Bringing animals in from Africa was, again, a bureaucratic issue. You were involved with Department of Agriculture, there were certain permits required, both for export from country of origin, and import for country of destination. Paperwork seemingly took time, there was no simple way to get around the bureaucracy. And bringing animals in from Africa, the baby gorillas, the few that we got from Cameroon, which is a west African country where a lot of the lowland gorillas that are in the zoos of our country and the world came from. So that, again, it was a sheer happy coincidence that we had a Chicago Park District Commissioner, a guy named Franklin Schmick, who for whatever reason, thought that gorillas were the greatest thing ever. And he, of course, included chimps, and orangs, so the great apes in total, and he’s the one that underwrote our first trip to Cameroon to go and look at and see if we could bring back some baby animals. In those early years in reflecting back, it wasn’t necessarily the best thing to do, but orphan babies were brought in to various holding areas, various dealers in Africa, and these babies were there. And it’s a matter of either giving them an opportunity to get proper care and come to a zoo, or they potentially would die.
