(laughing) Yeah, every year we have a big dinner, dance bash at the zoo with some big name entertainment, and all of our big donors come to that. And it’s a black tie affair, so everybody’s, you know, dressed up. And here we’re at this event and we get a… Read More
Am I correct, you actually had to deliver a antelope in a tuxedo?… Read More
So they’re all, got the animal immobilized and they’re, and nobody, they can’t, you know, they’re not, and you asked before about my management style, I usually let them go and get it done, you know?… Read More
Nobody knew about masks. But we TB tested then all of those employees that were involved with the necropsy, even though they had been TB tested earlier, but we had two people that converted from negative TB test to positive TB test, just from the exposure at that necropsy, to… Read More
Well of course that was way before COVID, you know?… Read More
And it had been part of when we used to have an elephant show, and none of them were positive reactors. They were always negative. But the exposure during a necropsy was far more than than day-in, day-out care of that animal. We’re talking medical things that you’ve been involved… Read More
Well, all of our employees that work with elephants, hoofstock, primates and that, not the office staff or that. But we tested everybody annually. Read More
And so he came out, and right away he’s on my case because none of us had masks on, you know?… Read More
And so right away we had to all get masks. Read More
Successfully?… Read More
That happened even early on. When an elephant goes down, it’s a big deal. And we had a A-frame, huge girders made, and then were able to hoist an elephant, get it up and standing. So an animal then would have time to recover and get back into good shape,… Read More
One time unsuccessfully I guess, or we were successful in hoisting it and keeping it, but it continued to go downhill and eventually died. And that elephant, and we’re doing a necropsy on it, an elephant is not something that one person to do a necropsy. We had four or… Read More
But we have a lot of volunteers who are in front of the enclosures and talking about the animals. One of the things, I remember one time going to a zoo, it might have even been Disney, and it was a huge flight cage. And I was going through, was… Read More
So one of the things that, I guess I did implement that. You know, but our education department was happy to do it too was, we have a whole cadre of volunteers. And not only volunteers, some of them are paid, who just do that. They’re there to engage the… Read More
A couple of questions about zoo medicine that you were involved with, possibly as director or when you were veterinarian, hoisting elephants?… Read More
Do you have any secret about getting people to read educational messages in the zoo?… Read More
You know, you can only sign the health certificate.” And I said, “Well okay, but all of its animal records is gonna go on that health certificate, I can tell you that,” you know, ’cause there’s spot to put it all in there. And the end of the story was,… Read More
I don’t know that I have any answers to what’s the best thing. You know, there’s some people that go and read everything, and there’s others who don’t read anything. I do think that, you know, you wanna have interesting information on there. A lot of times all you have… Read More
And one of the things, when an animal goes out, it has to have a health certificate signed by the veterinarian, that you looked at it and checked it out, and I had, and it was in good shape. We had it in a crate. I signed the health certificate,… Read More
And they looked through all the animal records and they said, “Oh my gosh, it’s had this in the past. It’s had you know, nasal discharge, you know, several times,” and what I had treated it with, and so on. Well they saw that and they said, “Oh, this is… Read More