Well, two ways, we set up a program, a clinic, if you will, in the veterinary school hospital for wild animals, and we took in all kinds of animals, both birds, reptiles, and mammals. And secondly, we had courses that we taught, these were outside the regular classroom hours, so… Read More
You approached them, the students?… Read More
Yeah, but all these things kind of build because over the years, as a horse person, because people found out that I was willing to deal with any kind of an animal that people from the zoo would bring animals to the hospital, or occasionally they would ask us to… Read More
Were there students who took this pioneering class that then went on to work in zoos?… Read More
Well, I can tell it this way, at one early annual meeting of the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians, we asked everybody that has been influenced by the program at Davis to come for a picture. One third of the people that were there had experienced either as a student… Read More
How did you expose your students to the exotic for the zoo medicine?… Read More
And that’s one of the things that I think may be lacking as far as modern zoo veterinarians is they have just focused right down the line on medicine and neglected the biology. And I think that was important. But the way I really ended up is that the dean… Read More
So that’s how we got into that serendipitously. Be careful what you ask for you might just get it. (laughs) Yeah. Read More
But how important would you say this program was to the development of animal medicine?… Read More
Well, it was the first, anywhere in the world, it was needed, and it was the only one for about 10 years. And then it started to be copied, if you will, in other places and other times, and eventually now almost every veterinary school has a person who is… Read More
And how did that come about that they would ask you to do that?… Read More
Or why did you decide it needed to be done?… Read More
(chuckles) Well, that’s an interesting situation because everybody that looks out of a veterinarian that ultimately works in a zoo said, “How did you get there?” And I can say really serendipitously. But I also would point out that I was prepared. When I went to the university to be… Read More
Well, throughout the rest of my career, I was associated with the University of California, which was what, 40 years, something like that. Read More
But you were doing more things on than just teaching horse medicine?… Read More
Initially no, I taught a lot of different courses. For instance, I taught the introduction to large animals surgery course, the laboratory phase of it. I taught what we call a therapeutics or pharmacology course for clinical teaching, or clinical use of various drugs. I taught poisons plants, and I… Read More
When then in your university teaching, did you start to develop this program and zoological medicine at the university?… Read More
So you’re primarily there for horse medicine?… Read More
Horse medicine, essentially large animal medicine, because we also did cattle and sheep. Read More
And how long did you stay at the university doing this teaching?… Read More