Some of the hippos came from overseas. I remember that. You know, we, we got young hippos. ’cause young hippos got along. If you put an older cranky female that, that didn’t work. So, so, so, but all but they’re social animals and they wanna be together. And then, and… Read More
I don’t mean to be arrogant, but it’s not the Disney way. And we’ll, you know, you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s the best exhibit. It’s, it’s better than a lot of the zoos that are waiting in line. But you can’t, you know, you can’t tell a zoo,… Read More
We were gonna get them, we’re gonna rescue ’em outta Kruger. ’cause they were due to be cold. But then that year they put a moratorium on culling. So, okay, we’re not gonna do that. We’re getting lu anyway, protesting that were getting animals from Africa and that, that, that… Read More
You can’t say, well come back in five years and it’ll look really impressive. That’s not Disney. Opening day looks like, you know, it’s a finished product. So the crocodiles couldn’t be, oh, well they’re, they’re gonna get bigger. No, we had to have, you know, three meter, nine foot,… Read More
I said, Andrew, how do we do this?… Read More
He says, I said, we both said, we get all males and I’ll put ’em in a small area because they, they don’t fight when they’re all together. When you give ’em too much room, they get territorial. He says, I’ll put ’em all together, only males. And we, and,… Read More
Mostly we did a ZA accredited zoos. We made a few exceptions, but there were, there, it wasn’t, there was really no problem. Getting in. The challenge was gorillas, and we’ll get into that, you know, the, the, but most of these animals, zoos were, you know, had extra hippos. Read More
Did you get them from all zoos?… Read More
So where were you getting animals?… Read More
Did you get them internationally?… Read More
Did you get them from private people?… Read More
So it was, our first animals arrived probably a year and a half before we, before we opened Animal Kingdom. Once we staged the animals at Luby, then we’d move them over the first barn I wanted to get done with the giraffes. ’cause we really didn’t house the giraffe… Read More
And they had a lot of land and, but we had to build the facilities there ’cause they had bats. They didn’t have, they Bacardi ran that back then. And so we approached them and they were fine with it. And they were very reasonable. So we built all the… Read More
And she was, and then we got the male from St. Louis Miles and Kiva, I think her name was. And so we have this, we, we gave everybody a picture of the, of the two, the two giraffes in the barn. And we set the first ambassadors. E everybody… Read More
So first I went to White Oak because I was good friends with John Lucas and we were gonna put ’em up there. They have a lot of room up there. But then the lawyers got involved, their lawyers and our lawyers and they wanted to control the animals when… Read More
So, so we had, we had some really good people from other zoos, but now where are we gonna put ’em?… Read More
We, we knew we had to stage the animals offsite. First of all, you have to hire staff. So you hire staff. But right after you get staff in, at least the core staff and the core staff are really experienced people We could hire, inexperienced people get trained by. Read More
So the imagineers are giving their baby, you know, over to somebody else that’s gonna do it. Totally different than them. So very different, very, very different schools of thought. And you know, they, they, they didn’t always appreciate each other very well. The imagineers didn’t care about budgets so… Read More
How do you start to bring animals into Orlando and where do you keep them?… Read More
Now how do you fit into this Disney culture?… Read More