Walter was pretty good at politics. And we didn’t get a lot of support from the zoo people, but we got it on the officers. With a problem that began, you know, with our own people. Then there was a huge problem with the park people at the head. At… Read More
Walter was president of the AAZPA, and I was on the board. And here again, zoo directors didn’t, they didn’t wanna rock the boat. You know, a lot of them were in park departments. And their park directors, you know, they didn’t want them breaking away. They needed our money… Read More
Excellent question. Excellent question. Read More
What was your impression of the AAZPA when it was part of the Parks Association Group?… Read More
And what was the evolution as you understand it for AAZPA to break away from the parks?… Read More
When that those trustees were there, that’s when it became pretty bad. He says, “I’ll come down that morning. And then I’ll take them aside, and I’ll tell them they can’t do that. And if they want to be on this prestigious zoo board, and be able to go to… Read More
They don’t want to hurt you. Generally, you’ll notice I said. Read More
And that vet doesn’t need any help really. If he needs help, he’ll go up to Stillwater, the Ag station”. So that would work about a fourth of the time. The colleague would take him aside and say, “Look, you know.” and they would listen to a colleague, but not… Read More
Well, first I tried to reason with them. And I would say 25% of the time that would work. They would get the picture and all that. Then though, another 75% it didn’t work. Then I would get one of their colleagues, that I could talk to, and just not… Read More
How did you deal with that?… Read More
And then we sold those ostrich, and we made a lot of money. Ranchers bought them, everybody wanted them. And then the, you know, it became a… I don’t know if you’re aware of it, the ostrich, and all those large birds became farmable. And McDonald’s was gonna offer ostrich… Read More
What were your most frustrating times as director?… Read More
With trustees that wanted to tell you how to run the zoo. Read More
And raising ostrich was extremely labor intensive before. No longer was it really, and we were able to. But again, we got, maybe in a year we’d get really 50, $60,000 net profit off of ostrich chicks. Read More
And they’d come with deformities and all that. Finally, we bought an adult male redneck ostrich in Kenya, that had been on an, there was an ostrich farm there. And this one was one they still had, he was a breeder. We brought him over. It cost a lot of… Read More
You’ll have to kill them, euthanize them. And we finally figured out, well the vet did it. They were just such big birds. And if you fed them too much, their weight gain was so much that their legs, they’re developing now in this chick, just couldn’t hold them up. Read More
And those four feeding stations had a little light on them, and they would, they were hooked up together. And they would open up and spit out some food pellets, some pellets. But it was strictly random. We put all these baby ostrich in there just the minute they started… Read More
Or events at the Oklahoma City Zoo? Is that what you?… Read More
Well, effected zoos, but obviously, affected- Gosh, I think that we had… The problem of pairing rare animals up. We’d have maybe a herd. I had about eight sable antelope, and I needed a new male. They were beginning to, we were about to have some inbreeding, and I didn’t… Read More
And they’re a beautiful antelope. And we already had about a 10-acre area that we were gonna set up for African belt. But we lost three years on that, just that one problem of not having a breeding male. So that’s when we started a policy of having two groups… Read More