The entire building where you walk in and it’s, it was almost taking a tropical greenhouse or a botanical garden, tropical exhibit, but developing it so you could incorporate animals as well, which means you gotta know which birds you’re gonna eat, which plants, which plants may be poisonous, certain… Read More
They came in and built their own webs on the stainless steel spider web. But everything else, cooties, and iguanas, giant fruit bats, everything else was in free flight or free ranging, two-toed sloths, whatever. So we wanted people to get the feel of the humidity and just take a… Read More
How did you fund it?… Read More
Oh, we, we built the Large Mammal building. When we had to fund that, we had to institute the admission fee because the bridge fell over the Kansas River and they stopped all capital improvements. And attendance was going well and admission fee was going well, and we’d raised the… Read More
Can you tell me about the development of the rainforest exhibit?… Read More
The rainforest, a lot of zoos had birdhouses, tropical birdhouses where at one end there would be, say, the end of the building would be a square, the square end of the building would be filled with tropical plants and there’d be a guardrail and lots of live trees and… Read More
And I always thought that was neat, but why not do a whole building like that?… Read More
So using all of my wisdom on animals, I said send her. (Gary chuckles) So they went down the turnpike and if that tiger had eaten that opossum, I’m sure the story woulda gotten out and animal rights people would’ve really hammered me. But the tiger didn’t eat the opossum. Read More
You keep the opossum, send us the tiger back.” That’s when zoo people could laugh at yourself type thing. (chuckles) Well, what would you say are some of the most significant changes that you made in animal care when you were at the zoo?… Read More
Well, there were a lot of safety issues when we came. I mean, just for a keeper, even in the older exhibits for a keeper to open the transfer gate and tigers or bears, whatever, to reach up to grab the metal handle of the transfer gate, an animal could… Read More
And I think that’s great. First of all, to keep the animals, like I used to call it occupational activity, give animals things to do within their environment there to keep them active. Plus it makes them more active for the public, for the visitor. But those can be used… Read More
And everybody looks at me, what are we gonna do?… Read More
(Gary chuckling) So I’m thinking, oh my gosh, if we hook the crate back up to the exhibit and open it up and let the tiger out so we can get the opossum out, she’s not gonna go back in today, or maybe not tomorrow. We gotta start this whole… Read More
What are we gonna do?… Read More
Were they doing it all perfect or did you see things that ultimately you had to changed?… Read More
Well, when I first came to Topeka, animal handling was more cowboy slash farm techniques than sometimes thinking about it or preparing the animal for it. And it was a lot of, the old days, you would push or prod, or use a hose or whatever. Instead of, for example,… Read More
So this was a new thing for a lot of the old timers at the zoo at the time. So we tried to incorporate a little more management practices. I mentioned the Sedgwick County tiger, which Ron Blakely is having us hold until he got his new tiger exhibit done. Read More
A plain opossum. Read More
So do you think this love of animals prepared you for your zoo profession ultimately?… Read More
Yes, when I was a youngster, the animal kingdom was fascinating to me. And when I was a boy, I wanted to do two things. One was work in a zoo and other was to go to Africa. But before the thought of working in a zoo entered my mind,… Read More