Interview 22122 – Caption Index: 498
How did you deal, if you ever did, with medical mysteries at the zoo, if you had any?… Read More
How did you deal, if you ever did, with medical mysteries at the zoo, if you had any?… Read More
And I said, “Well, can’t we at least try to castrate, and see if that will change it?” Because that’s what happened at a number of zoos way back then. I mean, those things unheard of today, but that’s what was taking place. And unfortunately we were not successful in… Read More
Well, I think every time you’re evaluating an animal, I mean your diagnostics, it’s a mystery. Read More
And so it’s a, open up the abdomen and get in there, to remove the testicles. And he had been successful in doing a couple of them on Asian elephants. And we, I discussed it with the veterinary school, with the anesthesiologists there, with the surgeons who did equine medicine,… Read More
And he was so aggressive that when they’d put him out in the yard, he would charge towards everything. He especially hated our security vehicle, it would throw, I mean we couldn’t have him on display. He would throw his feces at all the visitors, and broke a couple of… Read More
And the director had already made the decision to euthanize that animal, ’cause we couldn’t get rid of it otherwise, you know?… Read More
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
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
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
That was Dr. Eschenroeder’s hospital we used at that time. Read More
Now is that a difference between the cheetah and the Barnes Hospital?… 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
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
And what hospital was that?… Read More
And I’m telling the driver, “Speed it up,” you know?… 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