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.
