There was a time way back, again, this would’ve been in the 19, that would’ve been its second year that I was at the zoo. It was ’72 or so. Very, very few zoos had male elephants, nobody had bulls. And we had, especially not African bull elephants. A couple… Read More
But you were involved with castration of an elephant?… Read More
Well, of course Dr. Gilula was there. The specialist who does those things were there. And Dr. Ford was there, who was there just in case that cheetah needed some kind of surgery, you know, that he was going to help on a Sunday morning. So I of course made… Read More
I mean, and this isn’t unusual. A number of zoos have had a lot of consultants that have helped, but we did have to come in the back elevator. Now you’ve indicated that working with elephants medically sometimes can be very, have its own unique things, ’cause of the size… Read More
And she’s waiting eight months to get Dr. Ford. So that’s just a sideline of it. So Sunday morning after Dr. Gilula set it up, we anesthetized the cheetah. Steve Bircher, who’s our curator of carnivores and I, and a couple other keepers. We got the animal anesthetized, we got… Read More
And Dr. Gilula, who is one of our consultants, was there, he’s a physician, he’s a radiologist at the medical school. And he says, “Well you can’t necessarily judge, just because of that narrowing. There could be some other things going on. You need to do a, you know, CAT… Read More
Oh yeah, yeah. No, that was just a local veterinary hospital. But Barnes Hospital is part of Washington University, BJC it’s called now. Barnes, Children’s and Jewish Hospital are all one big, huge conglomerate, part of Washington U Medical School. And I mentioned before we had these consultants that we… Read More
Now is that a difference between the cheetah and the Barnes Hospital?… Read More
That was Dr. Eschenroeder’s hospital we used at that time. Read More
He says, “We’re already going 10 miles past the speed limit.” I said, “I don’t care, go 20 miles past the speed limit. We gotta get back to the zoo. I don’t wanna give it anymore anesthesia. It’s doing fine right now, but it’s gonna be awake before we get… Read More
I said, “Raise the head of the cheetah a little higher so that cop can see what we got in here, you know?” So they raised it up, you know, high enough that it could see through the window. And he never stopped us, we got on in. I don’t… Read More
And what hospital was that?… Read More
At one point we had, our x-ray machine wasn’t working. I don’t remember even what was wrong with it, but we had a veterinarian in town that said, okay, we can transport the animal over there, and you know, we can use their, you know, x-ray machine. And we did… Read More
And I’m telling the driver, “Speed it up,” you know?… Read More
And I mean, you know you’re there, and so you’re hoping to get into the large muscle masses, usually in the back leg. And (chuckling) unfortunately at that time I darted and the animal moved it or whatever, and instead of hitting in the leg, it hit the animal in… Read More
The keepers, oh gosh did they jump. (chuckling) Now you’ve worked with big cats, and you’ve had to work with cheetahs as you mentioned, and you had one cheetah that woke up in the transportation?… Read More
Well, not at one time. I darted lots and lots of chimpanzees, and lots of animals. And of course you wanna, especially if you’re using the Palmer capture gun, you wanna hit them in, you know, one of the large muscle masses. Usually the leg muscles are the, you know,… Read More
You’re a pretty expert shot, and what occurred?… Read More
And just because you mentioned outside activities, and going to Brookfield to assist with them, you also had some outside activities with San Francisco Zoo?… Read More
Well, that was not to treat an animal. That was the, the veterinarian there was, they had some issues with the veterinarian. There was an acting director there who called us in. There was myself and two other veterinarians that were, Mary Fowler being one of them, Phil Robinson the… Read More