Interview 27708 – Caption Index: 126
So what type of zoo did you find when you went on your initial journey to Sea Zoo?… Read More
So what type of zoo did you find when you went on your initial journey to Sea Zoo?… Read More
That’s a, you know, that’s a good question. I meant to, to look into that. There were two directors before me. One was Huff Bill Hoff. Bill Hoff, yeah. And he very much had to do, he, you know, he came out as, you know, came outta the zoo world… Read More
So that was, that was really my entry into, into the NC Zoo and set about finding many purposes for it very quickly. Read More
Who was the director you replaced at the North Carolina Zoo?… Read More
And and luckily at the time, both the, you know, the senior staff and the, the secretary and the assistant secretary, the guy, the assistant secretary was actually a lady, a woman who was responsible for the zoo and the museums in North Carolina. Both not zoologists, not biologists, but… Read More
You know, how, how do we need to use it with the taxpayers who paid for it?… Read More
And basically an open book as far as where do we take this place?… Read More
And that’s how that all happened. But it was very much, very much through the zoo world, knowing, knowing well what was going on in the, you know, with the debate in London and, and some of my colleagues, people like John Knowles in, in the UK saying, you, you… Read More
And the agency then heard from some of our American Zoo colleagues that, oh, well that guy Jones is, you know, there are things going on at London, which you might wanna talk to him. So I got this call outta the blue from actually gov governor Jim Hunt was… Read More
And his, I had a call from his office one day in London saying, you know, would I mind coming coming to North Carolina for a long weekend and seeing if I had any interest in becoming the director of the North Carolina Zoo?… Read More
And sadly what happened was that there were a lot of loud voices within the scientific fellowship who, for their own agendas, some of, some of the leadership actually were people who had applied for jobs at London Zoo and were turned down for very good, for very good and… Read More
And I, and I, I’d met said, you know, probably not, not accepted well that, that the London and which they zoos needed to change, that we need to lead the way in how zoos were run, were designed with, you know, how they looked at their collections, how they… Read More
And that department is, is actually the basis, it’s the foundation of the great work that ZSL all over the world is now doing today. But with, but with a lot more support Now you have another promotion called General Director of Zoo. That’s what the CEO position was. Yeah. Read More
It was a new, new division within ZSL. The idea being that ultimately money we earned on the consultancies we’ve just talked about would be plowed back into conservation. But in the meantime, we almost completely rebuilt the, the Ungulate housing at Whipsnade on the back of what we were… Read More
And I was very much of the opinion that we should create a specialist largely undercover, all weather, mostly small animal collection at London and focus attention for the large mammals on whip snow. ’cause at that time it was very easy to get to. Whip still is, it’s only… Read More
I think, well, there were two factors that were in play there. One, one was a, a very tight financial position. London had been losing, losing revenue for quite some time. There had been this relatively small injection, this 10 million pounds that I mentioned, but that was, felt that… Read More
And there was a lot of play in the, in the London Press. London Press can be pretty vicious. We think the American press can be, but in nothing compared, compared to Fleet Street and the London media. And of course, you know, oh, London’s zoo’s gonna close down. And… Read More
Why was there resistance to it?… Read More
Well, I didn’t ask, actually. What happened was that Colin Rawlins, who had responsibility overall for the zoos and, and a lot of external activity that Zeiss l was, was involved in, really felt he was moving towards retirement and he felt that he really needed to pass the animal… Read More
I mean, they weren’t, they were independent operations, but because, ’cause John and I had that had that sort of common interest, but then we ran, if you with something like Orx and, and Aax and so on, you want to build up numbers. So what we then did was… Read More