We did actually. We had years earlier become a member of American Humane. We were one of the very first organizations, the seventh one, as a matter of fact, that passed their very intense, hardest inspection I’ve ever been through, 90 some page report from them on every single animal… Read More
A true membership organization, really a true membership organization. And what I love about ZAA is that it’s unique. It’s a very unique organization, and it has that over other organizations because it’s a membership organization first with an accreditation option. So it can be accredited, and we have 63… Read More
Why would we turn away anybody who wants to learn and improve their animal care and welfare, why would we turn them away?… Read More
And the philosophy is that we want everybody to have a place to come, and to learn, and to improve their animal care, learn and improve their conservation programs, their education programs, get involved in conservation. Anybody. Read More
What you doing?… Read More
Tell me about your programs, how can we help?… Read More
What do you need?… Read More
Everybody was nice, everybody was like, how are you?… Read More
They snubbed him, for lack of better word. And he goes to ZAA and same responses we got. Read More
That was really nice. Oh my god. And I laughed and I said, well, that was like AZA of old. It’s the way it used to be when AZA was young and AZA was just starting out, and you felt like you were a member of this great organization that… Read More
I don’t know anything about it. He ended up buying it because they convinced him to by it, and he had the money, ’cause he’s a millionaire. And so he goes to AZA and he says, I’m gonna go to the conference. I’m gonna go to the national conference, and… Read More
He’s a chiropractor. Sorry, he’s a chiropractor, and he has like 50 different offices. Huge entrepreneur, millionaire. Millionaire, could do anything he wants to do. Well, the little snake farm in his community in Texas, the owner had died, and they were gonna sell it and close it down. And… Read More
And they were welcoming, honest to God. We walked into the icebreaker and it was like a breath of fresh air. Everybody was so nice. And I had five of my team with me. Everybody was so nice, and welcoming, and coming up and talking to you. And the board… Read More
And we all went back to the hotel together and we’re like, whoa, what was that?… Read More
We’ve got to get this ball rolling. And there was some kind of deadline, I don’t remember what it was even now, but there was some kind of deadline that we needed to meet. And so I sent them a letter via email saying that we were leaving, we had… Read More
And so we knew that we needed to be accredited. So we went through the process of becoming ZAA accredited, because we needed that for that funding. And that actually was reason we got in interested in ZAA, ZAA is the Zoological Association of America, and it’s only about 15… Read More
But we needed to be accredited. So we went to ZAA, we went to our very first conference, it was in Las Vegas. It was a blast. Had so much fun. It was like the, ironically, Mark, it was like the AZA conferences of old, it was so much fun. Read More
What’s it gonna mean, what do we have to do, where does it impact?… Read More
Interestingly enough, I knew absolutely nothing about ZAA. So in the months that we were looking at, we did a very thorough analysis when we were looking at leaving AZA of what it would mean. Read More
And one of the things we had picked up on was that we needed to be accredited to, we were getting some money from the state, not a lot, but a little bit. Some money in a line item that I had helped develop with Pete Hodgkins, the director of… Read More