Yeah. In the ideal situation, the board and the president and CEO are working together to fundraise. There’s some zoos where the Zoo Society does all the fundraising, and the president and CEO runs the zoo, and comes and helps with fundraising when asked, but the zoo society pretty much… Read More
But some species, particularly hoofstock, end up with a bunch of males in the population and can only use so much of that gene pool. And so we often end up, not often, but we end up with the situation of what to do with those surplus males, and whether… Read More
Absolutely. I mean, euthanasia is something that is difficult for people to understand, and especially for management purposes. It’s not something that we would do at Pittsburgh. However, I’m not critical of people that have been in a situation where they felt that that was what they needed to do. Read More
You mentioned that marketing and public relations were important, and fundraising, obviously. Read More
Whether they set up a trust or a 501C3 to help long term manage the facility or whatever, that they have a plan in place for if, heaven forbid, something should happen to them, and the children aren’t interested in it or something like that. So I think that’s really,… Read More
They started as a gift from a millionaire. Pittsburgh Zoo started as a gift from a philanthropist. And so a lot of our zoos that we think of today started out as private collections and then grew into the zoos that they are today. Read More
Does euthanizing of endangered species, surplus, genetic issues, et cetera, still pose a political problem for zoos and aquariums?… Read More
What are your thoughts about private zoos owned by people with means?… Read More
Will they survive the length of time municipal zoos have?… Read More
Well, it’s interesting, ’cause ZAA, I didn’t know about the number of private zoos in the country, but there’s literally a thousand private zoos in the country. And some of them are huge. I mean, it’s just amazing. I recently had the good fortune of visiting a zoo in Texas… Read More
In 10 years time, we raised almost $5 million for conservation projects, outside of the zoo. In just 10 short years. So I don’t have any idea how much we raised in 31, but a lot. But you have to use those. My philosophy at Pittsburgh Zoo is that we… Read More
So we make the capital dollars work towards conservation by bringing the visitors back, get the visitor money in operationally, kick it back out to research conservation projects. So capital dollars raised for capital projects do help our conservation projects, but it’s in kind of an indirect way, if that… Read More
And so when they’re funding those capital improvements, you can’t take that money and put it into operations, that’s fraud. You can’t do that. If they want to fund this exhibit, and they want to make that happen, then you have to do that. You have to build that improvement… Read More
So as a zoo, it’s not that I’m deciding that I don’t wanna take this money and put it into conservation. It’s that there’s different pools of money for different things. I have things I can, I have the organizations I can approach for conservation dollars. And we do. But… Read More
They were more understanding of the child, and what the child was trying to say to them, versus just telling them, oh, go do what I told you to do. I had one person tell me it helped their marriage. I never did explore how, but I had one person… Read More
When a zoo spends multimillion dollars on a gorilla, or an elephant, or a tiger exhibit, and critics ask why this money is not used to help animals in the wild, you say, what?… Read More
I say that a lot of times you have to understand that fundraising dollars are divided into two different categories, very separate categories. And one thing is called capital dollars, capital fundraising, and capital fundraising is raising money for a new exhibit or an improvement, it could even be a… Read More
If you’re trying to learn anything new and you already think you know it, you’re shutting the door for learning. And so that was a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun with that program. The interesting thing about it was it impacted how our staff members looked… Read More
And I only had one person in 140 some people say this to me after the course. “I know that.” “I know that.” Because that shuts down learning. That person’s not open to learning anything. That person has said, boom, I know. I already know that, I’m done. I know… Read More
What’s the three most dangerous words in the adult education language?… Read More