(laughter) It’s funny. Yeah, there is a Canada goose, a bronze Canada goose at the Oklahoma City Zoo, it says something like, “In recognition of service as director of the Oklahoma City Zoo from 1985 to 2000,” or something like that. And they wanted to have a commemoration party or… Read More
(laughter) How did you feel about that?… Read More
It’s happened not too long ago with a jaguar in Denver, these accidents unfortunately will continue to happen because it’s the human element and what do you do about that?… Read More
On different subject, can you tell us anything about a goose statue and the commemorative plaque?… Read More
And it’s happened how many times with elephants. Read More
How do you instill into other keepers, you’ve got to pay attention?… Read More
You can’t do things that are gonna jeopardize you. I had a flat rule and this may sound silly but I always believed it. That when I inter interviewed a keeper and if they said, “Oh, I love animals,” that always caused me to pay attention because there’s a difference… Read More
Well, certainly you have to find out exactly what happened. I know that I gathered everybody together, I started asking questions, a lot of the keepers who were not present when this happened felt that what happened was not caused by human error. You’ve got to ask a lot of… Read More
I think when you have accidents like that and this girl’s still alive but how many accidents do we know about where the keeper isn’t alive, where it’s led to a fatal injury and how do you talk about that?… Read More
What do you think directors in general, that you could teach them could learn from this type of experience?… Read More
And so, eventually the medical team got there and took her to the hospital. She was very badly mauled, she lost her arm. And it was an accident that probably shouldn’t have happened. As we know, the majority of accidents that happen in zoos are keeper human error. At the… Read More
And this was a person from the horticulture crew and apparently the keeper had said, “Do you wanna pet the baby?” And that was enough to alarm the mother because here was a strange face and we all know what that can cause. And as a result, she was in… Read More
She kept saying something about her arm and there were two people with her, one was a keeper and the other one was one of our security people. And he kept looking at me, when she’d say something about her arm, he kept looking at me. Well, she had a… Read More
Can you give us an overview of what happened and how did this particular incident affect you as a director and how did it affect the zoo?… Read More
Well, it’s interesting that that that accident occurred. It was like it was yesterday. I can remember I was in my office and my secretary said, “There’s been an accident in the Children’s Zoo and we’ve got a keeper down.” So, I went immediately to the site and probably was… Read More
I think that was significant. Yeah, it definitely was significant. You know it’s interesting, the Bean Awards went from significant births, which is what it always was to if you had a colony of Bali mynas going that was reproducing and everything, then it started looking more at not necessarily… Read More
They figured out how to do that. So, there’s been a lot of successes that you could probably group together and say, “Hey, these were notable.” And those were successes but in 1998, a tapir injured a zookeeper and injured her severely. Read More
Bateleur eagle?… Read More
Is there one that jumps out of you in the birth of a species that you were really excited about?… Read More
Oh, there was always quite a few that I thought were really unique and it was really noteworthy. I honestly, I don’t know that I can think of them. I can’t think I can single one out at the present time. I was always amazed like wow, they were able… Read More