Well now this is a story that I’m not sure that I can verify, but this is kind of the story that as I remember it, ’cause when I got to National Zoo, Clint Gray and I sat around one morning drinking coffee and just talking, trying to figure out how many zoo veterinarians there were full-time in the US working at zoos, and we counted, you know, listing off the, you know, Les Fisher, and Chuck Sedgwick, and you know, some of them, the classic ones that were, I think Amal was, Dowland Seck was there, but I think we came up with less than 10 in the United States. Now there may have been more, but it was hard to find that many full-time. There was, of course the majority of the veterinary work was being done by part-time or contract at that time, but that gives you the idea, of kind of the scope of the … Especially when I was at Angel, they had the AVMA convention, the American Veterinary Medical Association, and since we were lowly interns, the AVMA gave us free admission there, ’cause it was just down the block from the hospital. And I was looking around and that was after I did the impala at the Franklin Park Zoo, and they way down there at the bottom they said, “American Association of Zoo Veterinarians meeting in this certain room.” I said, “I didn’t know we had …” You know, so I said, so I went down there, and there they were sitting there, about six of us, Marty Dennis, and I think Les Fisher, and I, somewhere I’ve got who was there, but that was about it, and then we started meeting at Michigan State with a few, and now recently, our most recent meeting in Oakland, four or 500 in attendance. So the profession’s grown. You had mentioned in the beginning, medical committees or other leaning on physicians and … Not leaning on them.
