Well, way back in Cincinnati, for instance, we got a call from a local station, a local TV station. That was the educational TV station. And they wanted somebody representing the zoo to bring an animal out for their children’s program. So they called my boss and he said, “Well… Read More
The kids were… Young kids that age are a joy to work with. They would ask all kinds of questions, and everything was ooh and on about, oh this eats that or look at the teeth on that. Well, after the show, the station manager came down and he said,… Read More
And my neighbors all felt sorry for me, I guess, but it was a good exercise. And what surprised you about the job as you were doing that on a day-to-day basis. Oh, nothing really surprised me. I mean every day was a kind of a surprise ’cause I never… Read More
Yeah, in the first year I worked 364 days (chuckles). It tells you what my life was like. And we did manage to start taking a couple weeks off now to go to Sanabei Island. But it was work all the time. Fortunately, we lived about a half a mile… Read More
Were you still the veterinarian?… Read More
If you injected intramuscularly, they caused too much tissue damage. So now you are a new zoo director, looking for a challenge. Read More
And what was your day like?… Read More
And so you just kept injecting until you got the right dose. And there were a lot of deaths with it. It just didn’t work out that well. And of course the animals were paralyzed. They could still feel all the pain, they just couldn’t react to it. So it… Read More
If you shot a chimpanzee, for instance, with it, the chimpanzee would rip it out, and throw it back at you before the thing even discharged. But with the powder charge, it got the dose right now and it worked well, and we used it on a few escaped animals… Read More
Intramuscularly. And that was the beautiful thing about it. ‘Cause the only way you could give it to some of these animals was with a capture gun and the projectile syringe. And the capture gun of course was developed by chemist by the name of Red Palmer in Georgia. And… Read More
And it fired a projectile syringe, which was an aluminum tube thread on each end. Had a needle on it, screwed on one end and the size of the needle depending on what kind of animal you’re gonna use it on. And then on the middle we put a rubber… Read More
How were you administering these drugs?… Read More
It was good. We used it up until the time I retired. Read More
Never had any problems with it. And we used it on everything from big cats to primates. We even used it on hoofstock crocodile. It was wonderful for crocodile. Never had any problems with it. But of course, sertraline is PCP angel dust, and became a controlled substance and they… Read More
I mean, you could give a shot intramuscularly. There was no excitement period. They just simply got sleepy and laid down, went to sleep. The one thing we did notice is that they would do a little yelling and screaming now and then while they were under. Well, sertraline had… Read More
Did he say do your thing or was he- He was very supportive. Interested. Yeah, do your thing. But he was interested in things, and we talk about different problems. Yeah, he was very good. One of the first problems that we had, and that leads into another interesting story. Read More
We actually would quarantined her. But then we had a couple people come down with hepatitis, and it ended up that five people came down with hepatitis. So we called the CDC and they sent a fellow down two fellows down actually. And anesthetized the chimp and took a biopsy,… Read More
What was your relationship?… Read More
So we ran around the house and caught him and held him down. So we didn’t have to make that embarrassing call to the feds about their swan getting loose. First thing we did was clip his feathers and we never were successful at breeding him because we really didn’t… Read More
So we decided we’d wait till Monday ’cause we didn’t know how to get ahold of him. And that evening we found that the trumpeter swan was roosting over in a dump on the other side of Key Biscayne. So we had the bright idea that, okay, we’ll sneak up… Read More