And somebody from this circus called me one day and said, we’ve lost an elephant and we think it’s somewhere in wind in the Great Park, you know, when we find it, can we, will you please help us immobilize it and get it back to where it belongs. Anyway,… Read More
Were you not involved with an escaped elephant?… Read More
And I, and I remember having to go back to Jane on several occasions and say, Jane, you are sending me pickled, formalized bits of animal. It’s illegal for one thing and also this animal has probably been dead for a month and I am not gonna be able to… Read More
’cause what would happen, she’d, you know, in her wandering, she’d come across a dead chimp, usually heavily decomposed and would carve out little bits from it and send them to, to me in the, in the, obviously as part of the path lab under the veterinary department with, with… Read More
Fortunately I had a very, very calm senior technician, head technician at the time who was used to all sorts of animal emergencies. I, you you can, I, you know, and he’d been there 20 years plus didn’t bat an eyelid, but, but obviously said, well, we’re gonna have to… Read More
And so we, we fairly sort of regular attendances from Elton John with parrots before, long before he became as famous as, as he is now. And oh, other sort of slightly alarming occasions. I remember one, one of my technicians came and saying, there’s a lion in that taxi… Read More
Oh yeah, yeah. Well, yes, Elton John, you know, who’s obviously well known to so many people now. He was not very well known at the time when I was running the, the veterinary department in London. The, and we had the, the veterinary hospital used to see, we, I… Read More
Thank goodness that, you know, there’s a law about it right now, you know, and, and comes up to the front door with a, this perfectly calm big male lion saying, could, could I just have its claws cut trimmed?… Read More
They were, they were really, you know, well there were amazing functions and really quite, you know, you were sort of up close and personal with many members of the royal family at those, they were, they were quite a meal as you can imagine in Buckingham Palace. So many,… Read More
Paul’s. And, and she was a big fan of the choir, the pickety of the choir, you know, the choir boy group. So we saw quite a lot of both the queen mother and, and the queen on most, mostly on formal occasions when someone was being buried. You know,… Read More
So yeah. So Is it true that as the London Zoo you would get calls from celebrities to look at their animals?… Read More
Charles, not so much with the zoo world. He’s, as you know, Charles is very, very countryside oriented, very much interested in the sort of broader natural things that we’ve been talking about. And both, both the boys, both Prince William and Prince Harry have been very, very, very interested… Read More
I don’t think either Charles or Camilla are, are involved with that. Camilla, we mentioned the Brooke earlier. Camilla is the, is the president of Brooke, the, the, the major, you know, there are three wings. Brooke has a, an organization has, the main organization is based in London. Then… Read More
Thank you. Are there any stories you can share about your interaction with the royal family?… Read More
So it’s, it’s a really, it’s the, as far as I know, I mean there are, you know, I know individual zoos have actually produced a lot of useful material, but it’s, it’s the only really comprehensive welfare oriented teaching program in the world that’s online to anyone, anyone who… Read More
Well it, it was always interesting, you know, being at London Zoo because there were strong con had been for years strong connections with the royal family. Many of them have a very genuine interest in, in wild thing wildlife. And in the countryside especially, you can imagine with the… Read More
But what it is, I think two and a, over two and a half thousand people have actually now gone through the, ’cause we, we ask them if they do take the course that they let us know and it’s, it’s, it’s well over 2000 people have done it all… Read More
And so we started what we call the e-learning program. And it has six parts to it. It’s a pretty comprehensive coverage in relatively simple language because we are dealing mostly this is the difference between what we are doing and the more sophisticated up to date science side of,… Read More
That’s the sort of work that Brooke’s doing in, you know, almost all in these communities where people are lucky to earn a dollar a day if that While welfare is, is is kind of unique, but does it have any aspects of classes or things that people can look… Read More
Absolutely, yes. I mean, what what we’ve found in the, in the p of actually getting into the field and working, you know, face to face with a lot of the folks that we’ve been training in mostly Southeast Asia and Brazil, Japan, one or two, one or two other,… Read More