Safe place to bring the grandkids, a place to bring the grandkids. ‘Cause again, in my community they were all old and retired for the most part. So, they weren’t as worried about bringin’ their kids initially. Now, of course it’s kids, but at that time it was, “I’ll give… Read More
Where do you see zoos going these days?… Read More
I think again, the first thing would be to market your institution any way you can to your local people to get them in the door. Because until they’ve been in the door, you’re still this abstract thing. And so, and it’s critical for support. It’s gonna be critical for… Read More
One of the things that I never did because I didn’t have a local community until it was too late to do it was literally asked my community, what do you want from us?… Read More
We started kind of asking that later on once we already had things, but initially I just said, well, I’m gonna put this out here ’cause I was, again, I was young. I figured if I built something wonderful, they’d come anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to ask your community… Read More
When you finally got around to asking your community what’d they tell you?… Read More
I’m a new zoo director, a neophyte. Read More
What can you tell me about the importance of marketing zoos?… Read More
Some of the most important aspects of marketing would you like to impart to me?… Read More
Zoo education for the zoo professionals or for public?… Read More
Public. Okay. I guess all of the above. And I think there’s ways to do that in a variety of offerings so that because any one thing isn’t going to accomplish all those things and isn’t gonna interest one individual. I think you have to connect to people wherever their… Read More
So, you connect, as broad as you can develop programming for, you should probably develop it because that just gives you more ways to connect to individuals ’cause each individual that comes into the park or you’re trying to get into the park, might come in for a slightly, obviously… Read More
And so, I think it behooves us to look at our visitor as not just a visitor but they’re just as diverse as all of us and how many ways can we reach ’em?… Read More
Yeah, so you gotta give the new kids a chance and maybe there’s some really good ones out there. I think there’s maybe a tendency to think that curating a collection is somehow harder now than it was before and it might be because you’re expected to know more about… Read More
What direction should the zoo education be going for, conservation education, research?… Read More
Zoo education. Read More
I’m trying to get CNN to focus on that. That would help us all zoos and dog and cat owners, because I think it we’ve never been successful in confronting it. I think we all take it serious, but then we get on with our lives and go, “Well, maybe… Read More
Do you think there is a problem and how do you feel curator should be trained today or what do you feel is expected of that part of the profession?… Read More
Well, I’m probably not good enough to judge that because I’ve been out of the business for a few years, but even in the last years that I was running Living Desert, we had the curatorial staff we wanted pretty much in place. And so, I wasn’t out searching for… Read More
We had to deal with them a little bit. Not as much as, because we’re so much more low profile. We weren’t a big target and we didn’t have the big charismatic, mega vertebrates that the animal rights groups tend to focus on. we didn’t have elephants and we didn’t… Read More