I haven’t had on opportunity.” I knew exactly what was going on. So he goes, “Oh, nothing.” “Yeah, let’s check the tab. Is anybody there?” “No, no everything. Oh, they look good, they look good.” And then he gets to the one. He opens it up and he goes, “Oh… Read More
And I just had a dwarf hamsters. What’s going on?… Read More
So I opened one of the tops and there is a mother and her babies. Read More
You had to be inventive?… Read More
Well, you had to be able to explain to people. We had a person who let, because of not locking a lock, a very forgetful thing that happens in a lot of zoos, you know, “I’m gonna lock the lock and hey, I got a phone call,” and you forget,… Read More
I see. And sometimes, for learning experiences, you have to pick your learning opportunities. And a good example is you’re checking your animals in the morning. So I go into the small mammal house. We had these animals called dwarf hamsters, Phodopus roborovskii. And we got them from the London… Read More
And they go, “Mark, we don’t sell them. We sell only a dozen at a time.” Now, that should have gotten me my first clue of how good they reproduced. Pretty prolific. But I wanted them. So I said, “Okay.” So we bring a dozen over and we put them,… Read More
What do you mean?… Read More
Well, I think the thing, here’s the, here, this was taught to me, the thing of explaining things to people to remove. When we would have bad things happen, people would let animals out because of their neglect. You know, they weren’t doing it correctly. And we had to discipline… Read More
I mean, just, it happened, but others were negligence. And you had to identify that and deal with it, but you. Read More
So what are you finding at this time are the difficult portions of the job?… Read More
Well, of course, always the difficult portions of the job are our personnel, I think. It’s a very, the animals are the easy part, but it’s getting people to do the job they were hired to do and to get them to do it maybe the way you need them… Read More
So how are you handling people that are not doing their job?… Read More
You talk about explaining to someone to remove. Read More
Well, I think the role there was making sure that the Zoo Society understood what we did. They were giving us money. And so whether it was the Zoo Society or the volunteer or the docent organization, I always wanted them to be part of what we were doing, part… Read More
The cool stuff. And that was a more powerful thing. So we were called on to do a lot of tours. And in fact, when we had our quote, unquote, “large mammal house” that had giraffes and elephants and rhinoceros and pygmy hippos, and had all these larger animals, we… Read More
And of course, on a lot of those tours, you, the curator or somebody else is with doing that. So we really helped the Zoo Society. And when we tranquilize lions and we’d have them in the Lion House and we were doing some operation there, were try, I’d say… Read More
Yeah. Read More
And one of the basics is make rounds in the morning and see what your animals are doing, how are they doing, what’s going on.” So my first job would be making rounds in the morning, talking to people, see what’s going on, every day had a routine, but every… Read More
So it was a daily routine, but yet, meeting people, dealing with all the personnel and then solving problems and so forth. Sure. And you’re also working with the Zoo Society now. The Zoo Society. Read More