It was a new game every time, needless to say, over the last, I guess five or six years that I worked at the zoo, well, let me back up a little, we talked about some great detail. When with David Anderson and David Robinett, I started working very closely… Read More
He was pro animal, pro animal management staff wanting the animal management department to have more say, so what happens with the collection and not just randomly have other departments dictating what we wind up doing or not doing. So, yeah, from the beginning of David Anderson’s tenure to the… Read More
How did these various directors affect you as a curator and your ability to manage the collections?… Read More
I mean, we used to wind up having to give her, send a report when an animal was questionable, you know, a heads up, oh, the Guinea pig doesn’t look good, and we don’t know, it’s six years old. They normally live three years. It has no teeth, you know,… Read More
But yeah, animals hurt themselves, animals severely hurt themselves, and things have to be done. And literally it would be something as possibly as not as important. I don’t know what the right words are. As a Guinea pig was severely injured, gutted, nothing possibly to do, but you couldn’t… Read More
I also believe that boards are very reticent to admit to making mistakes with their choices. And they will go above and beyond hoping, praying, whatever they do, thinking that their initial choice was the right decision. And I saw this, I think with the last two directors, I stand… Read More
And one of these things that cost us at times, I assume it still cost us today a lot of angst was the euthanasia policy. And you’re in the animal, in that resolution. It says that that the zoo director shall make all decisions about euthanasia. And previously to that,… Read More
I think at some point in time, I believe she caught the fever and she liked the idea of being zoo director and by osmosis, by affiliation that sometime, soon as someone gets the title as director, they know everything. Tanya had us, she was making decisions on emotion and… Read More
So the zoo emotionally, the institutional emotion was not in good shape at the end of Manuel’s tenure. We had the tiger incident, we had his management style, we had his knowledge or lack thereof and the zoo, like I say, emotionally, if you look at it, institution emotion, I… Read More
Has it affected the zoo?… Read More
What were the pros and cons of that management style?… Read More
I’m happy to say I had little involvement with him, because his style, what he would do is, he would give orders and he would also, in terms of, he would minimize people, which I guess worked for many positions in senior staff at the San Francisco Zoo. He minimized… Read More
And how did that affect how you and the people ran the collection?… Read More
What type of style did he have as a manager?… Read More
I don’t think ’cause I mean you need new blood. I think it’s important that our new hires, it’s great to promote from within and at times promote zoo directors from within, it’s important to bring new blood into a facility where you are gonna see and do things possibly… Read More
Once they hired John Lewis, he was then returned to his position as director of parks. He had no feel in my opinion, he had no feel for the zoo. And it’s like he wanted to be something that the zoos are trying to get rid of. The newest, last… Read More
One of those things, could be, you know, a low B type, that’s not gonna call multimillion dollars, but depending on where you’re gonna put it, gonna cost some box, and we talked about it, looking into it, and then the marketing department made this huge, huge stink about it… Read More
And that was a pretty significant change in an exhibit. And you do that every couple years, two to three years. And then you have the A project, was the one million plus, one million to the sky’s the limit. And that was the project that should be built every… Read More
But he also through his support staff, and whatever was said to him, from him being very authoritarian in terms of making decision, we then became the consensus zoo, where everything was done by consensus. And everybody had to buy into the plan before we could implement things, and it… Read More
The institution, the area, the politic of the city. And the culture, I think, it is funny how David did change as personnel changed in his management team. And when David, initially David, he was very good at making decisions, and it’s not like he would just jump. David was… Read More