It’s kind of a sore topic with me. (laughs) If I can bare my soul, I left the profession a little concerned, and I still am. I don’t think… I don’t think we, and in this regard, I’m speaking of the AZA, did all that we could and should have done to preserve the diversity of our collections. Some of that was beyond our control, some of it, I think, was self-inflicted, and I think some of it was a little shortsighted. I saw something happen, and it was a slow, and I’ll use that old term. It was a very slow train wreck. Over my career, I saw zoo directors go from being intimately involved in the management of their collections to, in a lot of cases, zero involvement in the management of their collections. And that had to do with the fact that as we became more and more aware of the importance of science, we began to transition our curators away from the traditional curator, what I call brown thumb curators, men and women who grew up in the profession, started as keepers, head keeper, assistant curators, curators, and we started hiring PhDs with no experience and said, “Manage our collections.” Now a lot of my colleagues do not agree with me. (laughs) Some do, but a lot don’t.
