And it’s a legacy that another 10 years down the road, people won’t even know that the National Zoo even had a pygmy hippo or what is a pygmy hippo because they’ve never seen one and they don’t care. And the same thing happens when you’ve got curators that are… Read More
And then that curator goes, and somebody says, Privost’s squirrels, why are we exhibiting Privost’s?… Read More
Well, we’ve had them for us, so what?… Read More
so the Privost’s squirrels go away and it’s happening more, and more, and more, and we’re losing species in zoos that we’ll never see again because they’re gone from the zoo collections and they’re rapidly disappearing in the wild. Then we were talking about curators having time on the computers… Read More
Have no idea. Read More
It’s like, why do I need to know that?… Read More
Doesn’t affect me who ran the zoo 30 years ago, but it does, if you’re working for an institution, you need to know where it came from in order to know kind of where it’s gonna go. And if you can’t learn from your past, you tend to repeat the… Read More
I think that nobody in the zoo today whether it’s keepers, curators, and even directors, I think they’ve lost the historical knowledge of the facility that they’re working for. Read More
I mean, I could guarantee that you could walk up to any keeper in the National Zoo and ask him, who’s DR. Reed?… Read More
Who’s Dr. Mann?… Read More
Who’s Dillon Ripley?… Read More
Well, I never really had a problem when I was working for Reed. I mean, unless it was a major purchase, I mean, unless I was gonna go out and buy a giraffe for $25,000 or something, I mean, if I was bringing in small mammals or having the reptile… Read More
Do you feel that animal keepers today and maybe senior staff know their profession history and if not, why?… Read More
Because they’re not interested really in dealing with the living collection, they’re more interested, I mean, if you want them to write papers, that’s great, but you can’t have them in a situation where they’re more concerned with getting a paper written than they are in dealing with the issues… Read More
I mean, even before I left, it was why are we hiring PhDs?… Read More
Well, we’re a professional organization with Smithsonian. I said, “Yeah, but we’ve got a science department. You wanna hire PhDs, hire them in the science department, don’t hire me in the animal operation.” Because every single PhD that we had working in the animal operations failed at one point or… Read More
You indicated that you gave your curators carte blanche to get animals, do you think that that’s the case in a lot of zoos or should it be for the curatorial staff to in a sense make the animal deals, or have you found maybe the directors want more of… Read More
Do you have a degree?… Read More
What is it?… Read More
If they say I’ve got a PhD, as far as I’m concerned, that pretty much puts them on the bottom of the list. Read More