Interview 26791 – Caption Index: 683
We said could you do us a favor and not do that?… Read More
We said could you do us a favor and not do that?… Read More
Don’t let anybody know that the shipment’s coming in until the very last minute and then have your best person on it. They said we’d be happy to do that. So once wheels were up out of South Africa, we had to fly from Swaziland to Johannesburg, and then out,… Read More
And so any inspector who’s vacant and available takes the job, right?… Read More
But then we still had the animal rights community in the US and our intelligence through the FBI and whatever, indicated, okay, they’re gonna be trouble, so you need to get ready for this. So they helped us. We had great intelligence, local police, FBI, to help us ward off… Read More
And it’s the first airport they land in the US which was gonna be Tampa. And so that goes out to a pool. Read More
And that just goes out to a pool of inspectors, right?… Read More
And he really put everybody through their paces, our attorneys as well as the animal rights group. And he made his decision, and he turned to our attorneys, and said get your elephants in now. And we’re like, yikes. So we surveyed five transportation or five airlines. Everybody wanted it. Read More
So they didn’t care, they were fine. They said no, we’ll do this. We’re not worried about it. Lufthansa had to turn it down. South African Air had to turn it down because of pressure from animal rights community. So flew these animals in, again, crated them up. The king… Read More
And our two vets, each institution sent a vet along. I was there, Randy was there, and Lowry Park sent a couple of staff. And we did reproductive exams on all the elephants to make sure they were viable. And then we basically divided up the elephants and said okay,… Read More
And the next question went to the attorney, how much is this gonna cost us in federal court?… Read More
So here we have animals captured and the stop button was hit. And that brought in not only all existing trustees, but trustee emeriti showed up, the room was full. And we were sitting on the edge watching all this. And the first trustee stood up, not the chairman, but… Read More
And he said well, between 250 and $400,000. So the board chairman said it’ll be 400,000, let’s call our attorney in Washington. And sure enough, he came in at $400,000, but they were actually suing Fish and Wildlife. But we had to be there to make sure that our interests… Read More
Right, we were asked by our board what was the most significant animal in our collection that we needed to work on. And Jim and I did a presentation to the board and said it was elephants, it was African elephants. And so the short answer to that story is… Read More
What were the challenges, what were the issues?… Read More
And at that time, Lowry Parks facility and the comment from the emissary is, your elephants live in better conditions than some of my people. So the answer back to the king of Swaziland was, yes, we should go forward with it. So again, making a long story short, the… Read More
Is this a species we just need to leave in the wild and forget about it. But we have learned a lot and we’ve done a lot on the science side with elephants and this virus that they can contract is all been because they’ve been in managed populations. And… Read More
Can you tell us about the importation of the elephants from Swaziland?… Read More
And the focus that we were told by the board, the board had the final decision, are we getting out of elephants or not?… Read More
I mean, this is how devastating that was. And said give us an opportunity to come back with a better management philosophy and style. And they did. And that’s operant conditioning with a lot in between what I just said from the beginning to end of that. But that death,… Read More
It’s like, should we even be doing this?… Read More