You have charges who are dependent upon you. These elephants are not gonna water themselves and get their own food or get out into the yard. That’s all on you. And safety wise, you can’t have one person do it. God forbid, there’s a problem. There’s no one there to… Read More
But today, I need you to work as a team.” And, “Okay, we will.” I said, “Fine.” Now, whether the assistant curator could have done it, I don’t know. Obviously, he didn’t have the experience. He felt he had to reach out, which is great. But you had to do… Read More
And there’s a lot of people depending upon you to do your job in a certain way. And you can’t, and especially at that basic level where the charges of the animals. I mean, directors are not coming down to water the elephants. It’s not his job. His job is… Read More
What’s the deal?” And he said, “Look, I make you be excellent because one day you’re not gonna be excellent. You’re gonna fall below that. And you’re gonna be good.” He says, “But if I only make you good, when you fall below, you’re gonna be fair. And I want… Read More
That’s a good approach. That’s a good approach. And sometimes, and I will say this, sometimes you have to be inventive about how you get that information across to people. And I’ll give you a story. And I, we dealt, we had to get fire hose from sometimes the fire… Read More
So that’s why you’re getting the hat.” It was a little joke. And I got a call from the then zoologist or associate curator at the time. He said, “Mark, the two guys working with the elephants,” we always had two people for safety, “they don’t wanna work with one… Read More
So they walk in, they sit down, I don’t say a word. And they were looking at me and I don’t say a word. And I knew one of them, which happened, was gonna go, “What’s the fire hat for?” Which they did. Kind of obvious. Well, and I said,… Read More
It’s, you know, and I say, “Guys.” “Mark, we couldn’t get this done today because,” I get it. You only had two people. We should have four. I understand. No, no big deal. But most of the time, it’s not 90% of the time, we don’t get it. And 10%… Read More
You’re not gonna be doing 150% every day. It doesn’t happen. But you don’t. And here’s my story. When I was in college, I took a class, histology. We made slides as you would of the brain, of the, this, whatever it was. You learned, it was a mechanical thing… Read More
We said, “How come you make us do these things better than the professionals who are doing this?… Read More
And we put this great ape. Now, we had to move these animals. And we said to Dr. Fisher, “This is a really historic thing. We should get normals. How do you know what’s abnormal if you don’t know what’s normal? We should get normals. We should include our medical… Read More
And out of all of that, we produced a, I’ll say a book, a booklet of normals on gorillas, chimpanzees, ’cause we had a lot of them and orangutans. And this was a wonderful start. No one had done these many animals to draw blood and look at blood pressure. Read More
So we talked about your management style and I was curious of what you mean by the 90-10 rule?… Read More
Well, I always had a rule. I called it the 90-10 marks, 90-10 rule. Essentially, 90% of the time, and I’m talking about to the animal keeper force and things that we should do it correctly. We should do it at a high level. We should, that’s our goal. 10%… Read More
1976, a major move of the great apes from the old primate house to the new Great Ape House. Read More
Well documented, but how does this happen?… Read More
What science is learned from the move?… Read More
Well, I think what happened, what occurred was we were too successful in the old monkey house. Yeah. And Dr. Fisher realized that and we had to build. And again, that goes to the building and all the activity around it, and all. I mean, I was involved in more… Read More
And we were pretty much on top of it. I mean, we didn’t know what the ultimate end would be, but we were trying to get all our ducks in order. And to make sure that if this happened, this would happen, if this didn’t happen, and we were trying… Read More
But that was the only other time he really said, “Look, I’m the director, what’s going on here?” On major things, when we had a tranquilized major animals like Sinbad for his tooth operation or stuff like that, he was always on hand to make sure, “What are we doing?… Read More