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
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
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
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
But it was more fun when we mixed it up. So if people from the aquarium went with finance department, and the marketing department, and somebody from Kids’ Kingdom, then people who never talked or knew each other got to know each other, found out what personality this person was,… Read More
What’s the three most dangerous words in the adult education language?… Read More
You know the three most dangerous words in the adult education language?… Read More
He’s not gonna respect you. Horse C over here, my husband’s horse, is a “make me” horse. So you gotta make him do it. I mean, he’s literally the top dog and he’s not gonna do anything unless it’s his idea. So you gotta make him think it’s his idea. Read More
They had different horse-onalities, and so the keeper would have one horse here, and this horse was calm and you could barely make it move. And then you put him on the lead rope with my barrel horse who’s running circles around them and scaring them to death, and they… Read More
We’ve sent everybody through this training program. And over 16 years we trained 140 some of my staff members. I ended up sending people from every single department. Finance people went, accounting people, the entire maintenance team went one year, one session. They all went together. They wanted to go… Read More
And so they learned, through this training program, how to read the animal and how to move the animal around. And we would have six to eight different horses in the arena at any one given time, with people on the lead rope. Read More
I don’t know how to get it over there?… Read More
And we’d switch horses, because the horses had different “horse-onalities”, right?… Read More
But they’re on the end of the line, and they’ve got this horse, and they gotta get it over there. Read More
Well, how do I get it over there?… Read More
I brought horses from my farm, the trainer brought horses from his farm, and then we put people in a barn. So in the morning they would have classroom classes, and then the afternoon they would go to a barn close by, and they would end up in a stall… Read More
And it was so cool, because here you’ve got people, and they don’t know the language. They don’t know the language, they don’t speak horse, or elephant, or tiger, or rhino. Read More