And so when they, when they did that, the gorillas, you know, one of the females kind of directed everybody to go down and shift off exhibit and Bente went up and set the, set the child down next to the door where, where she went in. And so now… Read More
And he sort of ricocheted off a sloping wall and wound up unconscious on the floor in the water. And one of our females, benty, who had her own youngster on her hip, came over and scooped him up and was holding him. And you can see from the video… Read More
And in, in normal circumstances today, somebody would be putting microphones in the parents’ faces and, and saying, you know, why do you think the zoo did this?… Read More
Can you relate the story of a Brookfield Zoo when you were involved with a child that fell into the Gorilla Exhibit?… Read More
That was another very interesting day. That was, I was actually in a meeting in this room, we’re in the Brookfield Zoos conference room. We’re in a meeting with all of the senior animal management staff, and I had stepped out to my office to get something and heard this… Read More
But as it was when he got really, really ataxic and unsteady, he stepped back off the edge of the building and sat down in the bushes and went to sleep. Read More
’cause he didn’t make the move based on social compatibility and what had happened. So, so we packed up all of our stuff knowing that he was gonna be contained within the building ’cause that’s the only place he could have escaped into. And so we were getting ready to,… Read More
And so I pulled the truck kind of across, closing that triangle and darted him and then backed off and just waited for him to go to sleep. He walked up on top of the Crown Field Center in the middle of the, the zoo scared the whatever out of… Read More
And Otto walked up the back steps to the building and she was looking out the window at him. And because Sinbad was the only gorilla she took care of in the panic, she just thought Gorilla Sinbad. And, and that’s the call that she made. But Otto had actually… Read More
So having my arm wrapped over the animal, I know that my instinct would’ve been when she took off to hang on for dear life. And that’s what people described, witnesses described that I rode an OCO for the length of that stall until she clocked my head up against… Read More
Can you relate that story and your reactions?… Read More
That was an interesting one. That was auto. And we were, we were having rounds and, and by rounds, I mean hospital rounds. This is when Dr. Baker, now Dr. Thomas was working with me. And so she and Joel Pond, the vet tech were sitting around my desk, we… Read More
And so we were doing, we actually meant to immobilize her. I, I gave her enough drug that most maleo copies would’ve been asleep, but she was just standing and droopy, but she wasn’t moving. So we thought, no, give that a try. And I went in, I don’t, I… Read More
And she said it was terrible. I couldn’t, I couldn’t put him down. I, you know, he’d be all relaxed and I’d want to just take him and go to bed and I, you could take two hands off and he would hold you with his feet, and then if… Read More
What’s your perspective on that?… Read More
Yes. Your daughter had a perspective about baby gorillas. My younger daughter backing up, we sometimes when we had pediatrics, even when I was at Lincoln Park, you had a very accomplished nursery staff that could take care of whatever they needed in general. But when it got to be… Read More
And so we developed a, a very particular way of restraining the animal, or you’d grab one back leg, the other back leg, put an elbow on each arm and hold the animal so somebody could take a swab. And, and that meant that the command to his head was… Read More
I very, and, and seemed very comfortable with that. And many years later I was talking with her, you know, thinking about things and, and wanting to kind of explore how, how would you know, you looked like you were having a good time interacting with the gorilla. Read More
Maybe we ought to cover it. And they said, well, let, let’s just, let’s just do it one more time and you know, we won’t have to put the big cast on, we’ll just put a short one on. And they came in the next morning and the gorilla was… Read More
How did, how did that work? She said, oh, it worked great. We, we put the cast on her. The biggest thing we were worried about was that it would get an infection, a bacterial infection, and we weren’t gonna be able to see it. She wasn’t gonna be able… Read More