But now we have a situation where we are looking seriously at, okay, now, you know, the, I bought a book recently about dealing with geriatric zoo animals and it’s like we’re going backwards. Making every effort to keep old animals alive is actually contradictory to managing healthy populations of threatened species. They’re taken up space, they’re no longer breeding animals. And I think from a welfare point of view, I think it is entirely questionable to keep an animal alive way past its sell by date. And I think the geriatric animal issue, I think that’s, that’s one that hasn’t really been addressed even within the zoo community. So this idea of, of celebrating a, you know, the, you know, our, you know, our hippo is now, you know, 52 years old. I’m not sure that’s a cause for celebration because if that animal was to die tomorrow, I guarantee you’ll find all kinds of problems at the postmortem that we weren’t aware of. And so I think it’s, that’s, I think that’s a, that’s a major issue that has changed and, and how we perceive it.
