But you know, they were just afraid to anesthetize it, because they hadn’t had the experience, so I had the Indian veterinarian scrubbing in with me, and so he worked with me on the surgery, so we just didn’t come in, you know, like Dr. Kildare or something and do… Read More
And I think that’s an important part of preventative medicine, it doesn’t sound like preventative, but it is, and it relates back to what I mentioned on the developing countries. Proactive stuff is just not a way of practicing medicine over there. I remember in one zoo in India, they… Read More
And were you able to evolve that into the culture and were you able to do that on a national level too, when you would speak before audiences?… Read More
So I walk in this room and there’s just tamarins, you know, going everywhere, and they said, “It’s that one over there.” I said, “You know, could see it probably about over there on that beam, about 10 yards from in.” I said, “Okay, well what’s, well this just doesn’t… Read More
I hope so. You know, I just don’t know about the preventative medicine program at many other zoos, but I’m a big believer in that just because of the problem of manipulating our animals for diagnostic and other procedures, and I’m also a very strong proponent of proactive aggressive diagnostic… Read More
I had an … No, I, well, up until when I spent three years, I’d retired from National Zoo when I spent three years, but the other 14 years where we were going over there, and helping ’em, I was on staff at National. We talked about your sojourn into… Read More
How did you balance all that?… Read More
I don’t think it was in balance, because you know, I think, you know, part of the role of a veterinarian is actually, you know, as an important part of management, if you get management right, nutrition right, you know, veterinarians are, you know, do the preventive medicine and then… Read More
But that’s something you just have to deal with. Read More
And when you were in Thailand, were you then also still at National Zoo?… Read More
We’d been going into Thailand with the reproductive team and … Oh, probably about 15 years ago we started going over, and then … To digress back, I talked about the training program, Chris Wimmer and Rudy Rudran had at Front Royal, one of the trainees was from Thailand, Asopon… Read More
How did that come about?… Read More
So Steve O’Brien and Dave Wilton, I went over to do that, and while I was there, I was looking at, you know, how do you anesthetize the, you know, do they have stuff even to clean teeth?… Read More
They had no gas anesthesia, so on and so on. So I talked to Sopon and he gave me a whole bunch of money to buy a bunch of equipment to take over, and so we did, took it over there, set it up in five zoos, you know, anesthesia… Read More
Well, I was always interested in, you know, how in the heck does a dart gun work, because I came in, you know, we put a little charge here and did something, and you know, you burned incense and danced around the gun three times, and then you shot it… Read More
You know, basically what’s going on and so let’s talk”, and so we talked about, you know, the history of the gun, the development of the gun, some of the experiences he’d had with it, how the military used it and various other things. Interesting guy. Very interesting guy. You… Read More
And so we tried to change that around by building up some confidence, and also educating their curators and directors that, “Hey, look anesthesia’s possible, let’s give your veterinarians a fighting chance to get their hands on the animal before the autopsy.” When you were Head of the medical services… Read More
Yeah, we were very fortunate at that time, we had not major unlimited things like people thought the Smithsonian just went down to the basement, the horn of plenty and money poured out, but I would have to justify them, with the laparoscope, that was a fairly major investment, and… Read More
Can you give us some of your reminiscences with some of the original people who developed this technology and how that kind of brought it along or learned things about it?… Read More
How can we access animals in your cages?… Read More