Sure. We kind of consulting before we do it, you know, no surprises. And that worked out really, really well. The only times he micromanaged in a positive way, not a negative way was when we wanted to get koalas for our exhibit. And we weren’t getting them from Australia,… Read More
And he had left the St. Louis Zoo and was now raising ficus in a nursery in Florida. Read More
Can you talk a little bit more about how you manage them?… Read More
Well, when I was curator, we did have a very big collection of great apes. We’re very fortunate. A lot of the babies that had been born were females. We had new males. So we really had some nice troops being formed. The management, as it turned out, again, I’d… Read More
So I kind of had the philosophy of, I will tell Dr. Fisher what I’d like to do. I’m not gonna ask his permission. I’m gonna tell him though, ahead of time, “I wanna take this gorilla male and put it with this one. And we’ll have, we’ll do this… Read More
Do you feel he had a tendency to micromanage at all?… Read More
It was, somebody discovered it and it’s around. These basic principles, now, you can massage them and do a lot of things with them. They don’t change. As excitement increases, barriers weaken. That’s a tenant of one of the things that Heini Hediger talks about. What does that mean? If… Read More
When you build things, you have to be aware of the jumping of animals, of the burrowing of that, what are you dealing with?… Read More
These are just basic tenants. You gotta be a student of the game. If you said to somebody, “What’s the international zoo yearbook?” What is it? It’s been around for like 45 years and they have papers. Now, they’re now online. So you know, it goes with the new age. Read More
There’s a lot of stuff. So to me, these types of publications, the zoo publications are so important for people in the profession to be students of the game, understand the history of your profession, understand the tenants of your profession. And you become a much more valuable keeper, valuable… Read More
What are the building blocks of your profession?… Read More
What should you know? Basic stuff. It’s, I don’t wanna make a baseball analogy here, but the bottom line is you gotta know how to pitch. You got these fundamentals, the fundamentals of your business. And I found that a lot of people who are in the profession don’t know… Read More
When you’re a new animal keeper, that should be the, here’s this, read this. And I don’t find that people do. Heini Hediger who is called the father of zoo biology, that’s a pretty good title. It is a big title. Who wrote books, “Man and Animal in the Zoo,”… Read More
But all of a sudden, it was so powerful a lesson ’cause he discovered it. Sure. And that was important. And so that’s something he’s gonna do. The rest of his life. Absolutely. Well done. Well done. And he’s gonna teach that to somebody. “Yeah. That day I found the… Read More
So maybe this ties into, you often say that a professional zoo person needs to be a student of the game. What do you mean by that?… Read More
Okay. I’m gonna go on a soapbox here, but here’s the deal. Let her rip. When I say you gotta be a student of the game, I mean, you have to understand your profession. You have to have, ideally, you have to have a deeper understanding of your profession. Read More
What has been written about things?… Read More
Oh. And then I’m thinking, “What’s the deal?… Read More
Why am I finding this?” Right? Again, I am finding this. The keeper should have looked. And they knew to check, it’s all right. So we had a new keeper there, had not a lot of experience. So I said, “What can I do? I can go out there and… Read More
So I say to the new keep, I said, “Joe, have you checked the animals in the back end?” “Oh no, I was gonna do that.” I said, “Yeah, let’s go. What do we got there?… Read More