Interview 13445 – Caption Index: 339
And if so, was that something you utilized of various physicians within that were not veterinarians?… 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
We have a lot of questions now, why don’t you have elephants?… Read More
So after going through a couple of these traumatic losses, which are terrible to go through because you have no warning and the keepers are dejected, the staff has dejected, the press has many questions and all that, plus the space issue we decided to get out of the elephant… Read More
And it can get things other than elephants. We’ve seen it in wallabies. We’ve seen it in some hoof animals, Arabian orcs, things like this. It’s endemic apparently to the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana. We’ve had problems in Brownsville. They’ve had problems in Houston. They’ve had problems in… Read More
When we talk about these various animals that you had to deal with, when you became director, what were some of the most significant changes that you implemented regarding the care of animals?… Read More
Care of animals is our responsibility once we bring ’em into captivity and it’s our responsibility to provide them the optimum care within reason. And within reason means within the space allocations we have, which are probably some of the biggest things in zoos. For instance, we’re finding out more… Read More
Oh, very much so. One in particular that I can tell you is when I was in the early ’70s, we had, as I mentioned earlier, I bought in some duiker, very rare duiker. And we had the largest duiker collection in the world at the time. And in 1970,… Read More