We had six accounts in the city line item, six accounts. Animal food, provisions, it was crazy, staff. I mean, and that was it. That was a whole budget. So, one of the first things I did was we put together a full fledged budget for the zoo, independent of… Read More
I said, so how do you decide who gets the money?… Read More
During your time, did the zoo have a master plan?… Read More
And how important do you think master plans are?… Read More
A parent telling the kid what the animal’s doing, and you know that’s not what the animal’s doing. It’s a lot of fun. Read More
And talking to visitors, you learn a lot about where they’re from, where they came from, what are you doing, how often do you come?… Read More
Well, those kind of things are very important, especially for the leader to do. In today’s challenging world of all these electronics, and all the computers, and all the emails you get in one bloody day, it’s easy to get sucked into that office and never go, never go out… Read More
If we can accomplish half of them, we’re doing better than most of the zoos if we can get that done. So, I’m sorry your particular idea didn’t get taken, but don’t make that so that you can’t give us another idea, because you need to give us another idea. Read More
Because I walked the grounds at least three times a week. And so I was out there walking around, and so people get very comfortable with talking to the leader, because you’re just out there. And everybody called me Barbara, nobody called me Dr. Baker. The only people called me… Read More
Was that important?… Read More
Absolutely. Rounds were a hundred percent important. Did it every single day that I could. Sometimes I’d have meetings or weather, weather didn’t permit it in Pittsburgh, but we did have some challenging snow storms on occasion. But that’s one of the most fun parts of the job, to get… Read More
So I talked to everybody, I got some great ideas from the laborers, I got some great ideas from the custodians who cleaned the toilets. Everybody, I mean, that was the fun thing about Pittsburgh, too. We fostered a culture that everybody could give us an idea. One time I… Read More
How involved were you in the day-to-day activities and hands-on when you were director?… Read More
And did you ever do rounds?… Read More
The people that know the animals are born in the zoo, this is the only environment they know. So some animal rights people think we should take all the zoo animals and take ’em back to Africa or wherever they come from, and release ’em out into the wild, and… Read More
You talked about that you asked lots of questions. Read More
And it wasn’t that we weren’t providing him an adequate space, but he liked the grass on the other side of the fence, you know?… Read More
So I think that what people miss when they’re talking about animal rights and criticizing zoos is, often they’re looking at where we were 20, 30, 40 years ago, and not looking at the fact that, wait a minute, we’ve grown, we’ve learned, we’ve evolved. We’re getting better and better… Read More
So, I think that’s really important. When you look at animal husbandry, the animal rights folks want to tell us that we’re not doing the best we can by our animals in our care. But in reality, nobody gets in the zoo business to harm the animals. Read More
Nobody gets in the zoo business to, who gets in the zoo business to hurt the animals?… Read More