We’d been going into Thailand with the reproductive team and … Oh, probably about 15 years ago we started going over, and then … To digress back, I talked about the training program, Chris Wimmer and Rudy Rudran had at Front Royal, one of the trainees was from Thailand, Asopon… Read More
They had no gas anesthesia, so on and so on. So I talked to Sopon and he gave me a whole bunch of money to buy a bunch of equipment to take over, and so we did, took it over there, set it up in five zoos, you know, anesthesia… Read More
Well, I was always interested in, you know, how in the heck does a dart gun work, because I came in, you know, we put a little charge here and did something, and you know, you burned incense and danced around the gun three times, and then you shot it… Read More
You know, basically what’s going on and so let’s talk”, and so we talked about, you know, the history of the gun, the development of the gun, some of the experiences he’d had with it, how the military used it and various other things. Interesting guy. Very interesting guy. You… Read More
Yeah, we were very fortunate at that time, we had not major unlimited things like people thought the Smithsonian just went down to the basement, the horn of plenty and money poured out, but I would have to justify them, with the laparoscope, that was a fairly major investment, and… Read More
And so we tried to change that around by building up some confidence, and also educating their curators and directors that, “Hey, look anesthesia’s possible, let’s give your veterinarians a fighting chance to get their hands on the animal before the autopsy.” When you were Head of the medical services… Read More
Can you give us some of your reminiscences with some of the original people who developed this technology and how that kind of brought it along or learned things about it?… Read More
What’s the food you have here?… Read More
How can we access animals in your cages?… Read More
How can we modify diets basically to better meet the nutritional needs with what you’ve got without going to zoo premium or somebody else that has all these diets with all the vitamins and everything already mixed in it.” And so that was the way that we approached it, and… Read More
You know, what do you have here?… Read More
What are your cages?… Read More
I looked at that, the internships when I first put it out, I’d have over 100 applications for the one position, and, you know, getting rid of the top, getting down to the top 20 was pretty easy. Getting down to the top five or eight was just extremely hard. Read More
If somebody wants training we’ll go there and train.” And so we did that in Thailand, which, you know, eventually led to my stay in Thailand, but we did that kind of all over where we, if somebody wanted to come in, well we’d say “Let’s, we’ll send a training… Read More
We brought over some of the basics, and then we said, “Well, what do you have to work with?… Read More
Yeah, I hired two. Let’s see who the … I have to go back in my memory bank, Don Janssen was my first one. He came out of the internship program at San Diego, and yeah, Don came in and you know, Don is just a prince of a guy… Read More
Were you able to have during this time that you were now in charge of the veterinary services for the National Zoo, were you able to implement now programs?… Read More
Were you able to, we talked about interns, were you able to bring in, or did you want to bring in foreign interns?… Read More
Did you have kind of a free hand to implement things, “Ah, now I can do this or that or this?” Yeah, in a sense, I mean I knew one of the first big things was to get Montale on, get me a pathologist on, because Ted was, that was… Read More
I went to interns first, because I’d really enjoyed my internship at Angel, and I thought, you know, since we had so very few full-time veterinarians in zoos, and there seemed to always be the interest in veterinarians, especially students in zoo medicine, that I thought, “Well maybe we should… Read More