Well, we put it together pretty early, actually. Once they, I would say we wound up with a long range planning committee in the early ’80s. And I hand selected the best I could, board members that I thought would be most open. And I had at that point, I… Read More
What did you learn about returning animals to the natural habitat?… Read More
How did that start to influence things at your zoo in Living Desert?… Read More
Well, I mean, we came into the Arabian Oryx re-introduction program, I knew it was going on because I was, at that point had already computerized the studbook. And so, we were looking at animals from reproductively as to who could go back, what animals were overrepresented in our populations… Read More
What hand did Living Desert have in returning Arabian Oryx to Oman?… Read More
How did the project begin?… Read More
What were the results?… Read More
How did you start to develop the conservation and preservation projects you were involved with with your view of wanting to breed endangered species?… Read More
Well, again, for the most part that was, the ability to the luck, if you will, that there I was sitting two hours away from San Diego and had all the money and had an interest in desert species, not everything they had was desert, but they had enough of… Read More
And so, we computerized very early on compared to all of our colleagues because I understood them and I put my way through graduate school programming ’em for professors and as soon as there was such a thing that I thought we could buy, we bought some of the original… Read More
What was the idea behind that project and how did you get the community to be involved in that?… Read More
Well, our education courier, Sue, thought it was hard at that point. There wasn’t recycling drop-off places back then, but we thought if we’ve put this out by our parking lot and people even could, ’cause we had our own parking lot encompassed to us, so we could do what… Read More
Again, everything had to make money?… Read More
It had to make money. That was, yep. Read More
Is that part of- Yeah, they helped with the original view although, I mean, I was enough of a desert biologist myself, I could pretty much know what was out there, but sometimes the university, because they had their research center just up in the same alluvial plain, but it… Read More
What was the status as you were moving ahead at that time?… Read More
we had most of the North American gardens, not all of them, but most of them, and we had a small animal building built, specifically to house, as opposed to just a few, what was in the main exhibition hall, we had a specific small animal building. Again, it was… Read More
Yeah, yeah. Read More
And we finally wound up putting some call boxes in, electronic call boxes, and one of the jobs at night to this day is that we can’t, the last guy, the security cannot, if there’s a car in the parking lot that doesn’t belong to one of us, they have… Read More
I’ve had ’em get lost. We had one lady die of a heart attack out there and at the very end of the highest part of the trail, and had a, I mean, by the time we got the helicopter rescue in she passed away. I had the joy of… Read More