Interview 15695 – Caption Index: 312
I think in the long run, what’s a zoo without a lion, if you don’t have lions?… Read More
I think in the long run, what’s a zoo without a lion, if you don’t have lions?… Read More
This was happening. They were doing a lot of research in labs with white rats and white mice. But nevertheless, the message was the same. You’re going to have some genetic anomalies if we aren’t careful. A lot of that spilled over into zoos. And so, this idea of that… Read More
That was what this was all started out to be. Somehow it got changed. And there are a lot of reasons how it got changed. I really think that there should have been a system for monitoring the direction it was going. It was identified as this is what we… Read More
What had promulgated a lot of this was new information about inbreeding depressions and what was going to happen if the genetics of these populations didn’t change and they weren’t managed?… Read More
And when we got in this business in 1967, if you said you were going to build an insectarium, somebody would’ve thought you were crazy. And yet, that’s a very popular exhibit. And today I think you’ve got to have a collection that’s got an insectarium because it’s part of… Read More
And then it was changed to Species Survival Plan. At that time, Denny Merrit was chairman of the Wildlife Management Committee and I was vice chairman. And the charge was given to the committee to start looking at species that we’d like to have in a sustainable plan. Read More
What kind of exhibits do we want to build that are gonna be popular with the public?… Read More
And that synced with what kind of exhibits do we want to have?… Read More
We had a fiduciary responsibility. We all had a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that we operated it so that we could do the things that we wanted to do. And that meant being very cost conscious and thinking about ways in which we can gather more money. So, when… Read More
And I think that was something that we really had to think about in terms of what we wanted the collection to be. Read More
And the second part of that is the science slash research, how important was that?… Read More
I think that when we started looking at those four purposes of a zoo, we obviously in 1985, we needed to find every way we could to try to generate funding against an economy which wasn’t going to support it very well. I know as I went through the profession,… Read More
What role did you see Oklahoma City playing in that?… Read More
How important is conservation?… Read More
And did you have to then find the money to build the Great Escape?… Read More
No because the sales tax took care of it, the sales tax funded the exhibit and that’s where the money came. And that’s where the monies came for all of the exhibits after that. We did have some private donations that helped but they were largely funded by the monies… Read More
Actually that term, “Great Escape,” had been there. The prior director had wanted to build a Great Escape but he’d wanted to do it totally different than what it ended up. He wanted to use the sides of a building as a backdrop and it wasn’t going to work that… Read More
So, the bonding company had to take over getting this project done. Well, needless to say because of the oil boom, the people who had money, who made pledges didn’t have money anymore. So, they lost, I don’t know, 2 or $3 million in pledges. So, here we were, we… Read More
So, this great ape area was the first that you put together?… Read More
So, we eliminated two bad buildings with one new state of the art facility. And that’s what we started doing. We started going, okay, it takes care of that. Now, we gotta do something about cats. And then we did a new cat exhibit, state of the art cat exhibit. Read More