(coughing) Excuse me. There was another death some years later, actually right outside the zoo, which was pretty traumatic. It was a summer afternoon, there was a number of visitors standing outside waiting either to go to their vehicles or to be picked up or whatever. And on the street… Read More
In the history of the zoo, has that been the only death that has occurred at St. Louis that you’re aware of?… Read More
We always would try to discuss that. And you mentioned, you know, injuries. Probably one of the more, well certainly the most serious injury that I dealt with was not caused by animals and it was not a keeper. But we have a train that rides around the zoo, and… Read More
Certainly for an animal escape, an animal injury, whether it’s a personnel injury or whether it’s two animals, you know, fighting themselves and and injuring each other, or what can you do to improve it?… Read More
Normally there could be as many as 100 people on there, ’cause there’s a lot of cars. It came down and instead of, normally, that’s the only hill going downhill, and normally they’re braking down there, braking on it on the way down, and then stop at the station there. Read More
“Well, why can’t we add more lights here, you know?… Read More
Well, you know the management was, I think over the years as we would see things, you change it right away, when you have something that you can do something differently. I mean, I mentioned the bear thing. Read More
Will that prevent something from happening again?” Every time there’s an incident you go over it, and try to figure out what would be better. Read More
When you were you were able to implement things, did you see things that you needed to kind of change on animal management in any area that you observed, and now you had the power to change or to direct?… Read More
Now, were there significant changes that you made in the day-to-day care of the animals?… Read More
And the security guard, our security guards carry guns, .38s, and you know he wanted to shoot, but you know, he didn’t wanna hit Bruce. And so he shot the zebra in the abdomen, which didn’t do anything, you know, to stop the zebra. And the other keeper who was… Read More
What lessons were learned from that?… Read More
Well, yeah he should not have been in the yard there. Interestingly, the zebra got up afterwards and we immobilized it. We got radiographs with the slugs in the skull, but the zebra survived. The zebra was okay the next day. And the zebra lived for about six months after… Read More
And that bullet that went through into the abdomen that they had shot, actually didn’t penetrate the digestive tract, but grazed it enough that there was a huge amount of scar tissue around it, and it constricted the digestive tract, and that zebra died from the impaction six months later. Read More
We’ve had several, you know in my career there, we’ve had several injuries to individuals. We had one keeper who thought that he had, you know, turned the little sun bears out. I mean, these are small bears, but they’re still can be, do a lot of damage. They’re a… Read More
And anytime you have an incident, we, you know, evaluate the whole thing. And you know, one of the things that we did change, was we surely changed the lighting in that enclosure that, you know it was, those bears are dark black color and the area was not as… Read More
It wasn’t like a big plane that if something happened, you could work on it. It would’ve been, if that thing would’ve woke up on the process, that would’ve been a little bit more difficult to mess with. Read More
Well, now wasn’t a zookeeper, survived a bear attack?… Read More
But you know, and then you’re talking with the pilots, you know, because you’re sitting there. I mean, there’s nobody else on the plane but the pilots and a few other airline people. But you know, so that was more interesting. But then we shipped another gorilla to the Dallas… Read More
Oh no we, of course all the time were shipping animals, and taking animals in, and different times, well we worked with whatever the zoo was. One of the gorillas, I accompanied the gorilla to, we were shipping it, I think that was onbound to the San Diego Zoo. And… Read More