Well, yeah, basically, but what happened was he had sent the then general curator over and one of the educators and he went over and I think he got as far as Barcelona and he turned around and came back and I never really understood what happened, but he just… Read More
Well, I think I’d mentioned earlier that Ted, I think he was really influenced by what went on at the San Diego Wild Animal Park with Schroeder and he wanted this. I mean, it was something that he had thought about and talked about. And when John Perry came on… Read More
The one guy that was assistant head keeper was one of the first people from the zoo to go up there to work on the fence, which was a huge undertaking. I mean, this area that he had to have fenced in was like 1000 acres, I mean, it was… Read More
And we hired a lot of good people to work up there. And it’s still, I mean, Steve Monfort’s taking that, we’ve got, what’s the university, I just lost it. Anyway, we’re heavily involved with the local university there, and they’ve got dorms, they’ve got research labs that the students… Read More
If we wanted it, yes. Especially the small mammals. I mean, we got elephant shrews, we got 10 ricks, we got pacas, wheatears, I believe they were working on. So when they were finished with their work, if we wanted them in the collection, we could get, and oftentimes, they… Read More
And I think we took pretty much every species that they had available. Now, you had mentioned Front Royal and wanna kind of hit on that. Read More
Number one, what was your involvement in Front Royal?… Read More
And can you give us kind of this history of the place?… Read More
And we’d already pointed out that there was a major problem with the dorcas because we were losing calves from specific females that had been bred to specific males because they were so closely related. Kathy took that information and ran with it. And I know Horsely was really angry… Read More
I don’t think that we ever had any major issues with working with the research people and especially with Front Royal, CRC, we worked with them pretty closely, especially with some of the small mammals and with a lot of the hoofstock. Now, the research collection had their own animals… Read More
After their research was done, did that come to the collection then?… Read More
AI meaning?… Read More
I’m sorry, artificial inseminations. And so that the the vets and the research staff were heavily involved in that. So yeah, it was, I think those two animals were very well attended by pretty much everybody, including our public relations people, FONZ, the Friends of the National Zoo because they… Read More
So there was a good working, I’ll say, was there a good working relationship between all these various departments, and forgetting the pandas, how did the research and veterinary, how did they intermesh with the animal collections during your time?… Read More
Well, we tried very, very hard to get the research department to work with the collection. And actually it wasn’t that easy because they had their own research work that they were doing. And we had a lot of issues that we wanted them to look at, especially stereotypic behavior,… Read More
Yeah, in fact, I’ll never forget, she had built a nest and one of the keepers had gone in and cleaned it up ’cause he didn’t know what it was. And I had to stand there in front of 15 microphones and try to explain what had happened and that… Read More
Did you have to coordinate these various departments, research, veterinarians, your animal management staff regarding the pandas, I mean, they’re all working together?… Read More
Yeah, because we had, I mean, there was a huge input on the part of the research department with Devra Kleiman. There was a huge input with the vets because one that they were incredibly important animals and that they had never been maintained in the National Zoo. We sent… Read More
How important were they to the zoo and to the zoo visitors?… Read More
Well, we were completely swamped for many years, visitors would come in from all over the place just to see the pandas. I mean, to the point where they’d bring busloads of people in, they’d jump off the bus, they’d run over and they’d look at the pandas they run… Read More