And they would do things like this. So, we shortly convinced Dr. Thomas that cheetahs could swim and that we couldn’t depend on a water keep them in. So then he decided, well, let’s put an electric fence at the base where they would have to come out of the… Read More
Well, sure enough, she did that and she was reluctant to do it. So we told her, we’d give her a nickel if she’d do it. This is back in ’70s. Now you could still buy a candy bar for a nickel, Mark, but we gave her the nickel and… Read More
Oh, there are a lot of stories. Once we hit a topic, I’ll probably think of one, but the escaped animals are probably, and that’s something it’s not supposed to happen in a zoo as you well know we all have procedures for animal escapes and we categorize them by… Read More
[Mark] We’ve talked about stories. Read More
Are there any other stories, whether they be medical stories or direct oral stories that come to mind that you might want to share with us of your time at Brownsville?… Read More
Dr. Merrill’s first comment was my God. That’s the first kid I’ve ever had that could grab the forceps from his umbilical cord with his feet. So we had a lot of fun. We worked closely with the local medical community, and I can’t remember an instance when I ever… Read More
And if so, was that something you utilized of various physicians within that were not veterinarians?… Read More
We had an animal committee and a couple of the members of the animal committee were MDs. In our market in a fairly small town, 100,000 people, more or less in Brownsville and surrounding area, we pretty much knew the doctors, the specialists. In 1970, we did the first casserian… Read More
Well, speaking of using tools, did you have a medical committee?… Read More
And we’ve now documented a lot of these things. There’s still a lot of unknowns out there. There are a lot of emerging disease processes, mainly in the viruses, the bird influenza that has decimated the avian population all throughout Asia and it’s periodically touched us here. The one that… Read More
And that’s how it got started and probably came into North America with a flight attendant that had traveled and flown into to Africa. So these things emerging all the time. So we’re not done seeing new diseases. They’re still more that are gonna evolve and we just have to… Read More
I think they’re doing a much better job now, medically, mainly because we know more, we know what to look out for, we know what disease processes have created problems in the past. So I think we’re doing much better job now, medically than we did 40 years ago when… Read More
Once she found out what it was, but yeah, we brought animals home. Are today’s zoos. Read More
Are they doing enough to manage their animal collections regarding medical husbandry?… Read More
Oh yeah. As a veterinarian or a zoo director. Both. When we started in Brownsville and we had orangutan births, we did not, at that time have a 24 hour nursery set. So I would bring home baby orangutan, keep it in an incubator at the house and some of… Read More
And once you explain to the people, why you made that decision, they usually are positive about it. It’s the ones that aren’t asking it that worry me. If they aren’t ask it and they just are disappointed and say, well, I won’t go back, they don’t have elephants. We… Read More
Did you ever bring animals home with you?… Read More
We get more questions about that than anything else about where are the elephants?… Read More
But we feel that, that our responsibility to the elephant species is more important than the appeasing the public who want ’em for entertainment. Read More
Do you feel that the lack of having elephants at your zoo has hurt image, attendance, things like that or not?… Read More