What were the- The structure there at that time was like, you know, the lowest person was the fish house guy, and that was me. And then there was keepers and trainers and aquarists. There was three different categories. And then there was a curator of each division and then… Read More
Then, there was an opening as a keeper. And as I said, I was mentored then by Andy Soric. And he taught me all about the other animals that weren’t necessarily in the show areas. And so I learned a little bit of everything. Read More
Who was the director of Marineland who was the general trainer?… Read More
So had you moved up now?… Read More
Was your title move from the fishes to now you’re an animal keeper?… Read More
What was the structure like?… Read More
And as he watched the people there training the animals and he realized that their paradigm was wrong. And he had started to work with, you know, being more positive reinforcing and the animals getting reinforced for doing the correct behaviors and things like that. And you just ignore bad… Read More
It was from his days as a butcher way earlier on in his career. And this is how I would force-feed the animals, I would gather them up and sort of squat over them and tuck their flippers. And then, I would take and let them bite me with the… Read More
But it didn’t take very long. But Tom was watching me and he was fascinated. He says, “You’re doing this by yourself?” And I said, “Well, nobody else is helping me, so, yeah.” So he’d helped me. And then we started talking about training and reinforcing the animal and making… Read More
Is that management that you did so long ago, is that still known or understood by people?… Read More
Has that been lost?… Read More
It has been lost, the tribal knowledge in a lot of areas in husbandry or care of animals I think is being lost. There’s manuals on how to raise pups. There’s formulas, and you’ve gotta know where the sources are, obviously. With the internet today, you can find those things. Read More
And I walked up and I watched for about 30, 40 minutes and asked, “How old is it now?” And it was 11 or 12 days. And I said, “It’s too skinny. It’s too thin. Something, the milk isn’t probably good enough to supplement this animal. So you gotta teach… Read More
They had like eight animals. They were bringing orphans down out of Alaska. And what was going on up in Alaska is the indigenous folks up there had options, quotas, to actually kill larger walruses or adult walruses, and use them for subsistence, for food and ivory and things like… Read More
So I would have baby walruses imprint on my voice and crawl up on my lap with these big bottles of milk and clam juice. And as they got to be 2,000 pounds, they’d still wanna climb up in my lap because they were imprinted. I was their mother. They… Read More
I’m gonna digress a bit, but I don’t know a lot of management programs for walruses now. There’s not, the future of walruses right now in human care is very shaky at best. And that’s really a function of only small amounts of facilities and zoos would get one or… Read More
So 16 months later, 14 to 15 months, really, later, the pups are born on the ice in May and the males aren’t around anymore. But that’s not the way we managed it. And, nowadays, that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re shifting walruses, the few that are around in North… Read More
Why do we do this? Or why do we feed that?… Read More
Or why are the clams already shelled?… Read More
Don’t the walruses crack their own shells like they do in a wild?” And so I’d always ask lots of questions. And that was probably something that helped me in my career because people always realized that I didn’t have the answers. So I asked, and that really created, I… Read More