I think probably the most important aspect is having started from the shop floor as a baby zookeeper and working my way up. So I had a good understanding of, of what to expect from people, what they should expect from me. So having worked for a, a wide range of good, bad and indifferent bosses, then I, I, I would like to think I had a, a good idea on how to approach dealing with people and be a, a good manager from the animal side of things. Having worked with a wide range of species, primarily mammalian, I was able to get a very broad and deep understanding of how to manage primates or carnivores or elephants or ungulates and relate that to, to how I dealt with the staff and manage the animal collection. I mean, I remember being told one story, it was a curator who had never worked in the zoo before and immediately came in as a, a curator of mammals and asking the keepers and the story just went around the zoo and it was from some years back, so how many oranges do you feed the sea lions, you know, and it was that, and so what the keepers also knew about me was they couldn’t pull a snow job on me either because I’d done their job, I’d worked with their animals or at least, you know, similar species. So I suppose having, being able to generate that level of respect as well as respecting them for what they had to do, I think that’s what I, I would think, I think that’s what made me a good zoo manager, zoological manager. Now you’ve done many jobs in, in the zoo profession.
