Okay, I guess I’m gonna have to start a monologue on that one. Well, I was there about four or five months, and it was announced that Nixon was bringing over the giant pandas, and I went to a meeting in Las Vegas, and Chuck Sedgwick was giving something and as in passing, we had a bunch of band names, and there he said, you know, and I just knew him by passing, and we had introduced ourselves and he said, “Mitch”, he said, “I was so glad when you got the giant pandas and we didn’t get ’em at San Diego.” He said, “I lit a bunch of candles for thankful.” And I said, “Chuck, I hope you burned the hell outta your fingers.” But no, they came there, and there’s a big hooped law and at that time, the relationships with China were really touchy, so there was bulletproof glass all around the exhibit, and they had to have police outside when the pandas were outside, and the classic thing on the glass was, it was cold inside, and the photographers put the big light up on it and it shattered the whole thing. It didn’t break, but, you know, did the honeycomb thing on a I don’t know how many $1000 piece of glass, but it was fairly easy, we got there, and then all of a sudden, I guess about a week later, they passed a load of ascarids that would’ve filled a quart bottle, but that’s fairly normal in pandas, which I’ve found out over the years of the aascarids and controlling them, and so we first thought that was gonna be a problem, but we just had routine worming, and that was not a problem, and then we had basically feeding them, we had to find a good source of bamboo, and we had to check it for lead poisoning, or because it was too close to the a highway, at that time leaded gas would’ve accumulated on some of the plants, so we had to do some of that type of things, and generally, pandas were extremely healthy. I’ve had two major problems with the pandas at National Zoo. One I gave had a wound, and I gave it an antibiotic, that the animal was very sensitive to, and it had a hemolytic anemia to it, and his kidney shut down, that was a female. And so I was, we anesthetized her to, you know, get some diagnostic, get some blood samples and stuff, and so I anesthetized the female giant panda, and talking about anesthetizing a giant panda, when you have the only one out of, maybe there was two or three others outta China with kind of a gut wrenching situation, people would compare it to, “Well, that’s like anesthetizing the President.” And I’d say, “No, no. Best President is ever liked by 70% of the people, 30% of the people are gonna be congratulating you if you lose the President. But about 100% of the people love the panda.
