When you’re a new animal keeper, that should be the, here’s this, read this. And I don’t find that people do. Heini Hediger who is called the father of zoo biology, that’s a pretty good title. It is a big title. Who wrote books, “Man and Animal in the Zoo,”… Read More
But all of a sudden, it was so powerful a lesson ’cause he discovered it. Sure. And that was important. And so that’s something he’s gonna do. The rest of his life. Absolutely. Well done. Well done. And he’s gonna teach that to somebody. “Yeah. That day I found the… Read More
So maybe this ties into, you often say that a professional zoo person needs to be a student of the game. What do you mean by that?… Read More
Okay. I’m gonna go on a soapbox here, but here’s the deal. Let her rip. When I say you gotta be a student of the game, I mean, you have to understand your profession. You have to have, ideally, you have to have a deeper understanding of your profession. Read More
What has been written about things?… Read More
Oh. And then I’m thinking, “What’s the deal?… Read More
Why am I finding this?” Right? Again, I am finding this. The keeper should have looked. And they knew to check, it’s all right. So we had a new keeper there, had not a lot of experience. So I said, “What can I do? I can go out there and… Read More
So I say to the new keep, I said, “Joe, have you checked the animals in the back end?” “Oh no, I was gonna do that.” I said, “Yeah, let’s go. What do we got there?… Read More
I haven’t had on opportunity.” I knew exactly what was going on. So he goes, “Oh, nothing.” “Yeah, let’s check the tab. Is anybody there?” “No, no everything. Oh, they look good, they look good.” And then he gets to the one. He opens it up and he goes, “Oh… Read More
And I just had a dwarf hamsters. What’s going on?… Read More
So I opened one of the tops and there is a mother and her babies. Read More
You had to be inventive?… Read More
Well, you had to be able to explain to people. We had a person who let, because of not locking a lock, a very forgetful thing that happens in a lot of zoos, you know, “I’m gonna lock the lock and hey, I got a phone call,” and you forget,… Read More
I see. And sometimes, for learning experiences, you have to pick your learning opportunities. And a good example is you’re checking your animals in the morning. So I go into the small mammal house. We had these animals called dwarf hamsters, Phodopus roborovskii. And we got them from the London… Read More
And they go, “Mark, we don’t sell them. We sell only a dozen at a time.” Now, that should have gotten me my first clue of how good they reproduced. Pretty prolific. But I wanted them. So I said, “Okay.” So we bring a dozen over and we put them,… Read More
What do you mean?… Read More
Well, I think the thing, here’s the, here, this was taught to me, the thing of explaining things to people to remove. When we would have bad things happen, people would let animals out because of their neglect. You know, they weren’t doing it correctly. And we had to discipline… Read More
I mean, just, it happened, but others were negligence. And you had to identify that and deal with it, but you. Read More
So what are you finding at this time are the difficult portions of the job?… Read More
Well, of course, always the difficult portions of the job are our personnel, I think. It’s a very, the animals are the easy part, but it’s getting people to do the job they were hired to do and to get them to do it maybe the way you need them… Read More