If you have a Jane Goodall, you have a Bill Conway, you have a Russ Meyer, all these guys that are on our board, Terry Maple, they, Mike Hutchins. All we had, we had an incredible advisory board that that said, no Disney’s doing it right. And they’ll listen to… Read More
Yeah, I’m not trying to be egotistical here, but no, they, they let me decide. Michael Eisner and I would sit down and talk about this when he was the CEO and ’cause he wanted to, one time he wanted to buy the circus, you know, he thought that was… Read More
But it was, you know, they could, why you, why are you doing real animals?… Read More
It, it was, it, they just had this, the word zoo, we didn’t use the word zoo, but they, they called it a zoo. And that that’s got such a negative connotation historically that we had to deal with a lot of, a lot of letters, a lot of protests… Read More
You can do, you can do all this fake stuff. And so we got a lot of form letters and we had a whole letter writing and there was like 20 people that just responded to letters at Disney. And I did the form letter once and there was one… Read More
’cause they’re so good at it, virtual reality now. Read More
Huge issue with Disney. Why?… Read More
Because we, this is the nineties and Disney was gonna do live animals. Mickey Mouse lived forever. Now we’re gonna bring in animals, real animals. And they, and they thought they were getting ’em off in the wild. First of all, they don’t realize that almost ever, all the animals… Read More
Well, as you should because I, well, my question was then with dealing with animal zoo anti zoo groups, was this a issue in Houston?… Read More
Optimal cons connected to, to the wild conservation. I think that to me, animal rights is there because zoos dropped the ball. We didn’t deliver on our promise. Our promise is to take good care of animals and we weren’t doing that. And behind the scenes, you know, we have… Read More
Was it an issue in Disney?… Read More
And did you have to do that?… Read More
Well, I had to do that a lot. But the best advice I can give about that as be proactive, don’t get defensive. If you do it right and you care about your animals and it’s quality over quantity, again, you’re not gonna have, you, you might have problems with… Read More
Could you give us some thoughts on how best to deal with these kind of groups?… Read More
There’s a much more empathy for animals than there used to be in the past. Before it was this, oh, there there’s a freak show. You know, I’m talking 50 years ago or more, you know, the wild and the weird, you know, is what you came to see. And… Read More
Not because finance. I, I mean that’s an easy out, I guess to say that. But I, they’re getting smaller because they should be smaller. I think you can do things. Quality is better than quantity. It used to be the encyclopedia, you know, collection of animals. You have to… Read More
As an aside, do you think the collections you mentioned are getting smaller of financial constraints because of why are they getting smaller?… Read More
They’re habitats are getting much better. And, and there’s more space for them because now the collections are getting much smaller. Read More
What, what type of collection should small or medium zoos be focused on?… Read More
I think it’s a balance. I, I wouldn’t, just because you’re a small facility doesn’t mean you should just do local animals. You have to analyze what your audience is, who’s coming to that zoo. And maybe I would, if I would have a balance of maybe some exotic species,… Read More