We discovered we had built a constituency. The local people storm the governor’s residence. He had to go out the back window, which I think was absolutely marvelous. And that was the end of the Hinode Penguin Company, but it was not the end of the penguins. And now they’re… Read More
This community is trying to preserve those penguins. That must happen with elephants. It’s damn difficult with tigers. Two questions. Read More
Tourism has become a major profession. It was non-existent when I started there, it’s really major now. But beyond tourism, the people themselves are involved with the wildlife. After we got Punta Tombo, which is now a famous penguin colony, the largest colony of penguins on any major continent in… Read More
We wrote people called and so on, what happened?… Read More
Here we are, that was in 1964, the latest count is 52,000, the elephant seals, the only continental colony of elephant seals in the world. We have now over a million penguins. The sea lions, which was over a quarter of a million sea lions had been killed on Peninsula… Read More
The challenge now is to see can these people and these big colonies of animals live in this environment together, can they share it together?… Read More
With that sort of a situation, it is astonishing that the zoo associations have done so well and are continuing to do well. Although I wrote the original accreditation program so many years ago, it is much better now than it was when I wrote it. The species survival plan… Read More
You are retired as general director yet still are active, are you still active in the zoological field or just the conservation field and what projects are you involved with right now?… Read More
Primarily in conservation I’ve been very interested and in fact started the wildlife conservation society’s program in Patagonia, the Patagonian Coastal Zone Management Plan. And the concept was to take an entire ecosystem, it’s vast, almost 3000 mile long coastline of Southern Argentina with its extraordinary colonies of sea lions,… Read More
30 Years ago, the AZA’s forerunner, the AAZPA had virtually no scientific staff. Let’s see, I guess it just about had a species survival plan. We just started it 30 years ago and not long before that we started the accreditation program, but all of these efforts to professionalize the… Read More
How does that American Zoo Association compare with the American Zoo Association or the AAZPA of 30 years ago?… Read More
What do you see as the difference from that organization?… Read More
They have to have some place to live, something to eat, some way to raise their children. The human population growth, which has almost tripled since I was born, is the fundamental problem. We can talk about conservation at length, but we’ll only be able to preserve small groups of… Read More
China and India are building four coal power plants a week. Nothing we do in the west will matter as long as this continues. And it affects wildlife. It affects life. It affects you and me. If we can’t control our numbers, we can’t protect the numbers of wildlife. And… Read More
AZA member Steve Burns, who incidentally is from Boise is leading the field conservation committee of the AZA, which I founded in 1999. And he’s doing a wonderful job. The concept that he has developed is to get every AZA zoo, to contribute a percentage of its income to conservation… Read More
Consider the Serengeti threatened by a road right across. There is the great Tambopata Park in Peru is being chewed up, cut up, bulldozed by timber interests and gold mining. This is a national park. Everything that is happening is against the law. They Peruvian officials claim they do not… Read More
Ivory is not coming into the United States and Europe mow, it’s going to China. We have no control over that market. In fact, we owe them money. Not a happy situation. There is no clear way other than actually trying to stop, the poachers and to see that those… Read More
What issues would you like the American Zoo Association to be addressing right now?… Read More
Actually, they are doing some wonderful things right now. I should start that again. AZA, the American Zoo Association is doing some wonderful things right now. They have become, I think, fully dedicated to conservation. They’re dealing with the problem that their sources of income in many cases, if not… Read More
The wildlife conservation society was struggling, I was, I was trying to run an elephant conservation program and I had a talk with Liz Claiborne, you know who Liz Claiborne is, everybody knows who Liz Claiborne, the great stylist is, and one of the greatest American businesswomen. Liz Claiborne had… Read More