Interview 26791 – Caption Index: 689
And I said oh, what are you doing here?… Read More
And I said oh, what are you doing here?… Read More
‘Cause I was in one of the pilot cars and we found out later from the FBI, he said well, we have credible information that they were gonna be at these bridges and they were gonna throw a cinder block on a cable over the bridge. So what we’re doing… Read More
And you know, what the heck is going on?… Read More
You know, he said well, he said, we blacked out the space above your motorcade when you came in. And there’s only one person that can do that. And that’s me. And the only other person that gets that privilege is the president. But we didn’t want anything to go… Read More
And we’d come to a freeway overpass and they would slow down, and then we’d speed up again, and they’d slow down. Read More
So when the airlines want to, they can, but they got us there. We landed at 1:00 AM at the airport, it’s closed at midnight. They kept it open for us. We had all that done ahead of time. We had the truckers ready. Put them in a hotel room,… Read More
Don’t let anybody know that the shipment’s coming in until the very last minute and then have your best person on it. They said we’d be happy to do that. So once wheels were up out of South Africa, we had to fly from Swaziland to Johannesburg, and then out,… Read More
And so any inspector who’s vacant and available takes the job, right?… Read More
We said could you do us a favor and not do that?… Read More
But then we still had the animal rights community in the US and our intelligence through the FBI and whatever, indicated, okay, they’re gonna be trouble, so you need to get ready for this. So they helped us. We had great intelligence, local police, FBI, to help us ward off… Read More
And that just goes out to a pool of inspectors, right?… Read More
And it’s the first airport they land in the US which was gonna be Tampa. And so that goes out to a pool. Read More
So they didn’t care, they were fine. They said no, we’ll do this. We’re not worried about it. Lufthansa had to turn it down. South African Air had to turn it down because of pressure from animal rights community. So flew these animals in, again, crated them up. The king… Read More
And he really put everybody through their paces, our attorneys as well as the animal rights group. And he made his decision, and he turned to our attorneys, and said get your elephants in now. And we’re like, yikes. So we surveyed five transportation or five airlines. Everybody wanted it. Read More
So here we have animals captured and the stop button was hit. And that brought in not only all existing trustees, but trustee emeriti showed up, the room was full. And we were sitting on the edge watching all this. And the first trustee stood up, not the chairman, but… Read More
And our two vets, each institution sent a vet along. I was there, Randy was there, and Lowry Park sent a couple of staff. And we did reproductive exams on all the elephants to make sure they were viable. And then we basically divided up the elephants and said okay,… Read More
And he said well, between 250 and $400,000. So the board chairman said it’ll be 400,000, let’s call our attorney in Washington. And sure enough, he came in at $400,000, but they were actually suing Fish and Wildlife. But we had to be there to make sure that our interests… Read More
And the next question went to the attorney, how much is this gonna cost us in federal court?… Read More
Right, we were asked by our board what was the most significant animal in our collection that we needed to work on. And Jim and I did a presentation to the board and said it was elephants, it was African elephants. And so the short answer to that story is… Read More
What were the challenges, what were the issues?… Read More