Always the vets, always the vets, except another interesting story. This was when Clint Gray was vet and they had changed from the CO2 to the 23 cartridge charged guns, which had a much higher velocity, and they had, depending upon what the distance was that the animal was being… Read More
And so they finally agreed and the first time we were gonna let one of the curators use it, it was on some Eld’s deer and, was it Eld’s deer?… Read More
Yeah, it was Eld’s deer. So they go up to the enclosure and they hand the gun to the one of the assistant curators at the time and he fires it. And first, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know whether Clint adjusted the thing wrong or forgot to… Read More
You’ve talked about capturing animals at the zoo that you were involved in escapes at the zoo that you had to recapture animals, did you have any stories about escapes that you were involved with and how it was handled?… Read More
In the initial, you mentioned the initial experimentation at the National Zoo with the capture gun, who was shooting initially?… Read More
Was at the vets who we’re shooting?… Read More
Was it the keepers?… Read More
I think that the people that I work with, including myself, sort of had a natural bend for how to catch these animals regardless of what they were in a manner that wasn’t gonna cause them any damage. I mean, I remember trying to train some of the keepers, like… Read More
And you just go in, shut the door behind you, it’s pitch black, and just stand here for a few minutes until they kinda calm down. And then you started grabbing and you grab whatever you could, and you made sure you grabbed an antler and then you grab them… Read More
And what we want you to do, we’ll pay you 50 bucks is we’ll put a pat on your back and you’re gonna start running and we’re gonna shoot the dart at you.” And I remember I said, “Well, yeah, but you’ve only got the pat on our back, what… Read More
And it really made a huge, huge advancement in the way you manage a collection. With great apes, before you’d have to try to train them to come up and get to you. But half the time you couldn’t do that, you had to get them into a squeeze cage… Read More
Were you just learning on the job?… Read More
It’s interesting question. Read More
Did we learn on the job?… Read More
Were you part of it or were you just observing them?… Read More
I wasn’t part of it in the first master plan projects, which was renovating the upper hoofstock area, and also when they built what they called Hardy Hoff and delicate hoofstock buildings, which currently now ha has the panthers and the first renovation of the Elephant House, the first renovation… Read More
Do you feel it was dangerous?… Read More
Were they showing you what to do?… Read More
It was a trust for orangutans, and it was set up to protect not only the orangutans in the wild, but also to locate and bring together the captive population of orangs. And he also worked with then, I can’t remember her name. There was a woman in Hong Kong,… Read More
And so he was more or less persona non grata with a number of people because of that. But he was a far thinking individual because a lot of what he had started carried on into the SSPs and the whole cop population management situation. Read More