Well, I think the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians has been key to the development of the profession, as I mentioned, I first started associating with it and saw its developments when it started back when I was at Angel Memorial, but it had been going on many years before that, I think Pat O’Callaghhan or something was one of the first presidents, and it predates me by about 10 or 15 years, where the association’s been going on. And it’s grown into a real mainstay both in the US and abroad, because we’re getting more foreign papers into it, and it led to the development of the College of Zoological Medicine, which is the recognized specialty group for veterinarians at practice in zoo and wildlife. And that was the way that we got started. We first went through a specialty group called an academy where we set, tried to set up an academy not as an elitist group, and we didn’t want the college to be an elitist group, but we wanted it to have people have a goal to shoot for in zoo medicine to show directors and stuff, “I have specialized in this, I have met certain requirements, I’ve geared my career toward working in a zoo.” And we started out by saying “To be in the academy”, which was a precursor to the college, “you had to publish at least two papers a year.” Which, and that was very difficult to get across, because there’s a lot of people saying, “Well, you’re trying to be elitist, you’re trying to set yourself up as …” We’re saying “No, the profession needs for us to publish more and doing publish more we’re, you know, we’re trying to enhance the profession, push back the frontiers of ignorance, which I like to use as a term, as we advance”, and so that became, and then that became the precursor of the college, which, again, met with a lot of problems, because we set up certain publication requirements, length of training, training under a person that was already a college member, so that they knew what we’d gain, but we also set up other ways of getting into the college, where you could by self-training, and, you know, self-education over a period of time, and have enough exposure to zoo and wildlife that you could sit for the exam.
