And for whatever reason beyond belief, the animals invariably went behind the scratching post, which was us in the middle of a cage, and so that became a game. And the other issue was you couldn’t just get a lariat around the head of the animal. You had to get it around the head and under one of the other front feet, because if you got it down to the head, and start pulling the lariat and dragging the animal to the front, you were choking it. And there wasn’t any way to unchoke until get. So sometimes that took five minutes and sometimes you’d spend an hour maneuvering with this long pole, trying to get the animal where you could then safely pull it to the front where the bars are, and then we would try to reach through and grab each foot and put a little leg rope on, and restrain it, and then do what we had to do. There are many, many cases where I felt that one became a believer in stress, I remember way, way back a researcher in Canada called Dr. Hans Selye came up with the stress theory about humans, and the action and reaction of stress. Well, over the years, we would, for example, net a monkey and not often, but occasionally, one would just die in the net from stress. It was not unusual to reach into a cage to catch a small bird with your hand, a canary budgie size type bird.
