And on the other half of that equation, and like I said right now like on our bird curator. They’ve got a great bird curator there. If he left or got promoted, there’s two good in-house candidates that he has spent a lot of time mentoring and we have made… Read More
Is there a good in-house candidate and what can you throw their way should that come up?… Read More
That’s accentuating the positive at all times. And you know, I only had a handful of letters I never answered, but I know that one lady that for years complained about the elephant exhibit. I answered every single one of her letters. I didn’t live up to ’em as quickly… Read More
I mean, there’s people starving to death and we’ve got more refugees than we’ve ever had, that how people can believe some of the lies and some of the stuff that’s put out there when they’re fundraising on people, on their emotions. We are restricted by our moral ethical code… Read More
Is that a problem as far as you’re concerned and how should curators be trained today to do what is expected?… Read More
You know, we have the issue that we’re the truth sayers and they can say anything they want. And that’s a communication problem to start with for a dialogue. I mean, if we’re using pure science on stuff. I’ve always felt a lot of it had to do with the… Read More
And I think we did it at Sedgwick County Zoo. I know that bad press cells and stuff like that and it’s an unfortunate situation, but if you can present it, and that’s what we did on this, and we always use that phrase your zoo. It wasn’t our zoo,… Read More
What can you help us do to make it better?… Read More
And that was always a tough question. But you felt good about those long range ones. We were one of the very first to contribute to the Tree Kangaroo SSP, simply because I believe that they had done such a great job and created a whole national park that it… Read More
Sadly, we even have people in top positions in our field who seem in line with what these non biologists have to say. Read More
Can you give me your thoughts on how best to deal with these groups?… Read More
We had some highly involved work with the rock iguanas in the Caribbean with San Diego and Fort Worth. You know, when the curator makes eight trips a year to the Caribbean with a permanent suntan, you know something is going right. We were involved with the Marianna Islands. My… Read More
I made sure everybody realized it was expected that they become involved in the organization and in outside work for the benefit of conservation and different things. We had picked up on that Quarters for Conservation. I did some math real quick on that. And you know, there are some… Read More
It starts manning up quickly. We went from donating our $20,000 a year to over a hundred thousand dollars a year real quickly into various programs. You know, you have that question. Read More
Do you dilute it by small contributions to a lot of ones, or do you concentrate on so many and do more money?… Read More
So what can a smaller, medium size municipal zoo or county zoo do today to be involved in a wildlife conservation nationally or internationally?… Read More
You know, there’s some medium size zoos, even small zoos out there that are doing some pretty incredible things. And you know, a small market. 3000 animals, 400 species. We had as big a collection as just about anybody but San Diego and Omaha. I mean, overall it was 17th… Read More
You know, the biggest thing that changed for me, and I think you’ve probably heard this from a lot of people, is that the amount of time that I spent out in the community dialoguing about development fundraising. Because even if you were at whatever phase you were in, you… Read More
And what can you do to help us make this succeed for the community?… Read More
You were always on. And I had to balance that with making sure that I had a good staff that was out there. I had to give up all the animal stuff I was doing. The last one was the bear TAG and the last animal, you know, I was… Read More