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
How did you deal with that?… 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
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
With trustees that wanted to tell you how to run the zoo. Read More
What were your most frustrating times as director?… 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 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
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
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
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 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
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
Or events at the Oklahoma City Zoo? Is that what you?… Read More
Major events. Major events that affected the zoos. Read More
Well, the first to answer the what affected?… Read More
And of course, then the Oklahoma City Zoo?… Read More
We really proselytized it. We had a few people, but not enough. And there were many problems, research problems that we identified. We sent that thing out and we had a response, but not enough. And I had a curator of research that the universities, both of them paid half… Read More
We replaced him with a guy who had, was excellent behavioral experience and all that. Once he got there, all he did was trap mice for a taxonomic study. Read More
During your career, what would you consider to be major events that affected zoos in general?… Read More