At that time, we were so thrilled to be able to handle it physically and get it into this situation, no one bothered checking its sex. And of course, it arrived at the European Zoo, and the next day a cable came back, “Why did you send us X?” Meaning the opposite, we thought we were sending a female and there was a male. And a I’m trying to recall, I think at that time Marlin was still at the zoo. And of course, he was convinced that that couldn’t be, it was impossible, but the reality is we just were so happy to get that animal safely into a shipping container and on its way, that no one took the time to double check on the sex of the animal. Shipping animals, always was stressful, and in the earliest years, when many of them came by boat from Africa or Asia, south America, the time that they were in, whatever type of restraint mechanism they were in for shipping, the stress of that long trip created problems medically for the animals. That’s where air made the big difference, you could put a creature into an airplane in one part of the world, and 12 to 24 hours later potentially have it where it was going, so the stress was minimized. So early on, I became a great believer in stress for wild creatures. Even in my medical care, my feeling was to try to get in and get out early as possible time.
