And of course I was very well qualified to do so, I could catch a cotton mouth or a rattlesnake bare handed and teach a hummingbird to feed a substitute diet and put a harness on a splay leg of giraffe. But, he had made his choice and I was extremely fortunate in that a very distinguished labor lawyer who had been a friend of John Tee-Van’s and a long-term member of the New York Zoological Society came out of retirement to help me. And I chose one of the employees who ran the maintenance department, which was the center of apparently many of the problems. And I met with the keepers. The society demanded, I demanded, that so long as the AFSCME represented or sought to represent any of its employees, jobs necessary to the wellbeing of the animals would have to be considered non-strikable. If they were not willing to accept that level of responsibility, there was no way the society could agree to there representing our employees. There would be no way we could guarantee the wellbeing of the animals. That is what caused the seven week strike because the union would not agree.
