And they all knew that I was, you know, either running London Zoo or, you know, but in later years after, while Welfare was formed here, here in, you know, was in north with, I was a zoo director. But what that did was create a medium in which I could actually talk to these people quite a lot about zoos and zoo animal welfare and created relationships that then were very useful in informing wild welfare and in getting, opening an awful lot of doors that wouldn’t have been possible without that connection to the welfare world at that, at that sort of level. So while what, while welfare has done really sort of on behalf of the zoo community, it’s still only a small organization, but is now fielding a lot of the sort of questions and comments from the anti zoo lobby. It is working with not only individual zoos, but now very much with zoo associations, particularly the Brazilian Zoo Association and the Southeast Asian Zoo Association in developing not only their standards, but national standards and national laws regarding animal welfare and, and Zoo Zoo Man. Well, a bit like the Wild Dangerous Wild Animals Act in Britain or the endangered species, you know, we are now, we are actually writing the welfare legislation for Vietnamese zoos, Japanese zoos with the Japanese Zoo Association. So we are doing things that actually no other organization is doing, and, but we’re doing, doing it in a way on behalf of the zoo world. ’cause I think what’s happened over the last 10 or 15 years is that the level of antagonism, at least publicly visible and you know, published in papers, you know, all of that has actually reduced quite considerably because there is now an organization within the zoo world. It’s f it’s staffed entirely by ex XI say ex zpi, but folks with a lot of zoo experience, which was the problem when the welfare community tried to do something.
