Yeah, not extensively. And actually it was after I got to the University of California that I started doing race horse work. I was a track veterinarian at the California State Fair for two or three years. And that was an interesting experience. I would sometimes go to the race… Read More
Well, in the university setting, there is a animal use committee and they have to be involved in decisions for research appropriateness, this sort of thing. In most zoos that I dealt with, there may have been a veterinary committee, but we didn’t have one at the Sacramento Zoo for… Read More
How did you remain involved and what did retirement allow you to do freeing you up for those daily things?… Read More
Well, the most important thing that retirement did for me was it did away with having to attend committee meetings so that I could do what I wanted to do, and that was continue being concerned about animals. And I kept those interests going by continuing to read. I was… Read More
What was the epiphany that you knew you needed to move forward?… Read More
Do you have any particular animals or family of animals that you prefer to work with and why?… Read More
I don’t wanna say favorites but- You know, it’s a fair enough question to know which animals kind of receive your emphasis. And I wrote it out a biography entitled Hummingbirds to Elephants, and I’ve done just that, I’ve dealt with hummingbirds, with fractures and elephants with bad tusks and… Read More
For instance, we had a resident that was interested in the ratites when ostriches and emus became extremely popular in the private sector, this fellow really got enthralled with those animals and essentially took over that part of the practice. In later years, I drifted to handling more of the… Read More
When you were doing your work at Sacramento Zoo, did you make use of a medical committee of other experts, or did you already have them at your disposal in the university setting?… Read More
We kind of touched on this a little, are zoos today doing enough to manage their animal collections regarding medical husbandry?… Read More
I think the zoos are doing as much as they can. All these institutions have money problems, and doing things for the animal is I think pretty high on the priority list for most zoo administrations, they know that they’ve got a lot invested in these animals. And certainly there… Read More
But when you explain to them, we had a choice of either letting it die or killing it ourselves, or doing that surgery, we prolonged the life of the animal, it’s living a good life, it’s producing, it’s getting along just fine. Read More
Did you ever bring animals home to take care of them?… Read More
(laughs) Yeah, I’ve brought animals home to take care of them. I’ve have had chimpanzees, I’ve had macaques, I had skunks, baby skunks, baby raccoons. Kind of one of the neat things is that our children always wanted to have a pet monkey. So I had an opportunity to bring… Read More
But I’ve had others that have come into the home. In fact, fairly recently, while I was gone, a colleague, not a colleague, a client brought a camel and unloaded it in my front yard. And since I wasn’t home, but it congregated the neighbors and they all came over… Read More
How important it is to know your- Well, that was in a mobilization situation, and there are slight differences between a mobilization and anesthesia. But in that particular case, I was utilizing phencyclidine again, and I injected a polar bear that was on exhibit, and the reason it was on… Read More
So I was concerned about that, I got a long pole and we tried to poke it to see if it was responding. We got up on top of the exhibit and used a piece of electrical conduit to touch it, no response whatsoever. So somebody was looking out for… Read More
Luck is not a very major factor involved, it’s usually a lack of knowledge or something like that that gets us into trouble. But we also have support, and our keepers again, knowing the behavior of these animals can frequently let us know, okay, this animal does look like it’s… Read More
Or was there any difference?… Read More
Well, it’s interesting to look at the use of anesthesia, not as a separate entity, but in common with immobilization. And immobilization is necessary for studying individual animals and general, dealing with diseases and so forth for both free ranging animals and captive animals. But I guess one of the… Read More