And you just go in, shut the door behind you, it’s pitch black, and just stand here for a few minutes until they kinda calm down. And then you started grabbing and you grab whatever you could, and you made sure you grabbed an antler and then you grab them and you kicked the door and the vet would open the door and you’d bring them out, treat them, take them down to another shed, put them in, well, put them back in the yard until all the animals and I’d come out of there, sometimes in my uniform would be just done in shreds, but nobody really ever got seriously injured doing that. ‘Cause we just naturally knew what to do. The National Zoo was the training ground for the capture gun. And I don’t know whether Redd Palmer was the one that actually invented the early CO2 charged capture gun. And I think I talked about this when I did my Memorial to Ted Reed, but they had no idea when they were developing this gun, the velocity, the distance that these darts would travel. They didn’t have an idea of what the dosages were because there was no way to actually gauge the weight of the animals. And so I remember Reed calling and Jim Wright was the vet at that time in and said, “We’re looking for some volunteers, and he didn’t actually talk to me, but he talked to one of the head keeper and said, “Get some volunteers, see if they want to come up, and look at this thing we’re try to do with the capture gun.” So I think there were about five of us who went up there and Palmer says, “This is gonna be pretty simple.” He says, “We’ve got the yard marked out in 10 yard increments.
