I think our Traveling Zoo unit may have been the first in the U.S. to do that. I think that there were a lot of fun experiences with it, and my outreach took a different direction. I felt frustrated by the fact that we had this wonderful collection of animals, we had an incredible medical facilities in Chicago and seemingly we weren’t bringing animals to the hospitals. And I thought there’s something wrong there, and I realized that my medical colleagues and the human medicine profession had a phobia about animals. They thought that if you bring a animal into a hospital that you’re gonna spread bugs that don’t belong there, the patients are gonna be bitten or scratched, and the lawyers would be upset, and so there weren’t any animals going out. And somehow I took that on as a challenge and I prevailed, then we have a place in the south side of Chicago called La Rabida Hospital, and it was for chronic children in Jackson Park. And I prevailed on the doctors there to let me bring some animals there, and they had downstairs on the main floor a big kind of public room space. And so I arranged to bring some animals down there, can’t even remember if at that time I used the Traveling Zoo vehicle we had, or if I just put stuff in carrying cases and proceeded to have the kids sitting around the outside of the periphery and brought some animals in.
