The favorite part of my job as director, I guess over the years was the planning and developing a new zoo. One that had natural habitat. It was a long process, a very frustrating process. And eventually I think that the product, the new zoo was a very nice thing,… Read More
And as our collection grew and we got more big apes, gorillas for instance. At the new zoo, we would anesthetize them once a year to give them a physical exam. And we always had a team of doctors there do the exam. EKG and examine them from head to… Read More
We did if we had a primate, and then we were also called upon ones too, with a kidney transplant. One of the first kidney transplants that was done, they used two baboons to transplant the kidneys into young a boy. And I was responsible for anesthetizing the baboons, and… Read More
Did you ever consider, or did you ever use regular medical doctors or hospitals to help you?… Read More
We got them separated. But those were the days where the old cage type exhibits and the totally unsatisfactory way of keeping animals. The only thing I’d say about those days, is they got people interested in animals. And if you’re gonna get people interested in conserving animals, you gotta… Read More
He’s a big, powerful animal. And he could open those night house doors, if he wanted to. He’d break them open. One day, we had a painter in there painting, and he flung open the door and came walking by the painter. And of course he scared the daylights outta… Read More
“What did you use?” And I told him how much?… Read More
And he told me… He says, “Oh my gosh.” He says, “That’s not enough.” So we turned around and looking here was Colonel sitting up in the back of the station wagon (chuckles) looking around, trying to see what was going on. So we made the decision that he was… Read More
“I thought somebody apparently left a lock off, “or he broke it, I don’t know which. Read More
And he came out, met me at the exhibit and he said, “What happened?… Read More
And I shot him and hit him right in the thigh. And he of course pulled the syringe out immediately and threw it back at me. But he didn’t run. He stayed up there, which surprised me. And after three or four minutes, he started getting a little groggy, and… Read More
And I drove back over to the exhibit. In the meantime, our secretary had gotten a hold of our vet, our full-time vet. Read More
So we did a stair off for a few minutes. He was trying to figure out what I was doing there. And I was trying to figure out how I get a shot at him. So finally I told my head keeper to go over in the parking lot. Behind… Read More
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