And so he’s talking much more about conservation, environmental conservation, climate change, and the impacts of that. And he felt that there should be a new master plan, not necessarily a physical change to the enclosures, but a new way of looking at how to interpret the existing enclosures just… Read More
What would you say were the keys to maintaining your visitor’s attention?… Read More
Attention. I think interaction, if possible, is very important. If you can’t touch the animal or touch stuff, artifacts and stuff, then at least have it so that the animals can interact with them. Watching a good example is Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which I was at recently. You have lots… Read More
So these guys, we gave them the opportunity and they rose to the occasion and they bettered themselves. They got it. They understood the system, what the system was trying to do for them, and they worked with it. And we have quite a lot of them like that, which… Read More
Who would you say is the shelf life of a master plan?… Read More
I’d say about 20 years. I think after that, they get outdated. I was just talking with the director of the Woodland Park Zoo the other day, and he was talking about the Jones & Jones 1976 master plan, which was developed by the Hancocks, John Coe, Jones & Jones. Read More
And in fact there’s nothing wrong with an uneducated keeper. It’s just that you’re not necessarily gonna get the highest caliber out of them, but they’re fine in doing the work. I’ve always found that the best keepers are not graduate keepers at all. They’re probably somewhere around a school… Read More
So they would be especially insects, reptiles, areas where you need a little bit more maybe sophistication. And then we’d have the intakes for curators, assistant curators and curators who would definitely be graduates, but sometimes taken from the field, sometimes direct intakes of graduates. So over the years, we… Read More
So we need to upgrade the standards. But rather than sort of getting rid of those keepers… Some of them were very good, but had no educational backgrounds, but we started to implement a few things. One is we started implementing courses, just basic education courses, doing their school certificates. Read More
As they passed milestones, they would get a bonus. And also the disincentive was, if you didn’t do these things, wow, we are not gonna fire you, but you will never see any progress. And so we started also implemented a lot more rungs on the keepers professional levels. So… Read More
How important was professional growth for your staff?… Read More
I think it was very important. And when I first joined the zoo in 1973, as I say, I had four staff trained in veterinary technicians and the rest of them were laborers. And when I first came in, I said, look, I spoke to the board and I said… Read More
Are we going to run a zoo of some caliber?… Read More
What do you call it?… Read More
Welfare, animal welfare. It’s like, oh… So in the sort of the last 15, 20 years, suddenly people are starting to talk about zoos, are talking about animal welfare. We went through a stage where there was a siege of the zoo world from the animal rights people, from the… Read More
And it’s probably the most sensible thing that was done because if you have a complaint about a zoo, instead of nobody responding to it, because nobody in the zoo world was geared to make a serious assessment of a zoo. And so people like Peter would go, Born Free… Read More
Since 1970s, and I started going to WAZA in 1980, that was my first WAZA conference. That’s 42, 43 years ago. When I first started going to WAZA and mixing with the International zoo community, I realized that… I wasn’t smart, but I realized that actually nobody had education officers… Read More
Then this was I started to put out World’s Zoo Conservation Strategy, zoo started to hire in conservation offices or whatever they call them. And they sort of started angling their messages, their graphics, their design to be more conservation-orientated. And then recently, in the last 15, 20 years, suddenly… Read More
Why?… Read More
He’s nuts. So as soon as I can, as soon as he’s not looking, I won’t do it. But if I can convince that guy that it’s his idea, why are you doing, oh, I’m doing it for the good of the primates and for their enrichment, then he’ll do… Read More