He’s gonna be tested. And that’s just understanding dominance hierarchies. And there are ways of getting around that. For example, with Meir Cats, I think what we found out is that we could acclimate the, it’s a closed social group. You know, their society is a closed social group. So… Read More
And he said, he, he said, you have to watch it. You have to make sure it gets on the plane. He says, the guy with the forklift set it down. And when he backed up, he knocked the crate over on its side. And he said, I was there… Read More
But then there’s the other things like the infanticide in monkeys that is not, and let’s say introducing animals, new animals to a group. Read More
You know, this is ridiculous. You know?… Read More
And I’m so embarrassed that I was, you know, laughing when this guy was telling you. And everybody was seriously listening. My other co-instructors were listening and taking notes, but it just struck me as being a horrible thing that happened. But it was based on the fact that he… Read More
It was like, oh my God, you did, and then what did you do next?… Read More
It was like, I can’t believe it. Read More
I remember one time we had a, we were giving a course in Morocco and there was this very sincere young man who took the course and he was in a zoo management position. And he told us, we were talking about Kate crate training animals, cate tra crate training… Read More
And so I learned never to argue with them, you know, if he reprimanded me about anything. So there was this cultural factor that they hadn’t taken into account that affected that little scenario that we were enacting in the course. So that was, but we did a lot of… Read More
One of the things was infanticide in monkeys for a long time, time when that happened in zoos, people thought he’s a bad male. That bugger has to get outta here. You have to keep him separate. You can’t put any females or young animals in with him because he… Read More
And so I came down, I said, you know, this is completely unacceptable behavior. I said, this is an embarrassment to the whole staff in the place, and you just can’t, you know, you can’t do this again. So I was being like, I was being like the hard-ass boss… Read More
And there you learned that when you made decisions within a group with input from the group, you solved the problem. But they had exercises that you would do in a classroom setting. And the problems always got the better result when the group participated than if you had a… Read More
Well, I, I would break it down into maybe two areas. One would be management, personnel management, knowing how to deal with human problems, because those are always big obstacles, people working together. It’s like any kind of primates society, you know, you have a dominance hierarchy and stuff happens… Read More
What would you say are the skills, in your opinion, skills or roles that are becoming more working for zoo professionals today?… Read More
It could be a southern South African fer seal or something like that. Anyway, they could mix together, but if they were harassed, they could get into a, a creep area, you know, like a, a creep pen that they could get through the barrier. But the, the first seal… Read More
That wouldn’t be right, would it?… Read More
I remember the MITs species exhibit with, there’s penguins in something else in the Singapore Zoo that worked quite well, and they had a refuge for the penguins, whatever it was they were in with, maybe it was a sea lion or something like that. Read More
And I remember he remembered the rhino exhibit in Zurich where he had the floor was uneven. He said, A perfectly flat or floor is not natural in nature, you know, it’s irregular. So he, I remember Christian Schmidt made a big deal about that. And this is Hagar’s contribution… Read More
And they found that it was a headache, that there were problems that one species was interfering with or eating the other one and or stepping on ’em and that sort of thing. I remember the oxpeckers never worked that well. They were great to see ’cause they’re beautiful birds,… Read More
And so we developed the fauna interest groups, which they changed the name of, I don’t think it’s active any longer. But that was another kind of niche for the biologists, the zoo biologists in the community to get involved that differed from managing the cappa populations. And you know,… Read More