Interview 26791 – Caption Index: 270
Absolutely. Read More
Absolutely. Read More
Now, am I consulting with the CEO?… Read More
We validated it for weeks. It’s time to put the animal down. Very emotional for the keepers. But they finally got it, and that’s when I said to ’em, I will make that final decision. Read More
He has renal failure. So we played this out and I said, we have got to make a decision. This is not fair to this animal. Let’s make a decision. So every time we got to making a decision, the animal’s having a great day. And we stopped talking about… Read More
Vets are going, he’s not recovering, okay?… Read More
Tomorrow, and he’s up on the, you know, walking around having a great time. Oh, can’t do him. Look, he’s recovered. Read More
Yeah, some, well, kind of two, if it came to animal or personnel. On the animal side, there’s a tendency for us as humans to wanna over manage all animal management facets. We get crazy with it, I think. We forget the animal’s biology and you know, we jump ahead… Read More
That’s been a struggle with some staff who want time to think about it. I said okay, you can have time, but we’re gonna make a decision here. And when it comes to those kinds of decisions, I was very firm in saying, I will have the last say. So… Read More
What was your management style for dealing with negative issues?… Read More
But we did it, turned out well. Landscape is one of my other passions. You wouldn’t have to pay me to do landscape, but I oversee the landscape design for the zoo and I took that on because the CEO was extremely frustrated with the look of the zoo when… Read More
I’m not trained in landscape, but I’ve done many homes and I know what I like when I see it. And I spend some of my vacation time looking at botanical gardens and things like that. So I have a pretty good feel for plants. And the zoo has a… Read More
I mean, they know water quality, and they know how water moves through pipes, and all that. But now we’re asking you to make sure the standard is the following water quality. And it was even driving the engineers crazy. So I don’t feel so bad about that, that I… Read More
Kind of goofy, just worked out of a building that was turned into a commissary. Now, we actually have a commissary and don’t get dinged by USDA anymore. So that and the manatee are probably the biggest projects. I think the frustration comes with, it really wasn’t a money issue… Read More
Why is that over there?… Read More
‘Cause they were part of the process and we made sure they were part of the process. I do have a funny story about one thing we did miss, but nonetheless, that hospital was the first, ZooTampa was the first zoo to get American Animal Hospital Association accreditation. And still… Read More
And we’re just getting that point now. The Manatee facility, I was part of that planning and that’s under construction as we speak. $17 million facility. The whole back-of-house of manatee, all the filtration has been redone. I was part of that, state money to do that. Boy, I learned… Read More
Why did you do that?… Read More
But when that hospital opened up, and we had staff involved in certain parts of that, nobody walked in and went, what?… Read More
Can you talk about some of the exhibits at ZooTampa you championed and the highs and lows maybe of each of them?… Read More
Yeah, actually, it’s not an exhibit as much as a facility. And that’s a brand new hospital that we opened up in 2016, which was the first really large project after I got to ZooTampa. It was seven, $9 million. There was some ancillary, other facilities that were part of… Read More