep and going down spiral pathways into these deep minds and had never had any veterinary help, no, no sort of welfare aspect to it at all until Brooke came along.

That’s the sort of work that Brooke’s doing in, you know, almost all in these communities where people are lucky to earn a dollar a day if that While welfare is, is is kind of unique, but does it have any aspects of classes or things that people can look at online?

Absolutely, yes. I mean, what what we’ve found in the, in the p of actually getting into the field and working, you know, face to face with a lot of the folks that we’ve been training in mostly Southeast Asia and Brazil, Japan, one or two, one or two other, middle East to some extent, is that you can’t, you know, there’s only a limited amount we can do. We have five people who regularly go into the field and we have support folks as well. But even with those five and they often work in twos, they, you, you just simply can’t cover the demand that’s out there. And the, the demand is considerable. We’ve got, you know, ever since while Welfare’s been going, we’d be getting more and more requests for either direct help advice on something welfare oriented, but more and more younger staff in sometimes in the, often in the institutions that we’re have been working in, but then colleagues in other zoos. And it isn’t only zoos. We’re working, we’re working in sanctuaries, we were working in both public and private operations as well. They needed, we found that, that the demand is such that they want something they can, they can look at when we are not there.

And so we started what we call the e-learning program. And it has six parts to it. It’s a pretty comprehensive coverage in relatively simple language because we are dealing mostly this is the difference between what we are doing and the more sophisticated up to date science side of, well of the, of the welfare discussion. I can explain more what what I mean about the difference there. But we are dealing with people who often don’t have much education. They certainly have much knowledge of zoos. So we, we, in the e-learning program, what we’ve done is very much pictures, very simple language now translated into I think six languages. And we’re working on two more.

But what it is, I think two and a, over two and a half thousand people have actually now gone through the, ’cause we, we ask them if they do take the course that they let us know and it’s, it’s, it’s well over 2000 people have done it all of, well, not all from the zoo well, but all certainly involved in animal animals and animal welfare in some way. And even, even what’s really interesting is some of the welfare, even some of the bigger ones, I four International Fund for Animal Welfare, I mentioned what’s now WP World Animal Projection. They’ve been asking us now to train their staff, preferably face to face, but where we can’t do that, this e-learning program is, is really proving extremely valuable. So we now have it in Vietnamese, in Japanese, we’re trying to get a sponsor now for Portuguese and Spanish. It’s in French, so you know, it’s available to anybody. It has no cost. It’s available to anybody online. They only have to go to while welfare.org. And, and there’s one, you know, headline there that says, you know, eLearning program, you can go straight to the e-learning program.

So it’s, it’s a really, it’s the, as far as I know, I mean there are, you know, I know individual zoos have actually produced a lot of useful material, but it’s, it’s the only really comprehensive welfare oriented teaching program in the world that’s online to anyone, anyone who has an interest.

Thank you. Are there any stories you can share about your interaction with the royal family?

Well it, it was always interesting, you know, being at London Zoo because there were strong con had been for years strong connections with the royal family. Many of them have a very genuine interest in, in wild thing wildlife. And in the countryside especially, you can imagine with the country of states that they have Prince Philip was president of and and therefore chairman of the board of the Zoological Society of London for some years. And he and Soly Zuckerman, Lord Zuckerman, who was the secretary, this, I’m talking now about the sixties, sort of the late fifties, sixties. They were, they were very much the sort of power mongers in the, the power bees in the, in the society’s activity. So Philip was very much involved at governance level. The queen was patron of the zoo society for many years. And I’m not sure what the situation is now.

I don’t think either Charles or Camilla are, are involved with that. Camilla, we mentioned the Brooke earlier. Camilla is the, is the president of Brooke, the, the, the major, you know, there are three wings. Brooke has a, an organization has, the main organization is based in London. Then we have a brook USA and there’s a Brook Netherlands as well. Camilla is president of Brook uk. And I, because I’ve been so long with it, I’m actually vice president of of of Brook UK as well as being chairman emeritus of Brook us. So Camilla has been in, Camilla has been involved, you know, at least I’ve had quite a lot of contact with her.

Charles, not so much with the zoo world. He’s, as you know, Charles is very, very countryside oriented, very much interested in the sort of broader natural things that we’ve been talking about. And both, both the boys, both Prince William and Prince Harry have been very, very, very interested in things like William particularly has almost taken on the, the role that a young Philip had. And I remember, you know, when as director zoos that Princess Diana’s pa personal assistant would sometimes call our office and say, I’d I’d, I’d like to bring the boys to the zoo today. So I actually had quite a lot of dealings with, you know, with her bringing the young, this is talking about William and Harry when they were, you know, anything from three to 10, that sort of age range. And, and ’cause she was delightful. As, as director of London Zoo, we had invitations to the palace, particularly with state visitors of countries we’d had dealings with. So the state banquet for the King of Saudi Arabia or the Emir of Qatar, we talked about when they came visiting on a state visit, there was always a state banquet for them.

They were, they were really, you know, well there were amazing functions and really quite, you know, you were sort of up close and personal with many members of the royal family at those, they were, they were quite a meal as you can imagine in Buckingham Palace. So many, and I used to get, when I was in the ve running the veterinary department in London used to go from time to time to Buckingham Palace because of, they had quite a collection of wild foul including flamingos. And there were times when, you know, I would get a call to go to the palace and take a look at one bird or another, you know, flamingos with, as they often get sort of bumblefoot, you know, infections of the lower foot and so on. And I, I do remember one day when the queen happened to be in the gar in the Buckingham Palace Gardens and came down and we had this long conversation, must have been, you know, 30, 40 minute conversation about staphylococcal bumblefoot in flamingos if you, if you can imagine that. So, and, and she took a lot of interest in, in what was going on, particularly in, you know, all, all around her. I actually came across the queen first as a choir boy at St. Paul’s Cathedral when I was, you know, in rough and surplus and singing in the choir in the cathedral. Again, she was, you know, for state occasions she and her mother too met her mother, quite her mother actually the queen mother was, was patron of the friends of St.

Paul’s. And, and she was a big fan of the choir, the pickety of the choir, you know, the choir boy group. So we saw quite a lot of both the queen mother and, and the queen on most, mostly on formal occasions when someone was being buried. You know, I was, I was actually at Winston Church, I sang at Winston Churchill’s funeral, the old choir boys I’d, I’d sort of, my voice had broken, but they actually invited a lot of the old choir boys to join the main choir at Winston Churchill’s funeral in support. So certainly on that sort of occasion, one, you know, one came across the royals quite regularly.

So yeah. So Is it true that as the London Zoo you would get calls from celebrities to look at their animals?

Oh yeah, yeah. Well, yes, Elton John, you know, who’s obviously well known to so many people now. He was not very well known at the time when I was running the, the veterinary department in London. The, and we had the, the veterinary hospital used to see, we, I don’t think they do it now. And in fact we stopped doing it after a while. But there was an external patients service, if you like, payings paid service to people who had non, you know, exotic animals. And Elton John had quite a big collection of parrots. He was quite a, quite a sort of parrot fan.

And so we, we fairly sort of regular attendances from Elton John with parrots before, long before he became as famous as, as he is now. And oh, other sort of slightly alarming occasions. I remember one, one of my technicians came and saying, there’s a lion in that taxi and you know, the, the, the black London cabs that are, you know, so beloved of everybody draws up outside the hospital and there’s a lion sitting on the back seat, a nearly full grown lion. And so the pass the human passenger gets out and leads this lion to the front, no warning, nothing at all. And this was a time when actually people were keeping animals like that fairly regularly.

Thank goodness that, you know, there’s a law about it right now, you know, and, and comes up to the front door with a, this perfectly calm big male lion saying, could, could I just have its claws cut trimmed?

Fortunately I had a very, very calm senior technician, head technician at the time who was used to all sorts of animal emergencies. I, you you can, I, you know, and he’d been there 20 years plus didn’t bat an eyelid, but, but obviously said, well, we’re gonna have to put him to sleep, you realize that he’s gonna have to be anize. And the guy said, oh dear, you know, didn’t like the idea of them being anize. But anyway, as you can imagine, before cutting his claw, he was an easternized. So, you know, all sorts of things like that. And Jane Goodall and I, I know Jane quite well from all sorts of sort of assert through the welfare organizations as well as, you know, her interests in conservation. And Jane, when she was working in the field and wasn’t nearly as well known as she is now used to send me, but Gombe Gombe stream and she was working there, used to send me pickled samples of bits of chimpanzee.

’cause what would happen, she’d, you know, in her wandering, she’d come across a dead chimp, usually heavily decomposed and would carve out little bits from it and send them to, to me in the, in the, obviously as part of the path lab under the veterinary department with, with a request to, and can you tell me what it died of?

And I, and I remember having to go back to Jane on several occasions and say, Jane, you are sending me pickled, formalized bits of animal. It’s illegal for one thing and also this animal has probably been dead for a month and I am not gonna be able to tell you what the cause of death is. So, but anyway, yeah, there were all, all sorts of things like that where one was dealing with a wide variety of people.

Were you not involved with an escaped elephant?

Oh, winter, yeah. Well, a lot of, there were, you know, we, we course we had our own escapes. I, we don’t, we did have, I’m trying to think, we did have one at London, I think it, I can’t remember what, I think it may have been a wolf got out into Regents Park and of course it was much more scared of the people than, you know, than the people should have been of the wolf actually cornered quite quickly. But London, we at Whip Snake, we did have quite a number of wolves, cheetah, you know, but ne never, never anything very serious. But we did get calls fairly regularly from other zoos and, and especially in the early days of immobilization when the, you know, the local veterinary practice, there was no way, they didn’t have the equipment, they didn’t know what to do if there were things. So there were quite a lot of times when either I or somebody else had to go out and help them recapture something. But there was one occasion when there was a circus camped in somewhere on the outskirts of Windsor Great Parks, Windsor Castle. This park is, you know, has a huge park about about a thousand acres.

And somebody from this circus called me one day and said, we’ve lost an elephant and we think it’s somewhere in wind in the Great Park, you know, when we find it, can we, will you please help us immobilize it and get it back to where it belongs. Anyway, I I, I think I was at Whips snake at the time and the, so I, I went to Windsor Great Park and they couldn’t find the elephant and they didn’t find the elephant for three days. And the elephant was very happily browsing on the, on the, whatever variety of trees were in Windsor Great Park, still the same variety hopefully. And it, in the end, they, every, you know, everybody was involved. The Air Force did helicopters, the police, you know, I can imagine. And this female elephant fully, you know, been with the circus a long, long time, had been absolutely calm, no problem. You know, just been having a happy, a very happy time in the middle of, of Windsor Great Park. Didn’t, certainly did not need Im, and once found and, and recognizing, you know, the folks that normally handler was, was perfectly happy to be led back to where she had come from.

But yeah, the fact that it was in Windsor Great Park attracted, as you can imagine, what the media made of that one and what the cartoonists made of that one. My last question is if you would relate, you indicated a unique experience at the Cairo Zoo with the trimming Oh, with the trim, yes.

Yeah. Well, my early introduction to the Brook, the way I became associated with, with the brook, do I, do you want me to explain what the brook is?

Is that No, we, we you are okay. You’re okay. But that, yeah. But you indicated that Tyro Zoo Yes. Having Gone there was a unique experience. Yes, that’s, that’s right. Well, yeah, I, I, my connection and the way I joined the Brook was because I got a, a very, I’d only been a year at Waid, but because of Whipsnade being the, the large mammal collection that it is, immobilization darts, the weaponry and so on, was, was a, a pretty new, a pretty new technique. But even in one year, one had become the sort of national expert in darting as, no nobody else in the UK zoos was using it or, or indeed needed to use it very much.

And so I, I dunno how the lady got hold of it, but how got got to know, but called me one, I said sort of cold January morning, would I, would I go to, would I go to Cairo and trim the graf’s toenails?

And while I was there, you know, there were a number of other things that really needed to be done and, and helped because they’d had so many complaints, mostly by tourists, by European tourists going to Cairo, going to the zoo. Simply they were told there’s a zoo in Cairo going to the zoo and being absolutely appalled by the conditions that they were seeing. And so I did land up with my newly married partner to, to deal with all, not, we actually stayed for about two weeks in Cairo. They had 22 vets in Cairo at the time, none of whom had any practical experience with non-domestic animals. And they’d recently been given a dart gun and we act, I took with me darting equipment to, you know, to train them further. And they literally did not know one end of a dart gun or a dart from the other. So it was a slightly risky business training, particularly with some of the drugs that we, we did have available at the time. Anyway, we did, we did do the, the giraffe tone.

It was tricky ’cause we had to certainly didn’t wanna put a giraffe on the ground today, anesthetizing. It’s still risky, but it’s not, you know, the techniques are much better now, we did not want to lay a giraffe flat out under those. So, so, so it was a combination, really a very light sedation and, and just pushing up against, you know, squeezing between two barriers, which we had had to make. They didn’t have the equipment and then picking up roping one foot at a time and, you know, clipping it as best we did. But the funniest story on that episode was that they also wanted some of the la some of the big cats dealt with the claws and a few other sort of minor surgery. And so I arrived and they had l kra zoo. It still is, was, you know, it’s still there now in this form was based very much on the old London Zoo. So it had a cat house. So you can imagine this row of cages.

And so I turn up one afternoon with equipment ready to immobilize the, we were gonna start with the male lines of two or three male lines with claws, you know, like this. And, and in front of the cage was, oh, I’ve got a ro 10 rows of seats. And the me, you know, akram, the, the times if you, the New York Times of Cairo, the of Egypt was there with, and the TV units and everything else. And the Minister of Agriculture had apparently requested various, various sort of high ups within the Egyptian government to appear for this show. So the show was going to be immobilizing the lion and cutting its toenails and doing a few other things to it. Either one lion or more lion, whatev whatever we came. So this, so this sort of arra arra must have been 50 people sitting on this bit of grass in front of this lion’s cage waiting for this demonstration, which we, which we duly gave them. And the, and I think there must have been several sort of cabinet minister level people there.

And in the middle of Chira, in the middle of the Giza Zoo is the most beautiful small botanic garden where all the structures are actually there, there are actually made outta tiny little stones. It, so all the pathways are, are just this gorgeous sort of stonery, it’s quite extraordinary. And in it Farouk, when Farouk was the king of Egypt that predates, you know, when I was there, not, not, not too long, had this little summer palace. So here’s this, this, this demonstration is going on. At the end of it, the Minister for Agriculture gets up in the most perfect English and says, ladies and gentlemen, let’s now go for tea in the palace. So, so the whole company having sort of duly applauded to this lion toenail cutting show, then retired for very English tea in the, in this, in this sort of farouk palace, in this extraordinary little garden. Quite surreal. It’s absolutely, absolutely surreal experience.

Thank you David. Amazing. Alright. All.