And then some of the breeding, the captive breeding that we’d done on some of the species, and one of the senators of that out in Virginia called Small into his office and said, had asked him some very specific questions, like I guess senators do, “How much money are… Read More
What did you know …” this asking him to have the specifics, which he didn’t have, you know, he just made the decision that he was gonna save money, so he was gonna close Front Royal, so then basically after, I guess, several months of hand ringing and you know,… Read More
Well, that was during the tenure of Small, who was the Secretary of the Smithsonian, and he was a former CEO I believe of Fannie Mae or one of the big corporations, and he was used to, you know, not having to, I guess justify many of his decisions, and… Read More
Well basically hippo’s an aquatic animal. So you have the problem of them if they go in water, or if you dart ’em with a drug that causes ’em not to breathe, they drowned. So some of the early work where they used M99, or some of the narcotics, they… Read More
What brought that about, and that you’re aware of, and you think that would’ve been a good or a bad move to have done it?… Read More
Any story or so that was — Oh God, how long have we got here to talk?… Read More
Why are they tougher than rhinoceros or giraffe, or others that your experience is given?… Read More
Well, we’ve got time for at least two stories. Not, you know, not really. We had some close calls and stuff, but we usually kept safety as a major, you know, major concern we had. I had a giraffe fall on me, but fortunately I wasn’t hurt too bad, and… Read More
It was challenging, and you know, it was just great, we first started out doing elephants, as I said, for collecting sperm and doing that, we’re doing ’em all from ground vehicles, driving around looking for them, and maybe we’d find, oh maybe if you’re lucky, three elephants in a… Read More
What was it like dealing with animals in their natural habitat?… Read More
Were there any things that happened that in the bush, in the field that were unexpected?… Read More
I had to basically find, I had to apply for the money from our zoological society. I got some money from Ringlings to do some of this, some other grants, you know, I had to actually raise the money to do that when we had some free transportation, like from… Read More
Were the animals that you worked on chosen because of a specific problem in a zoo setting that you were trying to solve, or how were the animals chosen that you would work on?… Read More
Some of ’em were, well first we went to collect sperm from elephants, because as we used to say, that was a mammoth problem. But then we started doing things like, I’d have an elephant down, and we studied must in elephants, you know, the … And we’d find one… Read More
How often were you in the field?… Read More
It depended on financing, and defining going in the field, I was probably going into Africa at least once a year, maybe once every other year, and those years that David and I went to Africa were the golden years, we had access that is unbelievable, you couldn’t have had… Read More
Did you initiate, you said you got the money, was it things that people brought to you, “Can you assist us or were you, Most of it — “I wanna do this”, and they found you the money?… Read More
Well we tried to do that with the giraffe anesthesias I explained and that didn’t work, because we had to change the way that we did it. And then the TB again doesn’t work as well in that direction because of, you know, you don’t have confinement, and you can’t… Read More
I’d say some of it does. Some of it was directly for the field problems, like our study on tuberculosis in the buffalo in Kruger, we’d had some experience with tuberculosis problems in captive things, but they’re two different problems in a free-ranging versus a captive thing, so that didn’t… Read More
Did it work the other way also, things that were applicable in a zoo might transfer to field research or not?… Read More