(William coughs) I am concerned that zoos have been very slow to recognize their responsibility, to make conservation their core public service. It’s taken them a long, long time. Zoos had no accreditation program until 1972 when I wrote it. There was no species survival plan until some years later, and I wrote that one too. I shouldn’t suggest that I wrote them by myself, in every case, I had a team of colleagues who collaborated with me and helped. But even with things like accreditation and the species survival plan, we have very, very few viable populations of wild animals in zoos. This is scary.
