That’s a, that’s a challenging one because I think, you know, I heard presentations at the recent a ZA meeting talking about one of the, one of the big ways that we dealt with surplus animals over the last half of my career was not creating surplus animals. We, we had, there was lots of work done on contraceptives and, you know, we had animals reproduce only under certain circumstances and only particular animals. And the problem was animal reproductive systems are, aren’t generally designed that way, you know, and, and particularly some of the big mega vertebrates, if if they go their first, you know, if they go for half of their lifespan, if a female goes for half her lifespan without having any offspring, they can develop pathologies of the reproductive tract and other things that make it impossible, make them infertile. And so, you know, there’s, there’s a push for having animals breed as early as they can and, you know, maintaining your, an animal’s ability to reproduce and then, and so, and so that’s the direction coming from population managers looking for sustainability. And then on the other hand, there are folks that are, that are saying what we really need to do is kind of go back to where I started in the business, working at a children’s zoo in the 1970s and trying to develop attachments like personal attachments and connecting people with individual animals. And those two things very much are at cross purposes. And I don’t, I I think that’s one of our bigger challenges going forward. And I don’t know the solution to it other than, other than, you know, perhaps spreading that wealth around among zoos if they’re, you know, an animal that may be surplus to our needs may not be the same for a smaller institution that doesn’t have the ability to be breed, that particular animal.
