So we was bringing it. So I had the fun luck of he help capturing the muskox, which was, I don’t know if you want to go into that, but caught them, we flew them to Bethel, Bethel to Anchorage and Anchorage back to San Francisco. And I was with… Read More
So all of a sudden we changed our plan and started making the changes, the additions to what we were going to get. And it wound up that I got lucky enough to have to go up there. And we went up to flew up to, well, first, I flew… Read More
Everybody had their own land. And at times they’re saying, well, we can’t take extra animals. They wouldn’t allow other departments, fish and wildlife bring animals into their land. So in actuality, though we were talking about muskox, we had given up the possibility of getting muskox because of the… Read More
They were reintroduced. They were introducing the Canadians subspecies of muskox white fronted poster bar grill. So Alaska has establish the muskox on this island called Luna back island and the animals were doing well, the island could support 600 animals and after 600 animals, they would have to remove… Read More
There wasn’t a bunch of them in the country. We weren’t breeding enough. I believe if I remember correctly, the last 15 animals that were born, it was 11.4, which doesn’t make for a real large breeding stock. So, and then you had the problem with multiple males that you… Read More
It didn’t happen too often. The only time that I could remember that we wound up bringing animals in from the wild, I had company, other institutions pick them up. But muskox, when I went up to Alaska in the early eighties, when it was a great process that we… Read More
Were you able to go on acquiring trips during this time?… Read More
Were you dealing with animal dealers when you had to move animals out or bring animals in?… Read More
Yeah, I was the conduit literally for almost everything. I mean, Saul was very involved and in terms of going to Australia for the koalas, and he went to China for the pandas. But once you eliminate those two species that you work with during my time, in that period… Read More
Some of the species we had, some of them we had to acquire, one of them that we wound up adding for that was the François’ monkey, François’ leaf monkey, which was, we knew we were getting with our sister city relationship with Shanghai, they had offered to send us… Read More
No, Saul was real good about that. I mean, Saul would acquire animals. I would be doing, I knew the direction we were going. It’s like when we were acquiring the animals for the primate center, we wound up having to move out all the primates that were at the… Read More
Were you responsible for acquiring animals or was that the director’s job?… Read More
I mean, there was a great debate about change. There used to be giving them all out meat and bones in addition to the stuff. And that was changed while we were there. I mean in the end, they were fine, we shipped them back to China. Saul and I… Read More
Well, okay. With the pandas came a team from China, that were with the pandas. There are two keepers and interpreter, we wound up assigning two keepers, their job was take care of the pandas. And that’s all it was. I mean, part of their job too, was they were… Read More
Were you concerned about their wellbeing?… Read More
Were there special things you had to put into place?… Read More
How did it affect you as a manager of the pandas?… Read More
The society actually made so much money from the pandas that they wound up giving extra money to like $100,000 extra to the Chinese government because they had it, you know, I mean they were doing so well. It certainly was a special time for the zoo. And like I… Read More
And they were allowed three minutes and then they had move on and we’d bring the next group of 60. And it was common for us to have a line with a three hour or more wait to sit for, to spend 180 seconds in front of two pandas. And… Read More
I remember that the gift shop manager was saying that she said that literally, we were making sweatshirts and stuff to sell with pandas. And she said, I remember her telling me. She said, literally every wet red sweatshirt that was available west of the Mississippi was coming to San… Read More