I smile because I loved them and hated them. I used to complain bitterly to anybody that would listen to frankly, very little avail that we would spend, in some cases now millions of dollars creating naturalistic exhibits into which we would throw bowling balls and other things. And I said, “If you have enough brains to create a naturalistic exhibit, why cannot you create naturalistic enrichment?” Why do I have to walk by my enclosures filled with ripped up cardboard boxes by mountain lions and other rather ridiculous enrichment things?” I never won that argument particularly well to this day, but on the other hand, it is critical to the welfare of the animals that we provide as much stimulation as we can and I just never felt that my staff took my challenge and I’d even told em, I said, “If you can show me enrichment, even it costs three times what you wanna do, I’ll pay for it so that I don’t have to walk through exhibits that I’ve spent a bazillion dollars on sight lines and everything else to convince the public that this is nature to then find a bunch of ripped up cardboard boxes or milk cartons or whatever the hell is hanging in the middle of it. So, but yeah, we embraced it because it was necessary for the animals. So, I wasn’t gonna stop it just because I didn’t like the look of it. You had a Grevy zebra born.
