So I talked with him and we agreed that he would take whatever the zoos who wanted to get participate in the program. He would take the oryx, put them on the land, propagate them. And that would be forever. I mean, not just for a few years, but forever. Read More
I think it boils down to this business of hunting on ranches. The zoo people who don’t know better seem to think that what they’re being told by the activists is more true than what they can see if they came down here to Texas and took a look. For… Read More
And on that ranch, he came in one day and he talked to me about what can he do for conservation on the ranch?… Read More
And at the time I had surplus scimitar-horned oryx, and I needed to think in terms of what am I gonna do with them?… Read More
Elephants are going down the tube. We can name a number. Rhinos, they can’t seem to stop the poaching of either elephants or rhinos no matter what, when you have poachers using automatic weapons and the rangers in the national parks using World War I rifles, you know, it just… Read More
You can’t turn snow leopards out on ranches, but you certainly can with antelope species, but we have to be willing to share and share alike with the ranchers and they have to be willing to support the program that the zoo put together. Well, it would seem that ranchers… Read More
And it seems like a really interesting idea that you obviously and San Antonio have done, why hasn’t AAZA embraced that theory of using the ranchers more for a variety of hoofstock, which is declining in zoos today?… Read More
Why hasn’t it been and what’s your opinion about why it hasn’t been as embraced as the San Antonio Zoos has done?… Read More
How did their involvement help manage larger populations of hoofstock that might not have been able to do well in this traditional zoo setting?… Read More
If a rancher has the wherewithal and the space, and they’re willing to commit at least a section of land to one species or more, I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities for zoos today to get involved with that rancher, with agreement that the rancher will get something… Read More
Isn’t it true with a lot of other animals that we don’t have enough?… Read More
Was this the type of program that you initiated in 1970 with the blackbuck antelope?… Read More
Blackbuck antelope we did, blackbuck antelope in Texas are called Texotics. There’s so many of them all over Texas that people don’t even look at them like they’re exotic anymore. The same with axis deer and nilgai. I remember one time someone telling me that the King Ranch had 1500… Read More
If they had a national park where they could be put safely, we could do that. And so we gathered the zoo, the staff gathered whatever the ranchers wanna donate in blackbuck specimens. And we brought them to the zoo and we held them at the zoo, built crates for… Read More
And the last time I got any word from that reserve, they had done quite nicely there. Since we’ve kind of started talking about this, how ranchers got involved in this exotic, let’s talk a little about the role of ranch. Read More
And that’s how it all got started. Fred convinced them that he could bring them into the zoo from the wild, but they couldn’t by law. So he would do that, provided that they would pay for all the costs involved, and then he would share, to replace those animals,… Read More
And I continued that as I saw that I could, I bought more species and increased the numbers considerably. And I looked at it in terms of minimum for any new species of antelopes, two males, three females minimum. And if I could handle that in costs, then I could… Read More
And I ensured that they wouldn’t be injured so much by not having too much space. Its like, we all know that if you ship an antelope in a crate, you don’t give them a lot of space because they’ll only batter themselves up. So, you restrict their movement comfort,… Read More
Was it successful when you first got there because it had started, but what was your vision to keep it kind of continuing?… Read More
When I arrived in San Antonio in 1968, it was just about a year after Fred Stark had made some agreements with some ranchers to pay for his collecting some antelopes through dealers from Africa, especially. Read More