The world zoo conservation strategy back in 1993 was a long awaited and difficult first step. It was put together primarily by the distinguished Dutch biologists, Leobert De Boer and Bert was trying to push forward the idea of zoo people acting globally in every aspect of their work. He wasn’t the only one on the team that wrote it, but he was the primary author and they did, I think, an admirable job. All of, such efforts and there have been, many, the accreditation thing I did, the SSP, I did the acquisition and disposition policy that I did. Those were all efforts to professionalize the zoo field, to accord the wild animals for which we are responsible, more attention and impose upon those providing that attention, the requirement of knowing what they are doing and establishing a eventually standards in the field that will be essential to working in the field. Accreditation is the foundation of virtually everything the zoo field is doing. Without it, we were in a morass of individual ideas and, failures. And in some cases, dreams that did not enable zoos to be responsible caretakers of wildlife, much less educators and conservationists.
