And we’ve been married. We got married in 1988 and have three phenomenal sons who are grown men today. And all because of the Lincoln Children’s Zoo, because I turned her down for a job at the Potawatomi Zoo in 1983. Well, on another deck. Read More
I look to the other guy on the other side going, what do we do?… Read More
Okay, Ivan sitting up, he went, I dunno, what did I do?… Read More
This is a 500 pound Siberian AM tiger. Read More
The tiger shook his head going, what’s going on?… Read More
Then the tiger decided to get up on his front legs. So this is a tiger sitting like that in the bed of the pickup truck right at my feet and the other guy’s feet. And there’s a tiger right there. Read More
And he was a very nice man. And he tranquilized the tiger. Well, we had no crates to put the animal in. We didn’t train animals to go into crates. We just, so we just put Ivan on the tarp, lifted the tarp, put in the back of a pickup… Read More
Ivan is sound asleep between us. Okay?… Read More
And we keep him covered except for his head. And so this, we start, Dr guys starts driving the truck around the zoo. It’s October and there’s some cool air, cool breezes hitting the tiger’s face. Read More
Well, kinda one of favorite animal stories. But you know, when I was the youngster in the zoo world, we did all kinds of stupid things. Absolutely stupid. I called the Wild, wild West Days of Zookeeping back in the seventies and early eighties. You know, when if you needed… Read More
Do you have any favorite animal stories? One or two?… Read More
But probably one of the stupidest things we did, it was back at like, I was probably 19 years old at the Powan MOU in South Bend, Indiana. We had just built a brand new large tiger habitat for what we then called Siberian Tigers, which are now called AM… Read More
Nothing of significance. You know, we had a red pan to get out 30 plus. He was 34 years ago or so. He just went right up the wall. We had no idea he could climb up a wall like that. Other escapes, we had prairie dogs get out once,… Read More
Very, very fortunate. Read More
And keep making it happen. So that, How did you prepare for escapes?… Read More
Oh, lots of drills. Lots of drills. Drills, drills, drills, drills, drills, drills, drills. Lots of drills. You know, you, you got the emergency escape team, you know, just in case something happens, you always have the right person on staff just in case something happens present on the zoo… Read More
Any escapes ever occur?… Read More
Giraffe. The gi, I mean, talk about a logistics and talk about complicated and talk about charismatic and talk about iconic, which we needed those things to help boost the zoo. Make the zoo more year round rich experience with giraffe. We really needed to have something iconic at the… Read More
What animal species would you consider the most significant that you acquired in your career?… Read More
I still love going in and feeding giraffe and meeting the giraffe one-on-one. ’cause they’re such remarkable kid. You know, when you’ve been doing zoo work for as long as I have, that’s just, I still am amazed. I don’t care what animal is, you know, feeding a penguin every… Read More