And I learned to be a cynic in that room, (laughs) and I’ve been a cynic all my life. And that trip sort of cemented the fact that, you know, this man who had held himself out, John Mehrtens, as a world’s expert and authority on everything having to do with animals and zoos didn’t know what he was doing and that there were some pretty unscrupulous people at that time who were animal dealers, and they were in it for a buck. They weren’t in it for the animals. So it was a learning experience. So that experience, probably that whole thing from flying over, coming back on the ship, driving with all the animals up from Columbia probably took two weeks. But I thought about that trip every day for months later and dissected every little bit of it. And first of all, Mehrtens refused to talk about it after I showed him some pretty, you know, overwhelming evidence that he had been taken. The other thing that was interesting that I learned later, there was absolutely no need to bring those tigers back on a ship.
