And, (chuckles) one day I was sitting in the office and our head keeper came running into the office this Friday afternoon. He said, “Colonel’s out.” And it took a few minutes for me to figure out what Colonel was. And then I realized it was a big male chimp. Read More
And by that time we were using ketamine. We weren’t using sertraline. I wasn’t familiar with it. So I did a quick brush up on dosages, and I loaded up three darts figuring I could miss him a couple times, but the third time I better get him (chuckles). So… Read More
And the Jaguar. Colonel was a chimpanzee that somebody raised as a pet. And so he was totally screwed up psychologically. We’d try introducing females with him and he was just scared to death of them. And he’d run and hide, and scream and all that. But he was a… Read More
His wife and kids were able to come back, but he snuck out of there in the of dead night one time and made it back to this country. But, (chuckles) he had a wild time down there. Now we were talking about tranquilizers and doses and so forth. And… Read More
Yeah, I had been zoo director and veterinarian for three years and then we hired another fellow as the zoo veterinarian. And that took a lot of burden off me, although I was being cut off from what I really liked to do and into the political part of it… Read More
And eventually we did such a good job of it. We didn’t know what to do with all the surplus animals. So when I left the zoo field, 22 years ago, half of our animals were on some kind of birth control. Either they were all male herds, or we… Read More
But the way the endangered species act was written, we could not move a tiger. We could not sell or send off on a breeding loan captive bred tigers to other zoos. If we had an old tiger was dying, we couldn’t euthanize it, without a permit from the federal… Read More
And of course the cubs in nine months were pretty good size. So it was unworkable, and the AAZPA and their wisdom hired George Steele, who was a lobbyist. Worked for (indistinct) and also an attorney. And he was stationed in Washington. And he worked with the feds and it… Read More
We went after them for 11 years, to pass an endangered species act. Finally in 1973, they passed it. And the way it was written, it would’ve put almost every zoo in the country out of business. They listed endangered species. And I swear they must have had kids right… Read More
I’d go down there at times when they import a couple thousand monkeys, and a thousand would be dead. It was just… Really it was depressing. And one of the things that got AAZPA and the endangered species mode was the orangutans problem. And I saw orangutans come in there. Read More
We shouldn’t be bringing these animals in for pets, and maybe not even for zoos anymore because we could breed them in zoos. But especially the pet trade. And we developed our own restricted list, our own endangered species list back in 1962. And the orangutans was the first thing… Read More
And they did mainly importation of animals for pets. Ralph Curtiss worked for him for a while. And then Ralph went off on his own. He couldn’t stand the pet trade part of it. And we dealt with Ralph. Ralph was a very honest, very good person. He really took… Read More
I mean, who were some of the names that you had to deal with and how did they operate?… Read More
And you were right at the epicenter. Yeah, Bill Chase was the first one that we dealt with. Charles B. Chase was the name, but he went by Bill. Bill did mainly zoo animals. And was a good honest person to deal with. I liked him very much. And I… Read More
Can you talk a little more about that?… Read More
The zoo was small. Back then it was 25 acres, and we didn’t have that many animals. Now we did increase the collection and increase the exhibits. So it got to the point where we did have to hire a education curator. And we developed a curator, mammals curator, birds. Read More
When you came in, were you able to hire other curators or people that would assist you other than a senior or a zoo manager?… Read More
So there was no problem getting animals for the zoo. And we didn’t really think about education or about conservation. Education, yeah. I’ve always felt strongly about that. And we did develop an education curator position, and had him go out to the schools. I had been doing it up… Read More
Were you able… You said you hired an education curator. Read More
Well, I felt that education was the main thing for zoos. Sure, they were entertaining, and sure some of the bigger zoos could do research. Conservation, yeah. But back in those days, conservation wasn’t a big topic in zoos because animals were readily available. If lion died you just ordered… Read More