He’s, he’s in a bomb shelter texting his friend. They heard about Long Neck Matter. So TikTok, this is January of the next year. It went viral. And we booked out the Giraff suite. It’s two night minimum for that whole year. Every single night. Bam, bam, bam. And you… Read More
And, and, and his friend wrote him and said, Hey, have you heard about this place?… Read More
And then there’s a little door under supervision. You open it up and the tongue comes in the living room and you feed ’em. And then it ends with them on the, on the catwalk with the whole giraffe right there. It went viral on TikTok. And when I say… Read More
So it, it starts, you walk in, there’s giraffes looking right at you, right?… Read More
And I’m down to not a lot of money left, you know, in my savings. I didn’t ask for any help. And then, and then a couple came in and did this film, eight seconds or 10 seconds. And they put it on their website, which had a lot more… Read More
So I did that in, in 2001. Again, this is just me, no partners, just my money. I had architect friends that helped me a lot. I had a lot of help along the way. I hired just two keepers at that point and me. And so we opened up… Read More
What is it And, and how did it come into being and what was your philosophy?… Read More
Well, I was, if you know Rick Bargi, I’m not gonna retire until I die. You know, it’s just not in my DNA. And I was young enough, and I had been thinking about this for a long time, and we had the right piece of property to do it. Read More
People would pay money for it if it was done in the right way. And I started with the, with the bo, with the draft barn. So I built a much bigger draft barn than I designed a Disney or a in Miami, because I learned that, yeah, you, you… Read More
And number one, can you kind of go through why did you not retire?… Read More
Why did you open up this, this new facility?… Read More
And I carefully put the lock on I, and I said, Malcolm, what the, you did, you just do?… Read More
He goes, well, I heard the door close. No, you wait till I tell you that. I mean, you gotta be, sometimes it’s just luck. Now you, you, in, in 2015, you leave Houston Zoo, you do some zoo consulting, but ultimately in 2019, you open up your own place. Read More
He goes, Rick, Rick, we got a problem over the dick, Dick. He said, but we got one dick on the paddock and one dick in the moat. He thought, he thought we called him dick, Dick. ’cause it was two of ’em. It just sounded pretty funny on the… Read More
And she was pa pissed, but we had to just check the cubs and clean up. And so I did that, and he’s over on the other side, and he hears the door closed and he lets mom in. She comes in. I hadn’t locked the door, and the door… Read More
I’m trying to think of in Miami, a funny story. We had, we opened up the TIC exhibit and the tic is a small animal. They’re called tic because they’re, they, they, when they vocalize it sounds, so, it sounds like dick, Dick. So they’re called dick, Dick, DIK, DIK. Read More
Certainly at Houston Zoo? Any stories?… Read More
You’ve had to, have you had to deal with animal scapes in your career?… Read More
Yeah, a few, I guess in Miami, one day, one night, our male Malayan taper got out and he was, he’s a nasty animal. He, and he was out on the walkway. The public wasn’t there. And I can remember being in the back of a cart and, you know,… Read More
It’s, it’s essential that you do that and not think that you can resolve everything with your staff and it, and, and sometimes you have animal staff to think, you know, we can design this. We, we know our animals better than anybody else. Yeah. But you need to look… Read More