Well, the use of assistance, if you will, or technical associates, however you wanna call it was non-existent. In the early stages of my career, we essentially worked with the head keeper in every area of the zoo that we were involved with at the time. As we moved along,… Read More
And I envied that, but we just did what we had to do. I had a technician from the university that worked with me in the program there, and he would sometimes come with me to the zoo. And that was an extremely important thing, certainly when we had to… Read More
What was your relationship with the curators?… Read More
What is the difference?… Read More
Because vets that are on-call are limited in many ways, but what would you say is the difference in what did it difference did it make when full-time vets were starting to be hired or added to zoo staff, other than the obvious that someone’s there?… Read More
Well, I think the level of practice of preventive medicine was elevated materially when there was somebody there constantly in staff meetings and knowing more about the functioning of the zoo in Toto. And I think that it’s just necessary to be part and parcel of the whole program and… Read More
When you were at the zoo, did the zoo provide veterinary technicians that were on staff and state, and then you’d come in and go out?… Read More
I mean, you’d go there, what was your routine?… Read More
You’d go there once a week, twice a week with your student?… Read More
Usually as we develop the program, we would go to the zoo at least two days a week with students. And then we had clinics where we accepted animals at the university at the same time. But in addition to the Sacramento Zoo, we had the Mickey Grove Zoo, which… Read More
Now during that time, how were veterinarians communicating with one another and sharing information?… Read More
How was that done over that initial thing when you started at the Sacramento Zoo and you were doing this tour and you were meeting people, how did you communicate?… Read More
Well, that’s an interesting challenge because communication is the key to success in any operation, whether it’s a zoo or a business or anything like that. And the challenge was that they weren’t communicating. A few veterinarians had met in the early 1940s at the AVMA meeting, and they shared… Read More
And I find that’s a very challenging situation. Always. You were an on-call veterinarian at the Sacramento Zoo. Read More
Well, it certainly was self-teaching in the sense that I had a lot to learn, but in terms of going to other zoos, yes, I did a good deal of that. In fact, early on probably the year after I became involved, I took a six-week tour of the United… Read More
And I guess that has been a… A characteristic of my career is I’m not ashamed of learning from other people, in fact, I may be even accused of plagiarizing other people, particularly when I write about it, I try to give credit for where I’ve learned these things, ’cause… Read More
Well, I guess, and today’s standards, it wasn’t a zoo, it was simply a collection of animals, menagerie. And the animals who are being fed, they were in very small enclosures and there were limited numbers of animals, although we had lions, we had black buck antelope. Eventually we even… Read More
And again, working with townspeople and keepers, we didn’t even have curators at that point in time. And over a period of time, several different directors. And again, I like zoo people. And so that was a very enjoyable thing. Now you started to… You were starting as this veterinarian… Read More
Did you start to give yourself exposure to other zoos by visiting them to see what was going on?… Read More
And if you did, was it again, this self-teaching?… Read More