Bernard Harrison

Bernard Ming-Deh Harrison, born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the 31st of December, 1951. Tell us a little about your parents and what they did. My mother was a nurse, she was Chinese, a nurse during the Second World War. She was born in Fuzhou, China, and then her parents moved to Perak in Malaysia. My father was a English major in the army in the Second World War. A zoologist, actually entomologist by training. He joined the army or was conscripted when he had a master’s in entomology from University of London, Imperial College. And they met in Singapore and conceived my brother and myself.

My father then went on to do his DSC, Doctor of Science from Imperial College, and worked in the Institute for Medical Research in Malaysia, and then went to Queensland Institute for Medical Research where he worked on scrub typhus, leptospirosis, and was working on the mites. So he was the entomologist working on the mites in the inner ear of rats and those disease-borne ticks, mites. So then he shifted to mammalogy and went to University in Singapore, Nanyang University where he was a associate professor. And then he was appointed Raffles Professor of Zoology at the University of Singapore, where he stayed for about 10 years. Tell us a little about your childhood and growing up.

Were animals and nature part of your life?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so my father being a zoologist, basically, used to bring back a lot of wild animals, which were given to him as a zoologist, sort of roadkills, fruit bats getting electrocuted on high pipe cables or so the young, so I had fruit bats, owls, in Australia bandicoots, a whole range of stuff besides the usual dogs and cats. So I grew up having to learn how to raise them. Probably one of my most important lessons that he taught me was he used to go out every morning and set traps when we’re in living in Queensland, Australia, used to trap bandicoots and do surveys, and so I said, “Can I have a set of traps?” And so he said, “Yeah, sure.” And so he gave me a set of traps and I set those traps and I used to go every morning and check the traps and see what was inside. And one morning, I forgot ’cause I was late and I went to school and didn’t check the traps. And so he came to see the headmaster of the school. And we’re talking when I was seven, eight, and he said, “Bernard has to go back from school. He has to go and check these chaps because if he doesn’t check them by midday, whatever his caught is gonna die in the heat.” And so I went back and did that.

And I think that was probably a very important lesson for me about respect, respect for animals. The fact that doesn’t really matter what animals they are, you have to treat them with respect. That was powerful for me. So you took trips in the jungle with your father.

And did these trips help shape your feelings about nature?

Yeah, so as a professor of zoology in Singapore and Malaysia, although they had split as two separate countries, there were very great connections between the two universities, University of Singapore, University of Malaysia. And so we used to go up every year with his students to a place called Ulu Gombak, which is just outside Kuala Lumpur in the rainforest. And I’d go up with his assistant from his IMR, Institute for Medical Research days in Malaysia. And he was actually a Dayak headhunter prince. And so he was like dad’s laboratory assistant, field assistant. And we would go up earlier before the students arrive and build camp. And Uncle Ben as we call him, Ben Gunn, actually, ’cause he showed me how to shoot, taught me how to shoot a gun. He would set up camp, he would set up camp in one day.

He would go into the forest, cut down saplings, make a kitchen off the ground where you could all sit down and cook and not have to be on the ground because it would be wet, rainy, and make some other basic facilities. And then the students would come in with pitch tents around that central cooking-eating social area. And we’re talking about in the days when zoologists used to get their specimens by shooting them. My father would be walking in and he’d say, “Can we get that black and white giant squirrel?” (imitates gun fires) And there we go and shoot it down, pick it up, skid it, take the measurements and there’s your specimens. And that’s how he used to do it, basically. And he taught me how to shoot, it was great. He taught me how to shoot a shotgun. From about 10 to about 16, we used to go on these trips and it was probably one of the nicest things, two weeks in the rainforest with my dad and his students.

And some of those students I know today, they’re probably maybe 10 years my senior, zoologists in Singapore.

So in these trips, did your father then help you shape your consciousness about nature and wildlife?

You could say consciousness, yeah. It certainly honed a great interest for wildlife. In my brother, it honed an interest for botany. My brother studied botany at Oxford, and we always had this difference in our interests. I mean, he was not particularly interested in animals, but he really liked plants. I was actually very interested in animals and not particularly interested in plants. And that’s the way he went. But yeah, basically, certainly got us into a frame of mind that when we finished at school…

We went to boarding school in England. When we finished school, we both opted to go into biological sciences. So you mentioned school.

Could you tell me a little about your formal education as you moved up you were in boarding school?

Yeah. Okay, well, in Australia where I was in a primary school, then we went to Singapore. My brother was sent to a boarding school in England. I stayed in Singapore and did two years in a prep school, which prepared you for a British education. My mother was not particularly excited about me and my brother going to boarding school because she’d only see us once a year for six weeks. My father felt it was very important to get a good British education. At the time, Singapore schools were good, but he felt not great. So off we went to a boarding school, it was called Midhurst Grammar School in West Sussex.

I just came from there. Every two years, we have a reunion. It’s a boarding school, a mixed boarding school. So you have a girls’ boarding house and a boys’ boarding house. Boys started at 11, I was there at 11. And you go into a dormitory of 12 boys and you stay with that group of 12 boys for eight years. You move dormitory, but you don’t move people. And so you have these incredibly lasting friendships in those very formative years.

And as I say, we’re now 70s, early 70s. And through Facebook 20 years ago, we got together. And we’ve really been meeting. As I say, literally every two years we go there. The actual school is shut down, but we stay in hotels and we celebrate. And we celebrate the death of our friends, especially friends from a year above, a year below in our year, but fortunately not in our dormitory yet have passed away. And we have a very non-religious ceremony up on a hill where there was an old castle, Norman castle. In the ruins of that, we usually find it a hollowed log stump somewhere.

We each place a pebble as a remembrance for those people and just talk a little bit about celebrating their lives. So it’s a very, very powerful to me. Anyway, it’s a very powerful reunion that we do. It’s something that I really cherish, actually, and look forward to it.

Then you move on to other schools?

Yeah. I went off to University of Manchester. I studied animal behavior that was a double degree in zoology and psychology and never went to the Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester. Couldn’t stand zoos. I thought they were really not very nice places. And that’s not really my father, I think I was just a teenage thing where you just feel that animals in captivity is a bad thing. And then I went to Singapore, I had to see my mother. I’d actually had a place to do a PhD at the University of Reading.

The PhD was in social behavior of the long-tailed macaques in Singapore. And I’d done that because my father had died a year before. And so I wanted to be back, spent some time with my mother. So I chose macaques because there’s a big colony in Singapore, wild colonies. And I was with a group of primatologists who were based out of Cambridge and Bristol, Bristol being a guy called Crook and Cambridge being a guy called David Chivers, who’s still around. She was basically siamang and gibbons. So we had people who were looking at different types of primates. But when I went back to see my mother with this place at the university, she said, “Well, there’s a zoo that just opened in Singapore, and they’re advertising for staff and they want an administrative officer.” And she said, “Actually, I know the chairman.

I’m not gonna get your job, but you could get an interview.” And so I went down with her and I interviewed. The chairman whose name was Dr. Ong Swee Law, he interviewed me, asked me to write an essay on something or other, and told me many, many years later that it was the most childish essay he’d ever read from a graduate. But hired me because I was very enthusiastic and was happy not to take very much money in salary because I just wanted the job. I said earlier that I disliked zoos, but I had actually done some research and been to Singapore Zoo and looked around and thought it was very, very, very, very beautiful zoo. It was actually designed by a guy called Lyn de Alwis, who was the director of Colombo Zoo and also director of National Parks of Sri Lanka. And that led onto a very long standing relationship with Lyn as a guru. I used to call it my guru. Now, you are a bit unique in and that you’ve spent your entire professional career at one zoo, moving up the ladder, with many titles, different responsibilities.

So like to talk about that.

So you’ve talked about how your career began, but were there any other series of events that led you to the first zoo job and what was the position?

And tell me something about the zoo that you started in.

What was it like?

Sure. Okay, so Singapore Zoogical Gardens opened in June the 28th, 1973. I got into Singapore in September, I think. I interviewed the chairman then Dr. Ong Swee Law, and I joined the 1st of November, ’73, as an assistant administrative officer. The position was interviewing for administrative officer. As I said, the chairman kind of liked me. So he hired two people. He hired administrative officer and assistant administrative officer myself.

And so when I went to report to the director who was also in the interview, his name was Tan Tiangyo. I said, (Bernard exhales) “So what do I do?” Because the administrative officer had a very clear, defined role. It was administration, obviously, and education. And these were his key roles and Tiangyo said, “I really don’t know what we can do with you because actually we weren’t really about to hire you in the first place, but what we are lacking is the head of the zoology department. And since you got a zoology degree, I guess you’re probably as qualified as anybody else. And there weren’t any other zoologists in the whole of the zoo.” And so I said, “That sounds pretty cool to me.” And so I met the guys. They had four supervisors who had all done, I think, it was a veterinary supervisors course in the local primary production department. So they were qualified to give basic drugs out and do fundamental treatments.

They had some animal husbandry training, and then a local vet used to come in and look at the sick animals. So I met them, said, “Guys, I’m gonna be your new boss.” And they all looked at me and said, “Hmm.” So I spent one day a week in the field with them, working with them in the sections and started to learn the ropes. And yeah, gradually gained their respect. And I think we were all very young. We were all the same age, basically. I mean, I joined when I was 21, they were all about 21. Besides those veterinary technicians who were the four supervisors, there were four divisions in the zoo, one of them left, and then we created three divisions. The rest of the keepers were basically laborers.

And a lot of them were grass cutters. The zoo was situated in the center or is a promontory into the Seletar Reservoir, now called the Upper Seletar Reservoir, the 28 hectares, 70 acres. And so it’s surrounded by water, then surrounded by forests. It’s actually probably the most spectacular site for any zoo in the world. Sydney says it’s a very spectacular site, Taronga, but I mean, you’re looking at the opera house and the city, whereas Singapore, you’re looking at water, not primary rainforest, but very heavy secondary rainforest. So it’s very beautiful. Yeah, so just slowly started to manage it. The reason why there was no head of the zoology department was because the chairman, Dr. Ong kept firing every director he had.

And the vet, the guy who was hired as the vet, who was de facto head of zoology, eventually moved up to be the acting director and got fired within about a year. And so they hadn’t filled that position, that’s why I kind of moved into that position of curator. But as I say, I would work there as curator very happily. The director I worked under, Tan Tiangyo got fired by the chairman. They brought in the guy who was my administrative officer who came in with me, moved into the acting director position. He got fired. They brought in an ex-board member who used to be a deputy commissioner of police, a guy called Ong Kim Boon. He got fired.

And so he got the stage where the chairman said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have a director, then we wouldn’t lose them,” and the board said, “Yeah, that’s a pretty sensible thing.” So they said, “Why don’t we make Harrison?” He’s called me Harrison, “Why don’t we make Harrison assistant director and curator?” And we make Mrs. See, who was the financial officer, “Why we make assistant director and financial officer?” And so the two would run the zoo of this divisions. And that actually worked. And we worked as a team for about four years together. And then Jessie, what I call her Jessie, the financial director, finally left and she went off to join… She felt that she wasn’t doing enough finance and so she went off and did the financial job.

Then they looked at me and they said, “Well, we’ll promote you to director.” This is in 1980?

Yeah, 1980, yeah, yeah. And so I said, okay. And for some reason, and I think it was because of my youth, because I think I was 27, 28, yeah. And because I had actually worked with Dr. Ong, the chairman for six years in various positions, I could get on with him. I think I knew how to manage him and what buttons to press and what buttons not to press and so we just got on. We’re gonna talk about that in a minute.

What did you think when they gave you this promotion?

Did you think you were ready?

Yeah, I did. I felt I was okay. They asked me whether I wanted it, firstly knowing the history of the demise of the predecessors. And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’m ready for it, I think so.” I said, “I certainly can do it. I don’t have a problem. I’m not very good at the financial stuff, but I mean let’s hire a financial director and get on with it.” Although obviously, my role would always be looking at the technical side. I did get actually incredibly involved in the other side, the commercial side. Actually, I went off and did a marketing course.

I really quite got involved in the selling of the zoo. What was happening at that point was that we were not getting enough tourists. We didn’t get any tourists at all. Singapore had a lot of tourists, millions of tourists every year, but we were not getting any. And we could see that that was the key to our financial success. And so we really got immersed in marketing and understanding how to market the zoo and something we’ll get onto. But that’s when breakfast at the zoo came about.

Was the staff jealous of you, this moving up so quickly?

Some of them. There was a horticultural officer called Herbert Wee and he was 20, 25 years older than me. And he resented the fact that I was young and moving up ’cause we were colleagues, and then suddenly I’m now his boss. I just met with a colleague yesterday who was my colleague 45 years ago in Chicago. She lives in Milwaukee. She was the public relations manager. But it was basically a young team and most of them were quite comfortable for me to move into that role. And basically, they’re all waiting for me to get fired anyway.

I think it’s a, “Haha, let’s see how long this guy lasts.” So tell me about the zoo when you started.

Was it primarily Asian animals?

Was there a theme to it?

What were you seeing when you first walked in as you started moving up?

Okay. No, it was actually a mixed collection. As I said, Lyn de Alwis put it together. The first thing you saw when you came into the zoo, to the entrance gate. No, once you got into the zoo itself was the small-clawed otters, underwater viewing as well, and then flamingos, and then Barbary sheep on quite a high hill. So that was the entrance cameo. And then you had a choice of taking two separate loops or taking one loop with a tram and seeing the whole zoo. And so there was two loops with a central area where there was a food and beverage facilities and things.

And that’s where big orangutan exhibit was. But there was an African section, there was a reptile area, there was children’s zoo. And I would say it was a pretty, pretty mixed with Australian, Asian elephants and African, very little South American.

Was it strong point always the botanic ’cause of where it was?

It had a strong botanical leaning. I mean, the chairman had an emphasis on trees and plants. He wanted everything labeled. And he was a gardener anyway, so he was very interested in the horticultural aspects and pushed for the creation of horticultural exhibits. We had a thing called Heliconia Valley, which was just about 12 species of Heliconias. We had a tropical crop plantation where there were lots of different herbs and spices and things like that. So yeah, quite a strong emphasis on the botany. You’ve mentioned the commission.

What was the administrative structure of the zoo?

Was it governmental?

You said commission. It was set up as a public limited company, wholly owned by the government of Singapore. Temasek Holdings is the company that runs all the government assets. So Temasek owned $5 million worth of shares in the zoo. That was the grant they gave us. The zoo actually cost 9 million, so we were $4 million in debt when we opened. Temasek said, “Well, you’ll have to pay that back, the 4 million.” And while the board said, “Whew, that’s pretty tough,” but it was set up by Ong Swee Law, who was the chairman of the Public Utilities Board. That’s the only way that the zoo could have ever been put in the middle of a drinking water reservoir.

And when he told the chief water engineer that that’s where the zoo would be, the guy was aghast.

But since he was his boss, he had no choice ’cause he said, “Kong, do you want a job?” And Kong said, the water engineer said, “Yep.” He said, “Well, let’s have the zoo here.” So how can we prevent the water being polluted?

And we said, “Well, we have to put a stormwater drain.” So there was a stormwater drain that ran around the whole zoo. Two meters deep, two meters wide, which would take the first flush. The first flush, meaning, it would fill up with water, that water would go to a treatment plant and be pumped out to the sea, which was about four kilometers away, so pipeline. Technically, that catches any contaminants, so it’s fine.

How many members of the commission?

On the board?

On the board. There was about 10, various walks of life. Some business people, civil servants. As I said, it was a public limited company wholly owned, but it was set up to be floated on the stock market as one does if you set up public limited companies. But it never was and still is not today. So it was any profits were plowed back into the organization. But actually, as a company, it didn’t do well. And that’s why I got into the whole tourism thing because we kept having this big debt burden around our nets.

We have to pay back this 4 million and we have to depreciate the 5 million. And so it’s like our books were pretty miserable every year. And so we worked on the government to finally say, look, right off the 4 million, so we had $9 million worth. So they converted it into equity, so we had $9 billion worth of shares. But then we also started to not make money as we were meant to. And I think after 800 million visitors for the first year, which you have this novelty effect, the attendance dropped down to about half a million a year. And that was what we were doing for the first three or four years. And so there was this obsession really to how do we increase the visitor attendance by bringing in international tourists and Malaysian tourists.

And that’s when I actually got involved in the marketing and started to go and knock on tourist operator’s doors and ask them, “Why don’t you come to the zoo?” If you read a Singapore tourist promotion boards guide to Singapore, you’d see that, they say, “Okay, this is what you do on day one, day two, day three, day four, day five. On the afternoon of day five, when you’ve got really nothing else to do, go visit the zoo. But on day one, go visit the Jurong Bird Park, which is unique. It has the highest manmade waterfall in the world, has the largest collection of birds in the world. So everybody was going to the bird park, I was going to the zoo, although they were set up almost same time. Bird Park set up 1982. No, ’72. Zoo, ’73.

So as I say, go on this round of tour operators and everybody said the same thing. Well, there’s nothing unique.

What’s unique about the zoo?

I said, it’s the most beautiful zoo setting in the world, it’s great. But there’s nothing else about it. And so, eventually, I lamented with a guy called Dennis Pyle, who was the director of the Singapore Tourist Board for Australia. And Dennis said, “I was sitting down lamenting over a beer,” and I said, “I just can’t get any tourists to come to the zoo.” And he said, “Well, maybe you need to have some unique selling proposition.” You know, USB And he said, “You’ve got a whole bunch of orangutans there, how do you make use of them?” He said, “Can you have a meal with an orangutan?” And I said, “Yeah, you can.” And I know we flipped down to question number 46 or something, “But can you have a meal?” And I said, “Yeah.” I said, “We could do lunch, I guess.” He said, “Ah, lunch is too hot, you gotta do breakfast.” I said, “Yeah, but all the hotels offer breakfast as a package with the room.” And he said, “Yeah, but anyway, that’s the time of day to do it. Do it early in the morning, cool.” And so I said, “Okay.” And so he said, “You try and work with these tour operator who handles Australian market, Jetset or Jetabout. Yeah, Jetabout tours.” And so I said, “Okay.” So I dealt with them. Dennis said, “Talk to you, guys.” So we set up this thing, breakfast at the zoo, did it twice a week. And I went over to Sydney to promote it in Sydney and TV and stuff, breakfast shows.

And it was running, it was called Breakfast with Ah Meng because Ah Meng was one of our famous orangutans. It was twice a week. And we used to get like 20 people in a breakfast. Just okay, it’s not bad. And tour operators always got the wrong date because it was Tuesdays and Saturdays, they always got Wednesdays and Fridays. And so we get kept getting people sent up on the wrong day and so we had pull it together. And I was talking to the director of marketing of tourist board and she said, “It’s a Mickey Mouse show. Do it every day or don’t do it at all.” And she said, “Why are you doing it twice a week anyway?” I said, “Well, it was like an exploratory thing.” And she said, “No, I do it every day.” So I said, “Okay.” So we did it every day, which is fine, and we still get about 20 people.

And it got quite popular. And we got a lot of journalists come in, a lot of TV crews because it was unique. You sat down and had breakfast. And then about halfway during breakfast, an orangutan would come out, it would was Ah Meng, she’d sit down at her own table and she’d have her breakfast, which were fruits and stuff. There would be a commentator who would talk about orangutans, endangered species, and this and that, and characteristics about them. And then we’d invite people to come up and take a picture, to come and sit down with her and take a picture. And it was like getting very popular. And we were doing 50 maybe a day.

And so we looked at the cost effectiveness after the first year of operations, and I presented it to the board. And it had a very lukewarm reception from the board because actually it wasn’t really making a lot of money. And they said, “Well, do you really wanna continue with it?” And I said, “Yeah, because it may not be financially viable yet, but I’m sure it will be.” But more importantly is that, we’ve had like 50 journalists who have written about it and published it in tourism magazines. And we heard like 20 film crews come up and it’s like you’re minting publicity. They said, “Okay, fair enough, we keep it on.” And it just got better and better. I mean, we had to do a clone, we did tea at the zoo. So we did breakfast at the zoo, tea at the zoo. Tea was with young orangutans.

Ah Meng became just instead of breakfast with Ah Meng, it became breakfast with an orangutan at zoo. We had a Japanese breakfast going on. We had a Japanese tea. So we had two concurrent breakfasts and teas going on. We would get 120 people at each breakfast session and each tea. So we’d getting 700 people a day just during breakfast and tea. And it was incredibly successful. But probably more importantly, it really put Singapore Zoo on the tourist map.

So even though you didn’t do breakfast, tour agents started saying, “Oh, okay, maybe we should do the zoo.” Because it was in Monday, which is right at the north part of the island, before the expressways came in, it was 20 kilometers drive. And so we set up a bus service that would take you directly from the hotels to the zoo called Zoo Express and picks up from a few places and takes you straight up. So we just made the marketing of the zoo to international tourist much more effective. Will talk more now, the orangutan tea breakfast, ultimately, that had to have the chairman’s approval before. He was cool with it. So let’s talk about the chairman and your relationship. Chairman was the most powerful person on the board. Oh, sure, by far.

Series of questions. Tell us about him and his management style. Dr. Ong was a autocratic, He was a GP, a general practitioner, so he was doctor of medicine. I was gonna say he had his medical practice, but he was far more interested in public service. And so he was chairman of the Public Utilities Board, then became chairman of the zoo. He set up the zoo. He always wanted to set up a zoo. As a boy scout, he went to a jamboree in Sydney, visited Taronga Zoo, visited the shark pool in the Taronga Zoo.

So it’s like his whole life was love. He’d wanted to set up a zoo. And so he saw this opportunity of doing it and he said, “We’re gonna build it on this promontory.” He went about the world on a study tour when he went to do World Bank stuff, and it was go visit the National Zoo and zoos around the world. He was looking for a consultant on these tours and finally bumped into Colombo. And he liked the zoo and he talked to the young director, Lindy Allison, hired him as consultant. He knew very much what he wanted. He wanted a zoo where animals were respected, where the enclosures were decent. He had seen a lot of horrible zoos in his visits.

He’d seen a lot of horrible Asian zoos. And he had a very strict policy of not dressing up animals. Technically, he hated the concept of animal shows, but definitely if there were kind of chimpanzee tea parties, he had known of the chimpanzee tea parties in London and thought they were a horrible idea. So he had some basic ideas, but he wasn’t a zoo design expert. He had no idea how to go about it. Lyn de Alwis, on the other hand, was a very interested and concerned about design, designing naturalistic enclosures and taking that Hagenbeck principle and taking it through. So, yeah, he was a very strong-minded. Dr. Ong, very strong-minded, strong-minded character.

Got through all these directors, really, because he just felt that they were not up to the mark. They weren’t doing what he wanted them to do, which was run the zoo efficiently and effectively. To be honest, I mean, they probably weren’t because they were kind of de facto directors. There wasn’t a search to find a zoo director. They were just kind of, okay, well you are next in line, you go and take over. And you were next in line. Yeah, and I was def facto next in line. What he should have done, I think, is got a headhunters to look for a director.

But he hated that idea of that because he was anti-colonialist, brought up under the British, detested the British, detested the fact that I actually asked half British, but accepted the fact that has half Chinese as well, and told me when I joined, don’t ever bully the director. And he was said that to me, in all seriousness, not in front of the director, but just privately. And he said, “Don’t bully the director.” And I said, “Why would I ever consider bullying the director?” He said, “Because you’re half British.” So that means that kind of sentiments.

How did he shape your life, your career?

What would you say your relationship was with him?

Initially, a very draconian character. A huge stickler for writing reports, grammar, spelling, punctuation. We’d have this thing called dispatch where we had a dispatch boy who would typed stuff and send it down to him and he would kind of go through it and send it back. The dispatch leaves in the morning, and then if you’re lucky, it comes back the next day. If not, in the evening of the same day with hundreds and hundreds of just comments, corrections.

And why is this statement so bold?

And so it’s just dealing with him was quite painful. But there was obviously a good side to him, and I really found that out when I used to travel with him. Like one day, he said, “Okay, come, we’re going to visit Zoo Negara.” Zoo Negara is the zoo in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. I said, “Okay, sure.” And he said, “We’re going on Friday, We’ll catch the Friday. We’ll stay the night in Kuala Lumpur. We’ll visit the zoo during the day, and then we’ll watch the football in the evening.” Actually, the reason he wanted to go there is watch the football. We’ll, Singapore versus Selangor, which is like… And we were in the stadium.

Suddenly, I see this guy who’s like so officious and suddenly standing up on his bench and shouting and applauding or telling them that they’re horrible. They should be kicked off the field. It’s just a whole new dimension to him that I hadn’t realized. And I think through those trips… And I did many trips with him to the states and to Europe. And I found a totally different side to him when he was non-officious. I used to go a lot to China with him to negotiate for giant panda on loans, monkey on loans and stuff. And at the end of the day, we would go up to our room.

We were staying at the Beijing Hotel, which is on Tiananmen Square. It was a beautiful old hotel where all the foreign correspondent used to stay. But it was still in the communist, very communist era when everybody’s wearing Mao jackets. And you go up to our floor and there would be a butler, a grumpy old Chinese guy who would give you a flask of hot water. And we’d go to his room and he would have a put out a packet of coffee powder, and he’d say, “Let’s make some coffee. Go and get a sock. A sock out of my suitcase, put the coffee in it and we’ll make it.” And then he’d pour some (indistinct) or something. I mean, no, there was these kind of very warm sides to him.

And so I started to understand that he’s actually all not bad. He’s actually quite a nice guy, but he’s just incredibly officious when he’s playing his role as chairman of the zoo. And so one has to, well, respected, of course, but I mean understand that’s the way the game goes. And so understand it and work with it. And I think the point is I was young enough to work with him, work around it. And I found that there’s huge benefits to that because he then supported me and he supported whatever I wanted to do. And so I could do anything, basically.

Would you say he was your protector or would that be too stronger a word?

He took care of me. Protector is a good word. I would say he was also my mentor. I would say that I was the son that he had, but was not interested in the zoo. His son is to retired as chairman of Pricewaterhouse. Because we were the same age, I was like that son who actually did what he was interested in doing.

What would you say you learned the most from him?

Was it management style?

How to write reports. He really talked about how to write reports. (Bernard laughing) I’m not kidding. I do it tongue-in-cheek, but he really taught me how to write reports. It just relentless, relentless corrections, corrections. I thought you were gonna give me something philosophical. I think he taught me how to be pugnacious and how to be a bulldog. If you want to do something, you just focus on it and get it done.

He drove the zoo forward. He thought about it day and night. He just wanted to just get this thing. He was his baby. He wanted it to do well. He wanted it to be successful. He wanted it to be commercially successful. He wanted it to be the best zoo in the world.

Those were his goals. And so he pushed those and so I could see that was what he wanted to do, and so that’s what we did. And I could help tremendously by the development side, the design side.

Can you tell me, do you have a favorite story about him and possibly your relationship, one that makes you smile?

Not offhand, not offhand. I may think about something later, but not at the moment. So now you have the chairman support. Mm-hmm. He wants to build the zoo.

Aside from wanting it to be the tourist attraction, were there other challenges you faced in turning the zoo from a local zoo to his and your idea of a world class suit?

Absolutely. Well, I think we didn’t particularly plan it to be a world class suit. I think we’re always pushed on the fact that it should be a local attraction. And so one of his great philosophies was that we must have a new attraction open on an annual basis. And so he pushed that. And as working in a zoo, it’s not that easy to pump out a new attraction each year. And it’s not an acquisition of an animal species, new animal species acquisition. It’s the development of a new exhibit.

And so that’s what I was tasked with. I think that’s probably was my most important role that I did. I just kept pumping them out. And so I developed a team that we call it the creative design team. At its height, before I left, it had four architect, landscape architects, draftsman, artificial rock designers, and support staff. So it was actually what Bronx has right now in their team. And so it was just developing projects in-house. And sometimes there were totally new exhibits.

Sometimes they were old exhibits that we totally renovated. But we started off, I think the first exhibit that we started off was Cuban Islands. And then we went on to sea lions and every year something reptile garden. Yeah.

When did you know or when did you start to think that your marketing ideas?

You started to make people think about Singapore is a world class zoo.

What signs told you you were getting successful and was it hard to keep that momentum?

Well, we started to see the results with the increased tourist attendance. So as I said, when we opened, it was 800,000. We dropped to 500,000. We plateaued at 500,000 a year. Breakfast at the zoo kicks in. And then over the next three to five years, our tourist attendant starts going up and it peaks around about 500,000 a year, so about half a million tourists, international tourists. And our local attendance goes out to about a million. So we’re getting about one and a half million visitors a year.

And so that’s what we stuck with until we opened Night Safari. And then Night Safari cannibalized some of the tourists, but at the same time, it wasn’t so dramatic. And so it attracted its own set of tourists. I read about a million visitors a year.

Where did the Singapore Zoo sit in the hierarchy of city government?

Up to the side part of it?

Yeah, very, very much to the side. We weren’t treated as civil servants, but we were treated as quasi-government. So as a government company, you have certain, I wouldn’t say privileges, but Temasek Holdings, the holding company, invites you to various seminars and things that say private sector wouldn’t be partly to, and we always also used to go and see the government to get money from them. I mean, probably the biggest job that I had with the chairman was to find money for new attractions as one does. I mean, so one thing is to say, you must open a new attraction every year. The other thing is to actually have the money to do it. And so it always kind of chasing funds from private sector and from the government.

So it was a dual partnership, public-private?

Yeah, you could say that. I think the government felt that in the case of the zoo, they were a little less strict than with the other government companies. So Singapore Airlines is a government-owned company. Singapore Airlines normally would never get any handouts from the government, although during COVID, it got $5 billion, I think, just to make sure that it doesn’t collapse. So I think they felt… And we developed good relationships with the permanent secretaries of the chief civil servants of revenue and budget divisions of the finance ministry. And so they were very empathetic to us. And so we would go to them cap in hand and say, “Look, we’re running at a deficit this year.

Can you help us to make up the deficit?

We got quite a lot of development projects that we need to put in. Can you help us?” As a government, they have many ways of transferring money to different government departments. So we latched in on a government department way of getting money. At one stage, we were getting about 40, 50% of our money from the government, both in operating and capital development. And then with a new permanent secretary, there was a review and they said, “But I thought you guys were meant to be financially viable.” And we said, “Yeah, we are. We’re doing a huge service to the society.” And so they said, “Ah.” They tell you what, “This is what we do. From now on, we are giving you a grant for operations and a grant for capital. We’ll peg that to your visit attendance and we’ll give you a lump sum and you can spend it on either operations or capital development.

So if you insist on subsidizing all the visitors coming to the zoo, then spend it all on operations or else raise your damn prices and make yourself financially viable. And then you could spend all that money on capital development.” And we had always been very socialistic in our thinking that the zoo should be within the financial reach of the bad of the street. But once the government said that, and we said, “Well, that’s no choice. Let’s jack up the prices substantially.” We did, we jacked them up by 40% and without any impact on attendance, made us financially viable. And then so used all that money and for capital developments until the government decided that they wouldn’t even finance capital developments, and we had to do that ourselves. But by that time, we were pretty well making money.

Was some of your money, though, coming from literally private industry?

Yes. Companies that we give money to the zoo. Yes, yeah, we would make a few million dollars a year on adoptions and outright capital donations. Singapore is a very affluent country. Well, let’s talk about another area. During this time in 1988, public utility board comes to you, wants to know what you’re doing with 60 hectares of land- Right. That zoo-owned. And that starts a process.

Can you talk about that process?

Yeah, sure. Okay, so one day I’m sitting at my desk and I get a call from the chief water engineer of the Public Utilities Board. And he says, “So what are you doing with that extra land?” Zoo is 28 hectares with the car parks and quarantines and stuff. It’s about 30, 40 hectares. So we had a 100 hectares, it’s about 60 left. And I said, “Oh, we’ve got a lot of plans. We’ve got a lot of plans.” He said, “Well, can you send them to us?” I said, “Yeah, sure, I will, no problem.” And so I got off the phone with him and got straight on the phone with Dr. Ong. I said, “Dr. Ong, PUB wants to know what we’re gonna do with the land.” And he said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, otherwise they’re gonna take it away,” ’cause he does, he’s formally ex chairman PUB.

He said, we need to come up with an idea.

So we had a series of lunches every week with captains of industry and asked them, so if you have 60 hectares of forested land, what would you do?

We got all ideas, but nothing really realistic. And until we got Lyn and Lyn happened to be coming through for some consultancy. And so we sat him down and says, “Lyn, what would you do?” And he said, “Well, I’ll just expand the zoo.” So we got 60 hectares. I developed 50 hectares into very large open range zoo and maybe 10 hectares, I put on a frivolous nighttime thing. And he said, “I base that on my experience at Tiger Tops.” And Tiger Tops is a lodge in Chitwan National Park in Nepal. And he said, “You go into Tiger tops. You go on elephant back during the daytime and you see tiger, you see a Nepalese rhino and chital and stuff. And then in the evening, you have your dinner, you share your experiences, and then somebody would come to the dining hall and say the tiger has arrived.

And everybody would walk out onto this viewing platform and the tiger would be approaching a baited live goat,” which you could do in those days, you can’t do it now. They bait this live goat steak came out every night, different one every night. A tiger would come in and eat it, and so that’s your nighttime spectacle. So he said, “We don’t do the live goat, but at night, the whole point was that it was at night and it was just so traumatic. That was torches and stuff and fire.” And he said something like that in a setting. And so Dr. Ong, and he was very un-Singaporean in this way because if you talk to Singaporean about a new project, they say, “Well, show me the benchmark. Where has it been done before?” And the entrepreneur will say, “If it’s never been done before, well, let’s do it.” And that’s what Dr. Ong said. He said, “Has it ever been done before, Lyn?” He said, “No.” He said, “Then let’s do it, but let’s not do it on 10 hectares.

Let’s do the whole bloody thing.” And Lyn said, “Okay, well, 60 a bit much. So we 40 and have 20 hectares reserved.” So that’s what we did. And he said, “You sure it’s never been done?” He said, “Yeah, I mean, never been done certainly.” So we set about setting up the Night Safari, and initially it was completely different. It was to have a capacity of 500 people a night, you were to go in jeeps. It would be very much of a visit into a national park at night with a four-wheel drive and a guide. And you would spot animals, species around the area. We did a feasibility study. We got PKF, which is one of these consulting firms to do a financial feasibility study.

And we realized that 500 people a night is not sufficient. So we said, “Well, then we have to change the concept now. So it has to be rather than loose animals, you can cite them, you have spotlights and stuff.” We said we have to have fixed enclosures, fixed lighting. And you go around in much larger capacity vehicles, trams, and you see animals in enclosures, but don’t see barriers. Lighting has to be very subtle. And so that’s how we started to develop and probably the most important decisions we made on lighting. We got in a young Londoner who’d done son et lumière which is outdoor lighting theater. She happened to be doing something in Singapore at the time called Fragile Forest.

And so we got him Simon Corder and we said, “Simon, come and help us light this thing up.” So he did. And we had a board, but we had a Night safari committee and we said we have all these lighting options and everybody’s got a knows something about lighting, everybody got an opinion about lighting. Oh, it should be blue, it should be red, it should be multicolored, it should be come from the ground, it should be here. And Simon said, “Listen, boss, it’s two things. One, moon is up there so it comes down, so the light should be top down, not bottom up or this way.” He said, “The second thing, moonlight is the same color temperature as sunlight, which is about 3,500 degrees Kelvin. Stick with that color.” So it’s a very whiteish wash. And he said, “Let’s see color. And that meant you need to be about 40, 50 lux to see color.” Distance-wise, You can see color and make out shapes 35 meters.

And so that’s about the depth you want for your exhibits. And so basically, that’s it. We already knew the basic concepts. We have long exhibits. There are about 35 meters deep. Or if it’s a drive through, it’s 70 meters across. Don’t see barriers. Just don’t light them up.

Don’t light up moats, don’t light up back fences. We’d drive through Asia, Africa, South America. Lights on, high poles on masks. The challenge was actually… In lighting, the challenge was what happens if you have a power failure. Okay, you’ve got five standby generators around the place. The park, there are five circuits. But when mercury discharge lights, which were about the right color temperature go off during a power failure, it takes between three to five minutes for them to kick back in, which is a mess if you’ve got 2,000 people walk around in the dark.

So you have to have a mixture of mercury discharge. And in those days, tungsten lights, now you do LEDs, but tungsten lights. So tungstens are not 3,500 Kelvin, so you have to put color filters into… And so basically, you have a mixture of mercury discharge, which are the robust sort of general lighting. And then you have tungsten, which are spotlights, which you light up waterholes, salt lakes, feeding platforms and things like that where the animals were hanging up. And I think that was basically the guts of the new stuff that we had to learn. And we had to learn how to design with using darkness and brightness, but it’s not that difficult. And unfortunately, people to this day in zoos who’ve tried to do it can’t seem to get it.

Now, as you mentioned, this was a brand new concept. Yeah. Never been done.

Why did you think that the Night Safari, if that was its original name or what was the original name, why did you think this project would have the great interest to the public?

I think its original name was, I think we talked about Shika Knight. Shika is Indian word for Safari. And we realized that nobody would get it, so Night Safari. We totally believed that Singaporeans would get it and come. We totally believe that tourists would visit it. The government didn’t. I mean, so we eventually put together a master plan and costed it out at 54 million Singapore dollars, which really in the big scheme of things is not a lot of money. The cabinet took three years to make a decision on this project.

And every time it came up, we heard from the cabinet secretary, we’d say, like, they can’t believe that Singaporeans would leave the comfort of their homes or their television sets at night to go to the northern parts of Monday to look at animals under lights at night. So we just can’t make a decision. So eventually, they did. They said, “Okay, we’ll give you the money.” And we had to go back and say, “Well, since you’ve been messing around for three years, actually there’s been a 30% inflation, so that’s 72 million.” And so they gave us about $64 million, but through other agencies. So, it was enough to get on with it. And we thought we just better get on with it. Don’t wait to try and get the whole lot of money. So actually, we didn’t develop one west Loop, but we got all the infrastructure in and the project open.

That’s a great idea. Was certainly a great jump in zoo design and the presentation of animals.

But what did the development of the Night Safari have on you both personally and professionally?

It was draining. It was totally draining. I think it was probably the most… We conceived the project in 1988 and we opened it in 1994. So 1997-’98, we’d already come up with this. We’d had the call from the POB. We’d come up with the concept, let’s do a nice safari. So let’s start doing preliminary master plan.

Let’s do some basic costing submission to governments, giving us more seed money, trials, field trials, because you’re right, It’s never been done before, so let’s make sure we get it right. And so we built experimental habitats. We built a rhino habitat. We built a fishing cat habitat. We lit it up. We used different types of lighting techniques. We selected. We talked to different brands that we finally settle on Phillips PAR38s.

And so we did all this stuff. And while we were waiting for the three years for the government to make their decision, we were meeting every week myself internally with my staff designing stuff. The conceptual master plan that we had created, we actually designed it because we felt that the government will give us the money and we wanna hit the road running when the money comes through. And then we would have like this Night Safari committee who would have like monthly beatings. So the whole thing was just constantly ticking while we were waiting, It was virgin jungle, 40 hectares of jungle. I mean, just getting in there was, like, you would cut your way through, you would cut paths, you’d bring in four-wheel drives, you’d bring in tractors and bulldozers to create roads, but basically it would be hiking. And so there was like many, many days and nights of just kind of walking around, getting the right sites. So it was a very exhausting, but very exhilarating.

But at many nights, I was there until till late. So it was very strenuous, strenuous time, but very exciting, very exciting time ’cause we knew we were doing stuff which had never been done before. So it opens up to huge success, moderate success. We totally miss our misses, underestimated the capacity of the number of people who were coming. So there was a tram, which takes you around, which we had actually come to the States. And we had visited Chance, we had visited specialty vehicles who are two big operators. Chance is a big, big manufacturer here. We went with specialty vehicles and we bought I think it was eight prime movers and with two or three carriages each, so we could have a capacity of 100 people on one set of trams.

And they all had steerable axles, so you could do quite good turns. And so when we first opened, we were having a capacity, I think, of like a thousand seats per hour. And you open at 7:30 and you shut at midnight. You’ve got four to five hours, so you’ve got 5,000 people. We were getting crowds of 10, 10-12,000 a night. And we were just saying, there’s no way that we can handle you, guys. We’re telling people to go back. But we’d push people on the walking trails ’cause that there’s three and a half kilometers of riding where you see the big animals.

But there were lots of walking trails that were… I think there’s three trails, fishing cat trail, leopard trail, and the forest giants trail. And there was like three or four kilometers of walking. But basically, everybody wanted to sit on the tram. And we also had a nocturnal animal show as well, which was also good, twice a night. But we were just totally under capacity. So we had to increase it. We brought in more trams.

We increased the speed of the drive. It was designed to be a more of a leisurely drive where each tram has its own commentator and driver and the commentator kind of sets the pace. If you see an animal doing something, you stop and you… Well, so all that was kind of speeded up and tightened. I think to the stage where we got like… We were running about 2,500 bumps per seat per hour from about a thousand, so we increased it so that you can take 10,000 a night. We also found that people don’t come evenly spread out during the night. They all come at the same time or come at dinner time, seven.

We had good restaurants try to space them out, convinced them to eat first. Sometime we had sunset where we actually didn’t like taking people in sunset, but we had Japanese who were making a flight at 11 o’clock at night to go to Tokyo, and they had to come in at 6:30 so they could finish by eight o’clock, that kind of stuff. But the basic parameter, the basic thing was you don’t come in till it’s dark. Now, it gets dark in Singapore with a 20-minute difference throughout the year. So from the summer to the winter solstice, there’s a 20-minute difference. So there was a little bit of kind of flexibility on timing, but we don’t like you to come in when it’s still light because you see the barriers. You don’t have that full experience. You come in at twilight, you can see the back barrier, you can see the front barrier.

I mean, so it’s as the designers say, cut it. But as the operators who are your ground staff, they’re saying your marketing people, they say, God, you gotta let them in early, otherwise you’re gonna lose the business. And it’s like these animal lanterns you get in these zoos now for Christmas and Halloween. It’s like all the zoo directors I’ve seen, saying, “It’s horrible. I mean, African era is full of Chinese lanterns, but marketing people, we make money.” I say, “Yeah, okay.” So it’s your operating standards. So was there a marketing end of the zoo or was that through the- Well, I mean, marketing director has to make decisions. So I’m like the CEO and I’m saying, well, so the planning people, the designers are saying, I, “But they’re coming in during the day. They’re coming in before dark.” And the marketing people saying, “You’re gonna lose the business.” It’s obviously give and take.

So you are have these various people from these various entities working on Night Safari and other things. Some people have said that you ran the zoo like an extended family.

What do you think that meant?

Well, I think it’s my management style, whereas Dr. Ong’s management style is very autocratic and very gruff. And he liked to have a lot of people around and he liked to go on his… And I have the story now for Dr. Ong. He likes to go on his tours with all his staff, but it wasn’t something that you looked forward to. It was almost like, “Oh God, we’ve gotta go on this damn tram with him and he’ll be barking out orders and stuff.” So my style was rather different. I mean, I also used to go on at least one round per week with a total compliment of operational people. And we’d walk around for most of the day actually, and I’d buy them all lunch. And we’d just kind of just look at everything, from whether light switches are dirty and toilets, to animals, and plants, and maintenance, and stuff.

And then I’d go on around by myself maybe with just a couple of key people, curators, or whoever or whatever I wanted to look at. So I had a kind of a philosophy where when I hired somebody, I mean a director, I’d say we spent a lot of time and a lot of effort hiring you. We’ve done the tests, the personality tests, and you obviously… We’re testing actually for somebody who’s a team player, that’s probably the most critical aspect of the test that we’re looking at.

Can the guy work as a team player?

And if you can, then that’s to me much more important than your actual knowledge of the job because that you obviously has your basic training. So basically, once you hired the guy, then I said, “Just go and do your thing. I mean, and really don’t come and see me unless you have a problem, then of course…” And that’s a apparently called management by exception. That’s his style. So that’s one of my styles. And the other one is like management by walking around. I just go walk around, talk to staff, talk to toilet cleaners. I just ask them what’s going on, find out what’s going on.

Talk to visitors, do you like it?

And just get that feedback from the ground. Have a weekly staff meeting where everybody presents briefly what’s going on. And obviously, that’s the time where if there’s conflict, then to sort it out. And then have a management retreat once a year with the staff for about two, three days where they just it doesn’t really matter what the topic is. To me, that’s irrelevant. It’s obviously sometimes very critical, but most times it doesn’t matter. I mean, just wanna get everybody together, stay in a hotel, meet, talk about things, find out that the financial director is not actually such an ogre as as one thinks that he or she is because you land up sitting on the same dinner table as them and try and work them into all moving in the same direction without politics. And that to me the most important thing, just try and cut the politics and try and make them.

Don’t have to like each other, but just work with each other in the most amicable way possible.

And if I was gonna talk to your staff and ask them, would they say the same thing about your management style?

I would think so. I would think so. I’ve had quite a lot of feedback. Some of them would say it was a bit too much. Is management by exception your phrasing or is that- No, it was given to me by a management consultant who I explained my style and he said, “Oh, it’s management by exception.” So in other words, don’t see me unless you’ve got a problem.

Do you think you could have been as creative if you hadn’t worked in a zoo within a major tourist city?

No, I don’t, but I think it takes money to be creative or the way I work because I’m not a particularly creative person myself. What I’m very good at doing is facilitating creative people. And so what I would do is about twice a year, I would bring in a range of consultants and brainstorm. And so I would bring in, besides logical, so we’d have our own creative design team. So let’s say we have four projects, which I’d like us to discuss so that each project would have its own project architect or landscape architect and internally would develop concepts for that concept plan. And then they would then kind of like present them and defend them. And the external consultants would come in and they would be sound guy, lighting guy, theater producer, actress, creativity professor, whatever. A whole bunch of people who have got actually very little to do with zoo design at all.

And then obviously zoologists and horticulturists and stuff. So then put this group together and they’re kind of like gonna brainstorm and they brainstorm. Each of them in a group and then randomly would go and discuss and these different projects. And then basically get them to come up with new ideas. And if you get enough lateral and disparate points of view, sometimes you get rubbish, but sometimes you just get something which you never thought about before, but now sounds so logical. And that’s kind of like how we would generate ideas and it’s getting that guy who’s not a zoologist who’s never worked in a zoo before to just give you a totally different point of view, totally different perspective. And I found those were the kind of really useful people to have, especially our lighting guy. I mean, he’s very good at…

I mean, he’s got a opinion about everything, which is sometimes highly irritating, but it’s like he just comes out, they just come up with great little gems of ideas. And so we normally never changed anything totally, radically, but we added onto it. And now that I’ve kind of finally looked at and studied on purpose of because of my PhD in zoo design, I’ve actually studied like the WCS, the Wildlife Conservation Societies design team. And it was honed by Bill Conway and John Glyn. And people like Sue Chin, Lee Ehmke kind of taking it. And it’s like they have this incredible attention to detail. They have all these different messages, all these different spaces. And it’s like doing that.

You either have a template which they have, or you do it by bringing people together. Their template is an interesting one, which I’m now starting to understand, having visited Houston Zoo and seeing the template in action. And also, I went to see sharks in New York Aquarium, which was also Sue Chin. And it’s a very, very interesting, interesting design. They use a lot of creative people over there. They come up with all sorts of different ideas, which make most designs look very, very drab, very pale.

Can you talk about creativity and you have?

What did you mean by judgment had to be suspended and the imagination allowed free play?

Okay. Actually, it wasn’t judgment; it’s suspended disbelief. So suspended or suspension of disbelief is it’s a theme park. It’s a theme park thing. So let’s say you’re walking in a zoo and you’re walking through a forest and you turn the corner and there you have a group of gorillas sitting in a clearing. You can’t see any berries, you can’t see any rear berries. And they’re all munching celery. And you just turned up there.

And you know you are not in Uganda. You know that you’re in the middle of New York City or wherever it is, but you are willing to suspend your disbelief because of the realism of the situation. And so the natural or the school of naturalism in zoo design, and there are many schools, but the school of naturalism says some of the fundamental tenets are make everything look as realistic as possible and use nature as a benchmark and have nothing that intrudes into that. Like a guy behind in a red shirt, or a dustbin, or a broomstick, or whatever it is which shatters that illusion. So make that illusion so good as Disney is so good at doing that, you’re willing to suspend that disbelief.

And is that what you tried to do at Singapore?

Yeah, but it’s a tough thing. I mean, you’ve got to really have total control. Yes, we try to do it Night Safari, we tried to do it. And I’d say Night Safari is probably one of the best examples that one has in the zoo, yeah, because you totally had total control. You mentioned that, again, you tried to promote the zoo. You wanted not only people from Singapore to come, but international people.

Why did you think you could get more people to the zoo and why hadn’t anybody done it before you?

Sorry, say that again?

Why had no one tried to bring more people to the zoo- Singapore Zoo.

Singapore Zoo before you?

Why’d you think you could do it?

Oh, well, because I was pretty early on. I was a pretty pioneer. Actually, I didn’t know I could do it. But I’m the kind of person who if I… I don’t think anything is impossible. So I think if you put yourself, your mind to it, you can do it. And so I actually said about just doing it. I wanna tell you that you asked me about a story about Dr. Ong.

Okay, this is a story. Every Tuesday and every Thursday of the week, he would come and visit the zoo and we’d sit on a tram and we’d go around the zoo. And he would ask for Ah Meng to be with us. And we would sit on both sides. She would sit in the middle and he would sit one side, I’d sit on the other side. And he would give her treats. I don’t know if you know what Horlicks tablets are, but some kind of sweets or fruits or whatever. And so she had this treatment for like…

And Ah Meng is a very famous orangutan. She’s movie star. I mean, she’s appeared. Everybody in Singapore knows who Ah Meng is. So the president of Singapore once came to meet Ah Meng and he said… Apart from Lee Kuan Yew who is our founding prime minister, Ah Meng is the most famous person in Singapore. So anyway, so we are sitting with Ah Meng, who obviously is quite a spoiled orangutan. I mean, she has to be.

I mean, she’s like treated like gold. So she’s sitting there, her handler is sitting behind her. And we do this for years. It’s twice a week, Tuesdays, Thursdays on the tram treats, looking around. And then one day, Dr. Ong said, “I don’t wanna see Ah Meng today.” I said, “Okay.” And then the next day he came up, “I don’t wanna see Ah Meng anymore.” And so she’d be sitting in the enclosure looking at us as we are driving around, and she’d just be looking. And so from then onwards, he never asked her to come out again, but it had been going on for years. So there’s this huge resentment buildup, which Dr. Ong is completely unaware of and ignorant of. And I told him, “It’s like she’s really pissed off.

I mean, you could see. Look at her. Look at her in the enclosures, her hair standing up.” Was just looking at her. Ah, it’s okay. And then one day, she was out on a mountain taking photographs. I mean, let’s go and say hello to her. I said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” And I’m looking at the senior keepers and the head of primates, and they’re saying, “No, it’s not a good idea. It’s not a good idea.” And he said, “Ah, that’s okay.

We will go over and say hello to her.” And he goes up to her and she’s just all her hair standing up, and she’s like looking at him. And I said, “I don’t think you should go and touch her ’cause she’s gonna bite you.” And he said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah, because we’ve ignored her for the last couple of years. She’s like a rejected woman.” But he only got it at that point and not before that. It’s like just totally oblivious to it. So Ah Meng was not the first orangutan that we used. We had a lady called Susie who was a very pleasant and much more mild mannered orangutan. And she used to do… I mean, because they can be handled.

I mean, okay, to get the things in the context, Singapore decreed in the late sixties that nobody is allowed to own an orangutan as a pet. Now, there were a lot of orangutans coming in as pets on ships from Borneo and Sumatra and being sold in the pet trade. And Singapore was in the early days of a big animal trading port. So Singapore’s trying to clean up its act. And so they said, okay, a moratorium on orangutan ownership. If you don’t give up your orangs, then you get a $5,000 fight or a jail sentence. So about 15, 20 orangs were given to the primary production department, and they had them coming out of their ears and they didn’t know what to do with them. And the Singapore Zoo was fledgling institution, so they gave them all to the zoo.

And so we actually had like, I don’t know, I can’t remember now, but I mean at least 15 young orangutans all at once. So they were handled, they were managed, they were kept as a social group. And that’s why we were able to keep a quite a big social colony together of 10 females, three or four males. Of course, as the males got older and more aggressive to each other, they rotate the males. And so Ah Meng was part of this, and Susie was part of this group. And so Susie was the one who was the handpicked one, actually the nicest-looking. And so she would do stuff like she do promotional stuff, come out if a dignitary was coming, come and meet the orangutan, she could hold it. She could sit next to her and take pictures.

And then when Susie got pregnant, when she was about nine or something, we took her down to the gynecologist because she was suffering from what we suspected was some kind of pregnancy toxemia. We took her down to a gynecologist and actually just hilarious, just sitting in the waiting room with a female and all the other ladies, pregnant ladies looking on. But she finally died during childbirth. And so we had to choose another orangutan to take her place. And Ah Meng was the choice. And she wasn’t such a good-looking orangutan. She certainly didn’t have the pleasant disposition of Susie. But she was okay.

She would do. And so she was built up, not purposely built up into a sort of a star, but she became a star. And she’d met Michael Jackson, Björn Borg. Bo Derek used to come and drop off in Singapore, take a taxi up to the zoo, see Ah Meng and then go back and catch a flight. Every time I asked, every time I talk to my orang keeper says, “Oh, Bo Derek was just here.” I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, “Oh, I didn’t know you wanted to see her. Jesus Christ, about three times. Oh yeah, you just missed her, and said there was just stuff. She was given a tourism award as ambassador.

And basically, she was just a mega star.

What was your relationship with her?

Well, up until that Dr. Ong incident with the tourists, very good, she was fine. But after that, God, she hated me because she said, “Well, it must have been your fault. It must have your fault that I didn’t go out on rounds of the tram.” And so after that, it was like she just would want to kill me every time. And I had to be photographed with her occasionally. And I would only do it if there was one or two traders, animal handlers. I knew that keepers who I knew could control her totally. But yeah, she was megastar. She died after I left the zoo.

She had 5,000 people came to her funeral a week or whatever it was. She’s buried next to… I don’t know where they buried. I think he’s buried next to Dr. Ong, who was also buried in the zoo, I mean his ashes illegally. Ah Meng was…

You had talked about breakfast and tea, and I might say, or people might say, does this type of presentation still have a place in zoos?

But you don’t like the word presentation?

Why?

Well, no, that’s more for shows. So I just feel call a spade a spade. I mean, we can come back to the breakfast. I think the breakfast is okay and it’s been modified. You’re not allowed to sit with the orangutan anymore. The orangutans are in the rear. That was more of a veterinary, The vet’s got their way. They said now it’s too much potential risk of contamination and stuff, sitting with visitors, which is fair enough.

But they still do it. But it’s more shows, which is like elephant shows, primate shows, small mammal shows, sea lion shows. A lot of people do them and call them presentations and think that it makes it more palatable if you call it presentation. Well, I say, I mean call it spade a spade, it’s a show. It’s a spectacle. Yeah, you’re doing it because you want people to be entertained, but at the same time you’re doing it because you’re teaching them stuff. And with with my clients in my zoo design business, I will always promote shows. I don’t promote elephant shows.

I don’t think elephants should be kept in captivity because I think that’s a huge hot potato that’s they’re gonna have to face in the future. So I really say don’t do that. Obviously, don’t do dolphins getaway or stuff, although the Chinese wanna do it. But I say I always push, like, do something with non-endangered species, which are really, okay, let’s do a bird show. I mean, a bird show is a great show because it’s like you never see unless you’re really in a very large aviary, like Jurong had two hectare aviary. Unless you’re seeing birds flying like that, you’ll never see birds fly like in a show and do it. I mean, I think it’s great. The people love it.

They won’t see birds flying like that. And then you’ve got like small mammal shows where if it’s non endangered stuff and you have a lot of laughs, but not at the expense of the animals, expense of the people. I think it’s fine. I don’t have problems with that. I’ve seen some great shows and I’ve seen a huge revival of shows recently. I mean, I think that the zoo world became very anti-show in about the seventies, late sixties, seventies where the chimpanzee tea parties, the circus type of shows, the merry-go-round were all considered something which you shouldn’t do in zoos. We should be more scientific. We should be less public spectacle.

And then we had this kickback from the commercial zoos who were then still capitalizing it. And so zoos had to rethink their situations, I think, commercially. And so you had the revival of the show, like Steve Martin was bringing in like bird shows and stuff, which were deemed acceptable, but you weren’t having any like circus shows with lions and stuff. But yeah, so let’s say presentations have come back, carousels have come back. I dislike carousels actually in zoos.

I think it’s like, why do you have a carousel in zoo?

It’s like they come back just like these Chinese lanterns come back, it’s like just commercialization. Can you tell us about, ’cause you mentioned it briefly and I think you were involved with Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor, relate that story. Yeah, yeah, sure. So I had this big sponsor, Ong Beng Seng who owns the property that the Hilton Hotel Four Seasons was on. And so he is quite a big guy. And so he calls me one day and he says… And he’s a sponsor. He’s a sponsor.

So I’m giving him the time of day.

He says, “Can you shut the zoo?

Because I got Michael Jackson in town.” And I know he’s got in town ’cause I know there’s a concert, so I can’t shut the zoo. Can’t shut the zoo down. He said, “Why not?” I said, “Because it’s a public facility. I mean, come on, I’m stupid.” So I said, “Well, what can you do for me?” And I said, “Well, I know you’re a sponsor and I’m sure you’ll be a better sponsor in future if I help you.” He said, “Yeah, I’m sure we will.” So he said, “I tell you what, I can take Ah Meng down to the Raffles Hotel where Michael Jackson is staying and he can have a one-on-one with her in the hotel, maybe at the pool side or whatever.” So he said, “Great, great idea.” Jenny Chua, who is the hotel general manager, tells me the story on a separate occasion. And she says her assistant manager comes to her and she says, “Bernard Harrison is bringing Ah Meng down to the hotel to meet Michael Jackson.” And she said, “I don’t want to know. Just don’t tell me. Just don’t tell me, please.” Okay.

So I tell Sam, who is the head of primates, I said, “Sam, can you get Ah Meng together in the mini bus and I’ll come down with you?

We go down to the Raffles Hotel.” He said, “I shot a boat.” So I get into the mini bus with Sam. And as I get in, I see this like six orangutans, six orangutans, therefore six keepers. Each one has orangutan. So there’s six keepers, six orangutan. And I said, “Well, what’s all the orangutans?” He said, “Well, you know, they said, well, we thought Michael Jackson might like to see more than one orangutan.” So I said, “Okay.” So we go down and go into the Raffles, into the basement car park, go up a lift, and we go to the pool. He’s there, he’s there with Elizabeth Taylor. And so he doesn’t say much. Elizabeth Taylor, we’re talking quite a lot, but he doesn’t say much.

He’s just kind of just into the orangutan. And he’s not so much with Ah Meng, but with the babies, a couple of babies there. And he’s just like just fascinated. And then the manager, his manager says, “He really wants to go to the zoo.” So I said, “Well, he can come to the zoo. It’s just that I’m not gonna shut down the zoo for him.” I said, “But if you want, you can take a vehicle, unmarked vehicle. Like, man, just drive around the zoo, it’s okay, it’s okay with me.” So that’s what we did. And so we went into the vehicle and we drove around. I drove up and drove around.

And even then there was like word that obviously got out, I mean, through our keepers, there was like hundreds of people around just kind of waiting, looking, trying to get a glimpse of him. But it was like just amazing. Just the kind of the presence that this guy commands, so amazing. But he liked the orangs. Yeah, he loves the orang. He just loved him. Just totally adored him. So the Night Safari opens.

Yep. It’s successful. You get a title, another title, A title. Chief executive. Oh, right.

Is that because of the ninth Safari?

Is that because does he give you new responsibilities?

Yeah, I think so. I was executive director up until that time. Executive director was a position I had. Okay, so I started off as director in 1980. And then Charlie Schroeder comes along. We bring him out as a consultant in about whenever, ’86 or something. And he said, “You should change Bernard’s title to executive director.” And Dr. Ong said, “Why?” He said, “Because you’ve got a board of directors. All your board members are directors.

So what’s the difference between Bernard and the director of your board?” And so I said, “Should be called executive director.” So I had this change of title with absolutely no increase of responsibility or increase in salary. And then when we opened the Night Safari, the board said, “Yeah, I think you have more responsibility now. You’re running two institutions, so we will call you chief executive.” And I think I did get salary raise, but nothing great. And then my final title was Chief Executive Officer when we merged with the Jurong Bird Park at Created Wildlife Reserve Singapore. I became CEO of Wildlife Reserve Singapore. So you are with the opening of the Night Safari, very successful. We’ll use my word, you’re pretty famous. The zoo is world class.

Was your creativity and fame an issue with others, top civil servant?

People within the city government, were they jealous of the fame?

I’m not sure, actually. I don’t think so, It’s difficult to say, but I didn’t encounter any jealousy. I think the zoo is always sort of out on a limb anyway, so that it’s never really mainstream anything. And I think even within zoos, within a zoo, you have so many different specialists in the zoo, the educators, and zoologists, and horticulturalists, and maintenance, and marketing, and food beverage, they’re all kind of, like, they have their own sort of career paths and departments that they don’t really vying with each other for promotion to the director or chief executive position. And I never encountered it that from outside, no. You talked about 1999, there’s a merger. Yes. And the Jurong Bird Park is merged into the Singapore Zoo and Night Safari under a new name.

How does that come to place?

Why?

So what happened was we had a new chairman of Temasek Holdings, a gentleman called Mr. Dhanabalan, who formerly was the Deputy Prime Minister. So quite a hot shot. And when he came into Temasek, quite some time before the merger, I mean many, many years before that, he looked down the stable of companies and he started at the top, Singapore Airlines, Singtel, Development Bank of Singapore, DBS, huge companies and capital shipyards, symbolic ship and moved down to the bottom in the bottom three companies, which were all underperforming was Singapore Zoo, Jurong Bird Park and Temasek Holdings, Temasek Consultancy. So he got Temasek Consultancy, which is a management consultancy to do a study on the Singapore Zoo and the Bird Park and see why they can’t merge. And at that point in time, my chairman, Dr. Ong, was still alive and the chairman of the Jurong Bird Park was a permanent secretary called Dr. Kwa Soon Bee. He was perm sec of health and he was related to Lee Yu, the founding prime minister of Singapore. So they did a study with the idea to merge the two companies. And they came back, and quite rightly, they said, “We do not advise a merger because the two corporate cultures are totally different.

They’re totally different.” The corporate culture in the zoo is one of Dr. Ong’s personality, is a very open non-civil service, almost cavalier sort of a management style with very few concerns about the rules and regulations of government and with the Jurong Bird Park, because it’s been run by the Permanent Secretary of, of Ministry of Health, is, it’s a very conservative, very, very different style, very, very by the book management of, of staff.

And there will definitely be a clash, but the worst thing is to be a clash between the two chairman ’cause one’s gotta go, right?

If you merge the two companies, one’s gotta go. You can’t have two chairman. So the chairman, Dhanabalan, had a… Chairman of Temasek Dhanabalan who had asked for the merger, said, “Okay, I understand. I mean, let’s not rock the boat. It’s not a big issue.” So everything went well. And then Dr. Ong died in about 1996, I think. And so the Dr. Kwa Soon Bee, the chairman of the Bird Park came over to be the chairman of the zoo as well.

So he was chairman of Bird Park, chairman of the zoo. And so about three years later, and we got all fine, there was no problem. He kind of said, in fact, the first thing he said to me is like, “Bern, just do what you’ve done. You’re doing a good job. So just carry on and just do it. Don’t mind me too much, I mean, obviously, I’m the chairman, but you’re doing fine.” So I said, “Okay, cool and great.” And we had a fine, we had great relationship. And then Dhanabalan, chairman of Temasek, says, “Okay, the obstacle before was that the two chairman, one of them had to go, one of them’s gone, so have another study.” So Temasek consultancy, again, was engaged. And they did the study and they said, “Don’t do the merger because the corporate cultures are so different.” And Dhanabalan said, “I just merged them.

It’s just stupid. Two small companies in the same business. I mean, come, let’s just get on with it.” So we merged. Dr. Kwa obviously was the chairman of Wildlife Reserve Singapore, I became the CEO. And so we went on for a couple of years. We actually struggled with the name Wildlife Reserve Singapore. He asked me to give him several, which we put to the board. I came up with Conservation Corporation of Singapore after the African one, which I thought was quite appropriate because I mean it’s a quite commercial company, but Wildlife Reserves was felt to be a better name, which was fine with me.

And so it became Wildlife Reserves. So that was the holding company for the three parks, the Night Safari Zoo and the Bird Park. And then slowly, my demise came in because whereas before that, we were running as two separate companies, the Zoo Night Safari and the Bird Park. But with the merger, we had to obviously have one set of policies. It was small things that were just kind of very, very difficult for us to rationalize. I’ll give you an example or two. For instance, if you go on a study tour, like I would go on a study trip or a conference. I was vice president of WAZA.

I was president of SEAZA, the Southeast Asian Zoo Association. If I go on to go to a council meeting or to go to a conference in the zoo, it’s just written off. But in the bird parks style, you have to quantify it in terms of dollars and cents. It’s put against a bond. So if you spend $10,000 on a trip, then you are bonded to the company for a year or two years. And if you leave before that, then you have to pay a bond of 2,000 bucks, not 10,000 bucks. So I was making four trips a year. I was raking up a bonds of 40,000 a year.

I mean, and I would tell the chairman, I said, “We don’t do that.” And he said, “Why not?” He said, “That’s what government does.” He said, “Yeah, but we’re not government. We don’t have to follow government procedure.” If I send somebody on a trip. I pretty well trust the guy not to leave in two years. I mean, because I’m choosing the guy. In government, you’ve got 30,000 employees. I mean, God knows who’s… Obviously, there are people who default, but you’re in a small company. You or me or my directors are making calls about their staff.

I don’t think we need to bond them. And they said, “No, we’ll follow this.” So we are bonding people. So this is like one of these small aspects of discontent, which one sort of builds up. And as in the difference between the cavalier Dr. Ong and the very civil servant Dr. Kwa. Ultimately, so this blending of the two cultures was a bit difficult. But ultimately in February of 2022, you resigned your position as chief executive.

What circumstances led you to make the decision of leaving the zoo, zoo you built into a world-class facility, were you under impression?

Yeah, so it was accumulation of various policies that I didn’t subscribe to. And this kind of slow pressure of getting me to conform to Dr. Kwa’s sort of management style, which I was resisting. And there were a number series of incidents and one was actually he got my financial director fired because of some, I would consider, minor incidents. And I think the final straw was that I had a food and beverage director of the bird park who I knew and trusted. I had actually put him at the bird park. He was working actually at the zoo, and I put him at the bird park in charge of food and beverage. And there was an incident where Dr. Kwa had been informed that the food and beverage staff had some bottles of wine. And the wine had been given.

It when they have a function by a corporate function. So they leave excess bottles of wine. They give them to the food and beverage staff. Food and beverage staff keep them. And then when they have a vacation, they open them and they drink wine. And this is a practice again, which is like not a government practice. Government practice, you must give the wine to the finance department and the finance depart will hold it and do whatever they think fit with it. Whereas with food and beverage, basically that’s a tradition that that’s what they do.

They kind of keep this stuff. So the long and the short of it is that he found out about this and he said, “You must…” He called me, he said, “You must give this guy letter of warning.” So I said, “Well, I don’t really think it’s appropriate. I mean, I can give him a verbal reprimand, but I mean I don’t think you wanna give him a letter of warning. It’s like it goes on his record. I mean, and I think it’s a small thing.” And he said, “Well, it’s not a small thing. It’s a big thing,. I said, “Well, okay, if you think it’s a big thing,” I said, “Okay, okay.” I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” So I call up this guy, Gany, and I said, “Spoken to the big boss and he wants to give you a little of warning about this.” And he said, “And so I’m serving you this letter. I mean, just take it.” And he said, “Yeah, okay, but can I take it home and think about it?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” So he took it back.

And so the next day, Dr. Kwa writes to me and he says, “So has Gany signed the letter?” I said, “No, he took it home and he’s going to come back to me today.” He said, “No, then fire him. So terminate his services.” So I said, “Why?” He said, “No, I just think you should terminate him.” And I said, “I don’t think I should terminate him. I just think it’s ridiculous. I mean, it’s like just a small incident.” And so I get off the phone with him and I call Gany and I said, “Sign the letter. Give it to me now.” So he did. And I sent, faxed the letter or whatever it is to Dr. Kwa. I said, “He signed it already.” So he got on the phone, he said, “I think this is insubordination. I mean, you went against what I asked you to do.” And I said, “Again, I went against you asked me to do ’cause I didn’t think that it should be done.

I refused to do this.” And so he said, “Well, you should do the right thing.” I said, “I did the right thing.” And so we left it. I mean, I slammed down the phone and left it like that. But I mean, that was the end of the… You could see it’s gotta be rocky from then on because you’ve made that split. So over the next…

I mean already the rot was setting in, but over the next three to four months, you can ask Tina, we thought about it and she said, “Why don’t you just resign because you’re just having such an issue with this person, this chairman of yours?

And you’d just be so much happier if you just resign.” I said, “Yeah, I will be.” But it seem like it’s okay. Yeah, okay, it’s my zoo. But also I’m really letting down the staff, I think, because we had gone into this spurger and I had told the staff, “I mean we’re going to get through this together. And I did a lot of work with the staff and I said, “I really do. If I cop out, I really do feel that they will feel that I’ve let them down.” But I did, I did. And in fact, I sent in my resignation and the chairman actually called me up and said, “Don’t resign.” I said, “Why not?” I said, “We can’t get on with each other.” “Go and take a sabbatical and go to Harvard and do one of these four-month bootcamp things.” And I said, “Well, I’ve already done something at Stanford. I don’t really want to. I’m finished.

I’m out of here.” So I called a meeting with the staff and I think I got about five or 600 of them and just announced that I was resigning. And lot of them were really shocked, but I said, “Well, that’s it.” That’s the way it goes.

I’m really sorry about it.” But on hindsight, do you think you could have continued to be at the top of your game if you had stayed?

My chairman was actually removed about seven months later. I had an exit interview with his niece, who was the wife of the prime minister. And she asked me why am I leaving. I said, “Well, I can’t get on with your uncle,” or whatever relationship he was. And he was removed and the chairman of the McDonald’s was put in his place, which actually much worse. ’cause I mean I must say that Dr. Kwa was a pain, but he was really not as painful as putting the chairman of McDonald’s who really was quite a different kettle fish altogether.

Was this your most, I assume, but was this your most frustrating, challenging times as director leading the zoo?

I think so, yeah. If you ask my wife, it was probably about six months where I was really painful to be with. I just really was totally like… I can’t stand it. I really gotta go. And as soon as I left, it was great. I mean, I felt like I went out and got my ear pierced, had an earring and it was good. We set up a company called Rimba, which we were gonna work with Sentosa, which is a big tourist island of Singapore, set up a food and beverage animal attraction with retail, set up company, Bernie Harris and friends doing the zoo design.

And so it just kind of slipped into a new way of looking at stuff. A couple of quick questions.

Aside from the Night Safari, can you tell me some exhibits you champion and the highs of lows of each one or two?

I think one one of the exhibits I really liked, which was from quite some time ago was a Primate Kingdom. Primate Kingdom is a complex of about five, I think five or six or seven islands, some of them very large, some of them fairly small, forested, vegetated for troops of monkeys like Duklangers, hussar monkeys, black and white colobus, spider monkeys, things like that. And there was water motor, no handrails, shallow water. I mean, to me, one of the best exhibits that we’ve ever built, I think, right on top of a hill, which overlooks the reservoir. And so everywhere you see is forested. And just next to another exhibit, which we also developed, which was called the Baboons of Ethiopia, which is based on what they did in Bronx, which was the… I can’t remember. it’s called hammered.

Anyways, they have gelada baboon. I think it’s called Baboon Village or baboon camping, but similar concepts. Large groups of baboons with actually ibis. So the baboons have a kind of a rocky wall, which they can climb up to a point but can’t because of overhang can’t get on top. But then there’s a layer which nubian ibex can walk along that top area. Nice exhibit. And all the trappings of like the explorer’s camp and different types of different views from different angles. Fragile Forest, probably one of the nicest big dome of butterflies, about 35 meters, 35 by 70 by about 25 meters high, very planted.

You can walk in up to a higher level, go up. It’s got butterflies, but it’s also got a bunch of mammals, a bunch of birds, anything that doesn’t particularly like to eat butterflies in there. So it’s got lemurs walking around, it’s got fruit bats, it’s got duikers. And no, nothing, no geographic theme. It’s just kind of tropical rainforest theme. So bio climatic, those kind of exhibits are nice exhibits that we’ve done. You had to work well with your subordinates and also your superiors.

Did you have to take on different leadership roles for each group?

With my superiors and my subordinates. Well, I mean, no, I’m pretty much the same. I worked very closely with my subordinates, as I mentioned earlier. It’s more a question of hiring them, getting on with them, tasking them, and ensuring that they just get on and do it. And I don’t micromanage them. So they have complete autonomy as far as I’m concerned, and I’ll stick up for them. And I think that’s probably another important thing that one as a boss has to do with your staff. I mean, you have sort of empowered them to do the job and you just support them until you fire them.

If they’re really not doing the job well, then fire them. But we’re working with my superiors. I mean, it’s really just working with the board committees and stuff. Obviously, the roles that one are in with committees are you’re listening to what the committees are asking you to do. And unless they’re kind of going really off track, okay, that’s what you wanna do. Unless you really disagree with something, I say, “Yeah, okay, sure, let’s do it.” But delegation is, to me, very important for subordinates. You were very good at working with the media.

Why were you successful and what tips would you give a young zoo director?

I think I got thrown in at the deep end with the media from almost when I was first joined, I started being used as a voice, mainly because I was working with animals. And a lot of the times, the media wanted to look at new births and new arrivals. And so I was a logical choice to be the spokesman because I knew what was going on as opposed to the public relations people who would handle the interview, but would ask me to follow up. At a young age, I was doing a lot of media work with radio, TV journalists and was just comfortable with them. And I think created a sort of, I wouldn’t say a bond of trust, but I think they felt that I was fairly legit. Basically, I didn’t lie to them, mainly because I didn’t have to lie too much. But if something happens, we just used to say it the way it is, hippo escapes. Well, hippo escapes, you talk about had a hippo escape for 45 days in the reservoir.

Tiger gets out. Well, tiger gets out, had to shoot it in the Night Safari. So it’s written more of… Elephant turns around and steps one of his keepers in the chest shatters his sternum. I mean, there’s not much point hiding it. It’s just trying to manage the fallout. We actually would send on a… I got arranged to send three or four of us onto a course on aggressive interview, how to manage aggressive interviews.

And that was actually nothing to do with any of those incidents I’ve spoken about, but we had a volunteer who was really causing a lot of problems, who actually went on to set up animal rights NGO in Singapore. But he felt that we were treating our chimpanzees quite badly. And he enlisted the help of a guy called Carl Aman, who is an African push me photographer. And so we had a lot of kind of like aggressive interviews with the press to the extent where, as I said, we got about four of us to take a course in how to handle aggressive interviews. Because up to that point in time, actually I’d never had an aggressive interview in my life. It wasn’t so much a local presses, foreign press that…

How do you handle somebody who’s like kind of hitting you at every side?

What would you say is the differences you see it between loving animals and respecting them?

Sure. So often journalists ask me, “So you must be a animal lover.” And I said, “No, I’m not an animal lover. I don’t love animals. Maybe I love my dog or my cat.

But it’s like asking a sociologist, do you love people?

You must love people ’cause you’re a sociologist. I say, “No, love my wife, maybe my kids.” So it’s like but I respect animals now and a sociologist would respect people. I think it’s a subtle difference. And I think there are some people who love all animals. I think my daughter’s like, any animal which is in distress, she’s going very upset and very, very concerned about it. But I think working in a zoo, you tend to get a little bit more hardened to animal, but respect, yeah, lots of respect and for, I think, the whole spectrum. In fact the Buddhists basically, Buddha said try not to kill any animal at all, even an ant try and brush it away before you step on it. And there’s something very powerful in that philosophy.

You’ve said that being a zoo director, that even if you’re good, you don’t make a lot of money.

Do you think it’s still true in all the markets?

Zoo directors in the US seem to be doing pretty good. Well, yeah, I think the Germans don’t… And I was talking to a German zoo director recently at WAZA, and he was saying, “Well, we don’t earn much money because we’re all civil servants.” And although they’re not, I think some zoos are private companies, but I mean I don’t think they make much money. And I think most of them do get now some kind of subsidies from the governments. So they’re basically on civil servant salaries, which apparently in Germany and Europe are not very high as opposed to the states where some zoos obviously are commercial, which I mean SeaWorld and Bush Gardens, obviously you’d be paid more competitively. Society. I guess society is now kind of trying to peg themselves a bit more on industry if they’re gonna attract captains of industry. I know in Singapore that my salary, I think, has dramatically gone increased.

But that’s partly because Singapore has also pegged its civil servants and politicians on industry. And so politicians in Singapore and top civil servants are paid very, very high salaries indeed. I mean, a politician earns a million dollars a year. You mentioned retreats before.

Why do you think they’re beneficial for senior staff?

Well, as I was just describing earlier, I think the purpose of a retreat is to get all the staff of one level, so senior management, middle management, junior management together, and just get them to be more of a team to feel more… If you know people in your level, then I think it’s much easier to work. And so, as I said, like everybody hates the financial director because he is the one who is always kind of dishing out stuff and stopping you from having stuff. And so if you actually get to know them as a person, then you realize actually just like anybody else, I mean they’re just fine. They’ve got kids and they do stuff and a lot more sympathetic. And they actually become a lot more empathetic to you once they get to know you because it’s more personal. So I think retreats like that is very good. When we had the merger between the zoo and the bird park, and we created this Wildlife Reserve Singapore, I took the trouble to take batches of staff on retreats.

And I took senior staff and then I took a whole bunch of middle management staff on retreats, two-day retreats out of the country, but just to Malaysia. And we went through the whole philosophy of why we were merging, how we were merging, what were the benefits, what were the problems perceived, and how we were gonna try and solve those problems. And I think I did 8 or 10 retreats with staff. And I think they really did enjoy and respect it tremendously because they felt that the top guy could be bothered to sit down with them and talk to them in brainstorming sessions. I mean, I wouldn’t say brainstorming session, but discussion sessions about their concerns and their aspirations for the organization and how we should move it forward. And this was facilitated by professional management consultants, the same management consultants who did the studies, which said you shouldn’t be shown. Now, you had mentioned also that you would make rounds of the zoo. Tell us why it’s beneficial to a director to do this.

Well, I think it’s very important for the director to find out what’s going on the ground. And I think a lot of directors nowadays don’t do that. I think it’s a very German thing where the German zoo director would always do a round. If it’s not a daily round, it’s at least it’s like a every few days. He has his staff, his kind of operational staff in tow, and it’s kind of just doing an inspection. And so it makes you know what’s going on, see what’s going on. And it gives you the firsthand a ability to explain to your senior directors what you like, what you don’t like, and whether it’s… It normally boils down to a standard of maintenance, whether it be buildings, grounds, animal enclosures.

Is it just a sort of a this is what I want you to maintain and this is my stand?

That’s why I will always pick up a piece of litter in front of a staff member because it drives home the message that if he can do it, then I should do it as well. So I think that’s just something which I think is being lost in a lot of zoos. I don’t think CEOs even think about it. I don’t think the notion ever has occurred to them that maybe they should be doing that, wandering around and looking at stuff through the eyes of a visitor. And I think that a lot of that is also in the process of that walk around engaging visitors and engaging junior staff members that I love talking to the toilet cleaners.

And how are you getting on?

How is it doing?

You said, “I am becoming one of the zoo’s world’s greatest critics.

I sincerely believe that 90% of all zoos in the world should be shut down.” You meant?

Yeah. Well, I think probably I took a little bit of… I’ve had a little bit of David Hancock’s rub off on me, and he’s sort of like a… I would say he’s a mentor and David is a very, very abrasive critic of zoos. But as over the years, I’ve come to realize that there are so many horrible zoos in the world, so many shithole zoos which are… There’s about 10,000 zoos in the world, and about 10%, about thousand, are members of WAZA, whether they’re direct members or whether they’re indirectly through their national and regional organizations. And I think most of them, but not all, I mean in Southeast Asia, I know that some of the members of SEAZA, the Southeast Asian Zoo Station are also shitholes. And it doesn’t have necessarily have to be horrible run zoos, but also just commercially run abusive institutions where I think the respect for animals and welfare is very, very lowkey, subordinate to commercialization.

But I think that some zoos are great. I would say zoos like Zurich, the Bronx, many American zoos, many European zoos, many Australian zoos, some zoos in Asia, Singapore definitely are great zoos. And they should be lauded for their achievements. But for most of them, I think they should shut them down. And working with the Central Zoo Authority in India, they actually did it. They actually took over and of the, I’m just guessing now, 500 zoos and circuses in India, when the Central Zoo Authority first took over in the 1980s. They’ve shut about 150 zoos and circuses. The biggest problem when you shut a zoo down is what do you do with the animals, maybe actually creating a worse animal welfare problem than they were already in.

But I think slowly, we should work at the… The zoo world should work at shutting down bad zoos, but it’ll never happen.

What did you mean when you said zoos have a huge ethical and moral cross to bear?

Well, I think it stems from that really, from what I was just saying about the shutting down zoos. I mean, ethics is like what they should be doing. So zoos have ethical standards or at least associations have ethical standards. AZA have ethical standards, WAZA have ethical standards, which zoos should comply with. Many zoos don’t and those are the ones that should be shut down. And then the moral cross is basically doing it. I mean, they just don’t. So they have the standard that they don’t do it.

So they should be shut down.

I think the biggest problem with shutting zoos is that if you’re shut down a zoo, unless the legislation in the country is so strong, another one just as bad will open up tomorrow because it’s just how do you commercialize a set of animals?

Until the legislation is such that you have to go into a… If you’re gonna run a zoo, then you have to adhere to certain ethical and moral standards. Otherwise you shouldn’t be operating, very difficult though.

Can you talk to me about why you feel respect is so important?

Yeah, I think… And it is like people ask me and they say, “Well, you say you are pro-animal show. You say you have no problem with having breakfast with an orangutan. Isn’t that disrespectful to the animal?” And I said, “No, I don’t think so.” As long as long as the animal is being respected.

Because what’s the purpose of a zoo?

I mean, it’s really… Okay, you’re looking at recreation and education as a social entity, but you are also trying to get a message across to people. You’re presuming you’re talking about conservation and you’re trying to get those animals to be in somebody’s vocabulary. I mean, otherwise, unfortunately, animals just don’t figure at all in many people’s lives.

There’s this wild animals, but who cares?

So it’s really trying to get them to say, “Okay, I understand this animal. I respect it. I have a certain place for it.” So in Singapore, like for instance, people leave the zoo and they may see a presentation of orangutans, but it’s certainly not a degrading presentation. And they leave and say they’ve learnt more about those orangutans and hopefully they have a certain amount of respect for them in the wild. And so really those are their ambassadors for their wild counterparts.

Are you or can you be stubborn in the position you hold?

Mm, definitely if I think I’m right, especially if it’s an ethical issue, like bad zoos, for instance. I think you would have to really convince me that a bad zoo should not be shut. When I was president of SEAZA, I kind of took the stand and that’s like going back 20 years, I took the stand that you might as well let in all the zoos to the association because at least by mixing with good zoos, then the bad zoos could get better. But I’m now convinced that, actually, I don’t think that’s right. I think bad zoos should be really actively closed as much as it’s possible.

Can you talk about your philosophy regarding giant pandas?

Shouldn’t they be saved?

Are they worth the price?

I think I have very strong feeling about giant pandas, purely in the sense that they’re one of 10 million species on earth. Okay, they’re iconic animal. They’re pretty to look at. They’re WWFs and some of the Chinese icons.

But you know what, it’s like why are we showing favoritism to this animal that the species that took the wrong turn evolutionary wise long ago?

And it kind of went down a path of almost a note, a dead end path and so tough luck guys. I mean, when the bamboo runs out, they actually do each other stuff besides bamboo. I mean, we know that. I mean, I’ve had giant paddles on loan in Singapore. And the compulsory animal keepers from Bulong told me that when they’re hungry, they’re gonna eat sheep. So they’re not purely eating bamboo. But as I say, it’s like if there’s so many other species and you’re chucking so much money at giant pans, just because they look good…

That’s why when my daughter was doing a program about giant pandas in Singapore and she said, “Dad, do you wanna do an interview?” And the cameraman said, “I’ve done an interview with him before, and you don’t want him on your program.” In the case of Singapore or maybe even other zoos, do you think that people in government, in the area where the zoo is, understand that a zoo is run in a different way other than other departments?

Or is a zoo different?

Well, yeah, I think zoos are different in the sense that they have almost contradictory objectives are, especially when they’re commercial or even society run. But I mean, you’ve got these objectives of education, conservation research, and you’ve got this recreation, social immunity, commercialization. They’ve got to balance the budgets, they’ve gotta make money. And so you have got these conflicting objectives. I think a commercial zoo, as I say, SeaWorld, Hagenbeck in Germany, They’re totally quite a lot in the UK. Their focus is I’ve got to make money because if I don’t make money, then I cannot survive. And I think a lot of the zoos have the same mindset, which sometimes is contrast with other software objectives, so the conservation and the research. But yeah, it’s difficult.

It’s difficult for other departments who are not a zoo to even start fathoming why zoos tend to be a little bit schizophrenic.

You mentioned a little bit, can you talk to me about the importance of landscaping in relation to animal exhibitions?

Would the examples be the Great River Valley or Fragile Forest?

Well, I think I come from the School of Zoo Design, which is basically set up by Hancocks and John Coe, Jones & Jones in the 1976 long range plan of the Woodland Park Zoo, which David Hancock commissioned, and he chose Jones & Jones, which is a landscape company as opposed to an architectural company to do the long range plan. And they kind of created this school of naturalistic using nature as a benchmark. And so nature doesn’t go out of fashion. It’s something that is quite difficult to copy, but it’s worth copying, which Jones & Jones spawned Portico, Hanssen Studios and CLR, which the Bronx who sort of independently developed with Bill Conway and John Gwen. And then people like See Chin and Lee Ehmke have kind of developed. So they’ve all taken this very natural school. And I’m a great believer in, I think, that landscape and naturalness is a very integral component of landscaping a zoo exhibit. It’s not necessarily the norm.

That’s the point. I’m doing a PhD right now and what I’m doing is if it’s looking at great exhibits around the world and asking zoo people about which they think is a great exhibit, and then trying to analyze why it’s a great exhibit. And in fact, I’ve probably got subtitle it or the book that may come out of it would be called something like the Anatomy of a Great Exhibit, Zoo Exhibit. But the point is that, as with zoos in the world, I mean if there’s 10,000 zoos in the world, only a minute number are designed by zoo design professionals who understand the components of good design, which is natural design. Most of them, and it would be 9,500, would be designed by somebody who’s never, ever designed an exhibit in their life or were still a zoo. And so they go around. They’re commissioned by a country, a city that wants to build a new zoo, and they’re commissioned by that city and they go to the local architect and the local architect, “Well, I’ve never designed a zoo, but it sounds challenging. Let’s have a go.” And they maybe do a study tour and they go.

If they’re based somewhere in Central Asia, they go to Tashkent and some of the other zoos around there and Almaty and they say, “Well, this is the kind of yardstick that we’re following.” If they’re fortunate enough to be based in Southeast Asia, hopefully they go to Singapore Zoo and they kind of come back and say, “Well, yeah, we should follow a slightly more naturalistic thing.” But I think the problem is that a lot of zoos are designed by architects, and architects are trained to create monuments for their own egos. And so the architect will generally kind of create something which is not particularly functional for the animal, but they have some concepts which they think are very interesting. So the elephant house in London, which was designed by Sir Hugh Casson, the main issues was that the walls of the house were rough off form concrete, which looked like the skin of an elephant. And this was probably one of the most important things that the architect contributed towards the fact that they were displaying elephants. So it is that kind of thing, really.

When you decided to have polar bears in Singapore, were there objections?

Were you criticized?

And why did you choose to move forward with the exhibit?

I think it was a stupid idea. I didn’t want polar bears. My chairman wanted polar bears. And he had bumped into a guy called Jim Dolan in San Diego on one of his previous tours before I’d ever been with him. And they were looking at… For some of them discussing polar bears and Dr. Ong said, “Well, of course we can never have polar bears in Singapore.” And Jim said, “Of course, you can. It’s not a problem. You just kind of air condition the thing.” They built a polar bear exhibit in San Diego relatively recently.

And so that was it. And being a pretty forceful guy, he said, “Let’s do the polar bears.” And we didn’t have actually enough money even to do something, which was large enough. But anyway, and that was one of our first, one of our early exhibits. And even now, exhibit that I’m not proud of, and I wouldn’t recommend polar bears in the tropics. They turn green and because they have hollow hair follicles, the algae grows inside them. And the only way you can get rid of is actually to shave them. And then they turn black because they have black kids. So it’s just a mess.

You used to invite people to discuss how the zoo could be more inviting.

Why and why was it important?

Well, it comes back to this sort of creative design team and the creative design groups I used to develop. And I think it’s important to bring in people from outside the industry to not necessarily advise you, but to throw you ideas. And as I say, my skill, if you like, is facilitating groups of creative people. I mean, it’s a bit like herding cats. You’ve gotta pull them off the walls because they’re all over the wall, but if you give them a task… And you see I’ve got this baboon exhibit and I want to create it, and I want it to be different and interesting and stuff. And so then you get all these different people to come in and give you disparate ideas, then hopefully something lateral and new will come out of it. Not necessarily a paradigm shift, but at least something different and interesting, which you might be able to work into an interesting part of the exhibitor.

You said that zoo animals are like characters in a film.

What did you mean?

Well, I don’t know if I was thinking of the life at that time when I said that, but I think that zoo animals are obviously not wild animals. They’ve been taken from the wild, so their ancestry is from the wild, but they’re very different from wild animals as we know. I mean, putting a zoo animal back into the wild is all also a task of retraining and relearning, or not retraining, but just learning how to live in the wild. And if they’re not trained before they get put in the wild, they normally die because they can’t fend for themselves. But they’re there. They’re there. And that’s why zoos should take animals from other zoos and display them because they are like actors from central casting and they are used to being in captivity, understand things that you should do, you shouldn’t do, understand how to work with keepers and pose for the public. And I mean, say that in a very facetious way, but just kind of like they’re not stressed, highly stressed.

They’re actually quite cool. So they’re really not wild animals at all. They are actors in a film set. Zoos have set that conservation education research are important for zoos.

What should be the primary goal of a zoo aquarium and why?

I think conservation is probably the only reason that you can justify keeping animals in captivity. And it’s not necessary conservation through captive breeding or ex situ conservation or supporting in situ conservation. But I think basically it’s interpretation and interpreting to the visitors how important it is to conserve the animals, to conserve the environment. And I think that this is something that zoos have really done badly with over the last ever since they’ve been created. They’re just not good at it. I was quite impressive. Wildlife Conservation Society and their exhibits that they create because they really do create a quite a message and impact on why you should convert, conserve the species and the environment, but I think most zoos don’t do that. And they don’t have very good staff who are trying to do that interpretation.

And I think the interpretation doesn’t come by a zoo designer designing an exhibit and then finishing it and then saying, well, I’ve got a piece of wall here, which you can put a graphic on and got a piece of space here, which you could put a touchscreen on.

I think it has to be part of the whole design process where the, not educators, but interpreters need to get in there right at the beginning with the initial designers and the zoologists, the curators, and come up with this, what’s the purpose of this exhibit?

Why are we doing it?

What’s the message?

How do we get that message across to the visitor?

And how does that message fit into a storyline for the whole zoo?

And I think that’s the purpose, really the powerful purpose that zoos have on this earth. I mean, there’s probably a billion people that are go visiting zoos around the world. And we’re sort of squandering the messages that they could be leaving with, especially in the poly-run zoo. I mean, there could be so much more messaging to just get some simple facts across. And I think people are quite open to absorbing the facts if they’re presented to them. And in fact, one of the most powerful ways to get messages across to people is through an animal show, presentation show, because they are a captive audience. It’s when you’re watching a TV program at home and the commercials come on, that’s when you go take a break and you go to the toilet and you go to make a cup of tea in the kitchen. If you’re sitting in a cinema and the commercials come on, you’re basically sitting there watching them because you don’t go out to the toilet then.

And if you’re sitting in a auditorium in a zoo and the messaging comes through through the presentation, which it should be, and although it can be entertaining and fun and have a laugh, there should be powerful moments punctuated through the presentation where messages, subliminal and also very pertinent messages should come out about environmental conservation, conservation of these species. And if they don’t do that, then I think the missing huge opportunities. You had mentioned you talked to people who were cleaning up.

How important are amenities at a zoo?

Do you think people who are designing think enough about them?

I think it’s really important to have good toilets. In fact, one of the toilets that we we designed in Singapore was that we created this Balinese toilets where we go into the toilet and there’s a garden inside the toilet. The urinals could be outside in the garden. There could be waterfalls and ponds there. And you take an amenity that has always been treated by architects as something which you stick as far away from public site and smell as possible because they are unsightly smelly places. And you turn it into an exhibit and you create something out of it. So I’m a great believer of having good toilets. I think restaurants and food is very important.

I think zoos tend to cater to the lowest common denominator in zoos for their food, which are kids. And I think that’s horrible. I think you should have restaurants which cater for adults, single adults for adults who actually just want to go and have a nice meal. And there are sufficient adults who do go visit zoos and probably more would go and visit zoos if they had better amenities for them. As with retail stores, I think I’ve looked at retail stores on my trip to United States, all are selling horrible junk. And I really don’t see why there shouldn’t be… I’m sure have sell the junk, but I mean have an upmarket store, which is also selling something a lot more upmarket expensive, which would appeal to a certain sector of society ’cause if you don’t do that, then they won’t come. And that’s the difference between a museum and a zoo.

Museums tend to be a lot more focused on a slightly more upmarket clientele. And that’s what that’s reflected very much in their retail stores and to a less extent their food. You were able to form teams of staff that work well together to achieve a specific goal.

What style of leadership helped you to move the teams to work so well together?

I think leadership style for moving teams together is very much a sort of inclusive leadership where you’ve got to almost be a facilitator. I think the CEO obviously has to get the direction and get the objectives correct and have no doubt in their mind about where they’re going and how they’re going to go there. But from then onwards, it is then getting the senior management and the middle management to buy into it and then contribute towards working in that direction. A CEO can’t do it by themselves and and they can’t necessarily dictate it to staff members. I think if you wanna get the most out of staff members, you want them to be empowered and to feel that they’re part of a team, preferably it’s their idea that they’re implementing. So there’s a huge ownership to that idea and then it will be implemented. And it’s right down to the ground. I mean, as one knows, as a curator, if you go to a zoo keeper and you say, “Look, every day I want you to put in all these fresh brows into this primate, this barren primate cage, because this is why, then you’ll stimulate their behavior.” If you tell the keeper to do it and the keeper doesn’t get why they’re doing it, all they’re seeing from you is you telling them to put in all these cut branches.

The primates come and rip it all up and eat stuff and leave a huge mess. And then the next day, I gotta sweep it out. I gotta put another bunch of bloody, and it goes on. I mean, and this stupid curator’s been telling me to do this.

Why?

He’s nuts. So as soon as I can, as soon as he’s not looking, I won’t do it. But if I can convince that guy that it’s his idea, why are you doing, oh, I’m doing it for the good of the primates and for their enrichment, then he’ll do it every day and love it. And I think that’s top down, bottom up. It’s the same way.

During your career, what would you consider to be major events that affected all zoos in general?

Since 1970s, and I started going to WAZA in 1980, that was my first WAZA conference. That’s 42, 43 years ago. When I first started going to WAZA and mixing with the International zoo community, I realized that… I wasn’t smart, but I realized that actually nobody had education officers in zoos. Nobody was talking about education. And they started to just talk about education in those days. Then in the sort of the nineties, they started talking about conservation and conservation was big. Before that, nobody was talking about conservation, absolutely nothing about conservation.

Then this was I started to put out World’s Zoo Conservation Strategy, zoo started to hire in conservation offices or whatever they call them. And they sort of started angling their messages, their graphics, their design to be more conservation-orientated. And then recently, in the last 15, 20 years, suddenly got everybody’s into…

What do you call it?

Welfare, animal welfare. It’s like, oh… So in the sort of the last 15, 20 years, suddenly people are starting to talk about zoos, are talking about animal welfare. We went through a stage where there was a siege of the zoo world from the animal rights people, from the animal welfare people, Born Free Foundation, Peter, and everybody’s whacking the zoos and the zoos were retaliating. And then finally, they started to understand that actually instead of responding to an attack, they should actually get above that and actually start doing something about the welfare of the animals in zoos. And it wasn’t necessarily that the animal welfare was bad, but it just wasn’t necessarily good or particularly narrated well. And so I think animal welfare started to become a big thing in zoos. I was actually on the board of Wild Welfare, which is a welfare NGO set up by zoos to monitor welfare in zoos.

And it’s probably the most sensible thing that was done because if you have a complaint about a zoo, instead of nobody responding to it, because nobody in the zoo world was geared to make a serious assessment of a zoo. And so people like Peter would go, Born Free Foundation would go in and assess it and not necessarily make a great assessment ’cause they don’t really understand how zoos work. But now you have a zoo-based organization with zoo people who go in and make an assessment of animal welfare of a zoo, of the complaints and make recommendations to the zoo, to the National Zoo Association, to WAZA or wherever the complaints come from. And I think it’s very good. But I think an animal welfare obviously is the latest thing that zoos have started to sort out. I’m not sure what the next one will be.

How important was professional growth for your staff?

I think it was very important. And when I first joined the zoo in 1973, as I say, I had four staff trained in veterinary technicians and the rest of them were laborers. And when I first came in, I said, look, I spoke to the board and I said we have a bunch of keepers who are laborers. They have no educational complications. Some of them don’t even read and write.

Are we going to run a zoo of some caliber?

So we need to upgrade the standards. But rather than sort of getting rid of those keepers… Some of them were very good, but had no educational backgrounds, but we started to implement a few things. One is we started implementing courses, just basic education courses, doing their school certificates. We implemented City and Guilds Wild Animal Program on how to manage wild animals in captivity run by a UK college. And it was called the National Extension College, which which offered them a professional certificate in wild animal management, which could lead. And some of the guys went off to Jersey to do a diploma in endangered species manager. And then implementing a series of incentives and disincentives for the people for the keepers who took their educational qualifications, who joined the wild animal management programs.

As they passed milestones, they would get a bonus. And also the disincentive was, if you didn’t do these things, wow, we are not gonna fire you, but you will never see any progress. And so we started also implemented a lot more rungs on the keepers professional levels. So we had assistant keeper, keeper grade 3, 2, 1, senior keeper, supervisor, head keeper, assistant curator. So in other words, you’ve got like promotional grades. And so if guys are doing well, they’re studying, they’re bettering themselves, which for us was useful ’cause then they can read textbooks, they can read crandall, they can learn about the animals, they can introduce the internet so they’re getting better keepers. So that was one thing which was looking at the existing keepers. So as not to demoralize them because some of them been there now for six, seven years and they’re okay.

And in fact there’s nothing wrong with an uneducated keeper. It’s just that you’re not necessarily gonna get the highest caliber out of them, but they’re fine in doing the work. I’ve always found that the best keepers are not graduate keepers at all. They’re probably somewhere around a school leaving certificate who smart enough to read, write, intelligent enough to research stuff, but not huge, great lofty aspirations. But we also brought in a graduate keeper program to inject, just to simply inject graduates into the keeper ranks and call them animal management officers. And so they were graduates, preferably zoologists, but they could be biologists. They could be even chemistry or something like that, some kind of degree. And they would hopefully stay as field keepers, but take on very specialist roles.

So they would be especially insects, reptiles, areas where you need a little bit more maybe sophistication. And then we’d have the intakes for curators, assistant curators and curators who would definitely be graduates, but sometimes taken from the field, sometimes direct intakes of graduates. So over the years, we sort of really bolstered the zoology department. And some of the guys, I mean, Kumar Pillai, who’s a very good example. He joined the zoo as a grass cutter. He’s still there today. He’s a director of special projects because he’s just about to retire, but he was head of Light Safari. He did good.

So these guys, we gave them the opportunity and they rose to the occasion and they bettered themselves. They got it. They understood the system, what the system was trying to do for them, and they worked with it. And we have quite a lot of them like that, which was great. So I think it’s great achievement.

Who would you say is the shelf life of a master plan?

I’d say about 20 years. I think after that, they get outdated. I was just talking with the director of the Woodland Park Zoo the other day, and he was talking about the Jones & Jones 1976 master plan, which was developed by the Hancocks, John Coe, Jones & Jones. And he felt it was really out of date. Although I still use it as a kind of a benchmark for talking about master plans. But I mean, his, his point was that, it was all about bio climatic zones, regional zones. And interpreting the interpretation for those zones was talking about the ecology of the area and the species and talking about species. And he said the modern, he felt the modern context really has to be changed.

And so he’s talking much more about conservation, environmental conservation, climate change, and the impacts of that. And he felt that there should be a new master plan, not necessarily a physical change to the enclosures, but a new way of looking at how to interpret the existing enclosures just because it’s just so expensive to change anything these days. I mean, anything it touches 50 million, 100 million.

What would you say were the keys to maintaining your visitor’s attention?

Attention. I think interaction, if possible, is very important. If you can’t touch the animal or touch stuff, artifacts and stuff, then at least have it so that the animals can interact with them. Watching a good example is Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which I was at recently. You have lots of docents around with lots of interpretation material where they’re engaging people, showing them a skull, showing them a skin, showing them things, and getting them to understand, link it with the enclosure they’re looking at. Or kids looking at the otters in Woodland Park and just otters obviously interacting with the children, playing with them through the glass underwater. So that kind of thing is very engaging. And that’s the kind of stuff I think that visitors really, really do connect with and those kind of experiences that they remember.

I mean, I have adopted son who I took to the zoo about 35, 30 years ago and took him behind the scenes and showed him a PME cup. Even to this day, he talks about that. I mean, he’s like a 45-year-old guy. I just always remember that (indistinct). And these are really powerful experiences and you can give every person that. That’s great. And that’s the kind of thing that these animal shows can do in a way that they leave these very lasting memories. I mean, one of the greatest shows in Singapore that I remember is the King of the Sky’s show in Jurong Bird Park.

And besides, lots of raptors flying all over the place there,. There was this one at Griffon’s Vulture and he used to climb up this kind of sloping tree, climb up there. And then he’d get to the top of it and then he’d fly down. And it was just amazing just watching this wingspan and this huge bird just flying. And people were really enthralled. And right at the end, one of them, get all these missiles of meat and they’d flick them up in the air and they’d release five team train brahminy kites to fly and catch them. But you’d have the local wild population of brahminy kites hanging around ’cause they knew it’s a free feeding. And so you’d get like 15 brahminy kites flying at the air.

And these are kind of things that people are just, like, they’re just amazed or like… Those are the kind of things people really like the sort of engagement and they remember and that’s kind of those kind of stories that they take home and tell tell their friends or relatives.

How do zoos deal with, or should they deal with surplus animals?

Yeah, it’s a very interesting question. I mean, the Europeans are so much more laid back and are less concerned about it than the Americans. I mean, in the States, it’s like, whoa, culling is this like serious problem. in Europe, it’s not, and now obviously it came to a head with Marius the giraffe, where it was so casually done by Copenhagen Zoo where they invited school kids come and watch the euthanasia and dismembering of a giraffe, which was dissected by a vet and then basically chopped up and fed to the lions. And it was like a cool, casual kind of day out for the kids. And it was only when it hit the international press that it kind of rocketed around the world. It’s this big animal rights. But I mean, I don’t think necessarily it was the fact that the giraffe was put down because it was surplus.

The rationale was there was nothing wrong with the giraffe. It was a healthy giraffe. It could have been placed somewhere else if the director tried to place it somewhere else. But it was surplus to the breeding program that EAZA had, and therefore it was surplus and so it was put down. And I think that’s what really shook the industry. But I think Europeans have put down animals all the time. I think the Indians have the biggest problem because they’re Hindu. They’re not allowed to almost kill anything.

So nothing is euthanized in Indian zoos. And that’s where they have huge problems. And they don’t have any population control either. So you have herds of 500 access to trashing the exhibit spaces. You have 50 lions in one zoo, all kept in dingy little places because they only have one big exhibit, which could be two hectares in size, but they only put in five lions and the rest will stay in the back. These are basic problems. I mean, you either put them on the pillow or you euthanize them, just get rid of them. I’d prefer to be dead than to be a lion sitting in one of those cages in an Indian zoo backyard.

Zoos are spending tens of millions of dollars on elephant exhibits. Huge sums.

Would this be better spent going for institute conservation of elephants?

What are the issues and problems?

Yeah, it’s one of those things that. As I say, I always said advise my clients nowadays, don’t get into elephants, hot potatoes. It’s just a question of time before. It’s an international, it will be an international problem, like killer whales and dolphins, whale sharks, polar bears even. As I said, I came away from talking to zoo, direct zoo designers and directors. Anything you touches 50 million, 100 billion, an elephant facility must be twice that much because there’s so much more size and mechanism and it’s crazy. I think I like the concept of the Tennessee elephant sanctuary. I like the concept of white oaks.

I like the concept of many of the sanctuaries in Asia for elephants. And there’s many rescued elephants in Asia, especially in Thailand, which where there was, I don’t know, 2,000 working in the timber industry that have been put out of work. And so they’re kind of like in sanctuaries. Myanmar which is the last stronghold for working elephants, they still have quite a lot of elephants working. They’re actually a great way of logging because they’re really not damaging to the environment. I’ve seen elephants working in Chiang Mai in the timber industry, and they work together. They haul logs out of the forest without damaging anything else. They kick them down a slope which lands up in a river and it’s taken away.

I don’t know. I suppose eventually you’ve got the Asian elephant, you’ve got the African elephants. I think WAZA is putting a lot of pressure on zoos not to keep elephants. I suppose the zoos that have already got them up, keeping them and eventually may get out of them. But I think if you can spend some of that money on those facilities to help the wild, it might help. But at the same time, I think that keeping elephants in captive in zoos is logical, if it makes any sense. I mean, I have a client, which is the Amsterdam zoo artist and they have elephants. They just built a new elephant enclosure a few years ago.

I’ve suggested to them that they get out of elephants, it’s too small. Otters is like 10 hectares. And I mean, I think to be realistic, you should have like one hectare per elephant.

So what are you doing with elephants?

Why are you keeping them?

Why don’t you send them to a place which has 500 hectares if you’re gonna keep them in captivity?

And you have to because there are lots of elephants which need to go into sanctuaries like bears in the wild. And you’ve got many, many bear sanctuaries in Southeast Asia, China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, taking care of bears that have been in the bile industry, just putting them out to pasture. They’ve got another 30, 40 years. They have a right to live out that life. And I think with elephants, the same, just put them in sanctuaries.

Can the new technology, do you believe assisted promoting zoos, Twitter, Facebook draw attention to wildlife?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, sure. And as Twitter or X gets replaced by modern social media, I think one has to just keep keep with it and stay very in tuned with… Zoo should stay in tuned with always to get messages out to the general public.

Has student education you think made any headway in educating the public and the differences between the wellbeing of a creature and the survival of a species?

I don’t know, really. As I said, I think it comes back to zoo education is probably more effective in a classroom, zoo classroom situation where you’re actually teaching the student about the animals themselves. Once you start moving education out into the zoo itself, I think interpretation is a far more important tool where you’re not trying to educate the visitor, but you’re just trying to nail some… There are some concepts that they can take away with them. And as I say, at the moment, what’s very strong is environmental education and the impact that humans are having on the planet, plastics and global warming and stuff. And I guess it’s fair enough, push me. Many zoos seems to be giving lip service to using money for conservation purposes.

Is the conservation issue so big that it’s unreasonable request to ask of zoos?

I think as time goes by, zoos will will get more involved in situ conservation. I think the rage right now is to have a sister national park, which you sponsor where you’ve got educational, where you’ve got research programs going on in your supporting research programs in the wild and you’re showcasing them in captivity and giving more money to those kind of programs is good. Or you’ve got places like Zurich, which have put up like a Madagascar exhibit called Masoala, where that’s a national park in Madagascar. And they talk about what it’s like, what animals and plants are there. And then they take some money and they give it to the national park every year. And I think that those are sort of things which I think the public get, they understand. That’s why I was quite shocked when I went to the Bronx and they used to, in the Congo exhibit, the gorilla exhibit, have right at the end, you paid a fee to get in. Well, not to get in, but you paid for a donation and at the end you had this choice about three or four different projects that you could put that money to donations, which have all been trashed.

And now it’s you just pay a donation to get in and they decide where to put it, which I think you just lost the whole plot there because I think that… I mean, I think that was a very good way of getting people to sort of make… You forced them to say, “Hey, hey, maybe I should take a bit of notice here.

And what’s this program?

Is it with elephants, this with gorillas, this is with chimpanzees?

I think I’ll go for the gorillas ’cause that’s what I’ve been looking at.” But I mean, you’re making them make choices with their own money. I think those are good things. And I’m surprised and very saddened that they stopped doing it.

Does space continue to be a problem for zoos and aquariums?

I’m not sure about aquariums ’cause I don’t really know much about aquariums. But zoos, well I think it shouldn’t, but it obviously is. I suppose zoos need to make some conscious efforts to get to places where there’s more space. Obviously, very, very much easier said than done. And I’ve looked in the past at quite a number of zoos that I’ve been involved with and how they are inner city zoos and how they should actually get out of the city and have a lot more space and area, which they can devote more to their animals. But similarly on the flip side of that, looking at this client in artists in, in Amsterdam, which is a small inner city zoo, which will never move outside Amsterdam, I think, one of the things that we really encourage them to do, which they are doing is to get rid of their charismatic megavertebrates. So they got rid of polar bears, they got rid of western, they got rid of hippo, hopefully they get rid of elephants. And so they’re sort of scaling down the need to have big exhibits.

They don’t have much deer, antelopes. They opened a exhibit six, seven years ago called Microbial, which is basically a whole museum for live microbes, bacteria, yeast, fungus. And they have like 10, 20, 30 live specimens, tidy grades, things like that. And that makes a lot of sense because that’s on a small footprint of multi-story footprint of land in a very small zoo. And so zoos don’t necessarily need to display these megavertebrates. And I was talking to the director of the Amsterdam Zoo and saying it’s like… And he was saying, “But I can’t get rid of elephants because that’s what the people of Amsterdam come to see.” And I said, “Well, I can name you a whole host of zoos that don’t have megavertebrates, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, they don’t have megavertebrates.” I think their biggest thing is a pure. I mean, it’s like you don’t need it to be a interesting exhibit.

What would you say is the skillset that a zoo director needs today as compared to when you started?

Oh, I think when I started, 90% of zoo directors were men and were either vets or zoologists. There were a couple of odd balls like Hancocks who was an architect. I think there’s one priest, couple of other maybe horticulturalists here or there. And then you had really the big wave of captains of industry coming in from not necessarily bankers, but people who had run large-ish companies. And I think that was a sort of a fad that a lot of boards felt that since they’re handling bigger budgets, they should have people who understand how to manage money in charge rather than… Zoologists and vets who have no concept about money. And I think that was to the advantage of the bottom line, but to the detriment of the animal collections. And for two reasons, one is that a captain of industry, when he comes in to a zoo, he doesn’t know how to manage animals and certainly doesn’t know how to manage animal people.

And so the people can pull the wool over his eyes, left, right, and center, and he kind of just has to accept it ’cause he doesn’t know, he’s non-technical guy. And so I think you’re losing a huge amount of creativity because an animal guy can tell animal people, “We can do that. We can’t do that. I think we can do that.” And so in a creative situation, like you’re developing a new exhibit, you know how to push the boundaries, whereas the cattle industry doesn’t. So that was one problem. The other is that I think the technical, that the animal-based director certainly is ill-equipped to manage the modern problems that a CEO faces with the finance, the marketing, and the kind of general commercialization of the place. And a lot of them are not interested. So really they kind of shirk around it.

So I think probably the best would be to get a biologist with an MBA who understands the biology of the place, but also understands the commercial, the need for commercialization. And this is not very difficult to do. It’s just you find people with these kind of backgrounds. But I think a blend of both blend of technical and commercial.

What issues would you like to see zoos address in the future?

Of what?

Issues would you like to see zoos address in the future?

My personal interest is design. And so I’m very interested in making sure that in the future, more zoos create better looking exhibits with an equal balance of naturalism. I mean, in a good exhibit, you’ve got four different components. You’ve got the visitors, the animals, the staff, the keeping staff, and the zoo director, the zoo owner, the chairman of the board. And they each have almost conflicting requirements. And so it always tends to be a little bit of a balance of how do you kind of balance it out. But visitor wants to see the animals, the animals do not necessarily want to hide from the visitors, but may want to retire. The keeper wants an ergonomically designed place where he can function as safely and as efficiently as possible.

And the chairman of the board wants a commercial exhibit that will make money for the zoo and sell as much popcorn and and soda around it as possible. So it’s just quite that balance. But getting more zoos down that road of good-looking exhibits, which are functional, I think that’s what I would like to see.

How do you think zoos can improve their connection with kids and teenagers to heighten their zeal or awareness about the natural world?

Yeah, I think it comes back to that thing I was saying earlier about just interaction, especially younger children. The touch, the feel, the chase, the interaction through glass and the shows. So having animals that do that which connect with children. Or having, I mean, these things like tunnels which kids can walk into. I saw one in New York in the shark tank where there’s a 360 degree tunnel of perspex that can walk in and can be immersed in the shark tank. That kind of thing is always great for young children. Teenagers are really a challenge. And I’m not sure whether one will necessarily ever engage teenagers to go to the zoo unless they’re a very special breed because I think zoos have this reputation that when you stop being a kid and you become a teenager, you don’t go to zoo until you come back as an adult with children or with nephews and nieces.

Somehow if that can be broken, it’s good. Singapore has moved the Jurong Bird Park to Monday where the zoo is it’s called, this guy got a new name. Anyway, they’re building a new park. So it’ll be the fifth park, I think it’s called the Jungle Safari. And that is aimed at teenagers, young adults, young unmarried adults. I think it’s African and Asian animals, but it’s a lot of experiential climbing, repelling, ropes and stuff. So there’s a lot of this kind of outdoor sports in it. And I guess that’s targeted to that market segment.

And I suppose you either do that through appealing to their outdoor experiences or to their phone, computer-based where you come in and everything can be picked up on the phone with QR codes and stuff like that. You talked about marketing and its importance.

So is there any advice you’d give the neophyte zoo director about the importance of marketing zoos or important aspects for a new guy, Gail?

Yeah, I think probably what my old chairman set down as the philosophy is probably the very critical, have something to bring the public back every year. I mean, okay, you’ve got usually got two or three different markets that market segments that you’re dealing with, but your local market, which is your base market, which is within one hour traveling time of you, maybe two hours depending on how much you travel, is probably your core market. And they will come back if they’re members with children, so their friends or whatever membership you have with passes. They will enjoy your core facilities. But if you can have a new attraction on a yearly basis, that will keep bringing them back incrementally and bring in new people in. I think the tourist would be brought in with something which is different with some kind of a unique selling proposition, which is not found in the zoo and nationally or regionally, whatever that may be, whether it’s butterflies or naked bull rats or whatever. But it’s something which is different, which gets that out of town people to make that visit just to the zoo as opposed to going to a zoo or a park in their vicinity. But I think that it’s kind of like a…

Yeah, I think basically getting new stuff on a regular basis is very critical.

If you could go back in time, what, if anything, would you have done differently?

I think I would’ve spent more time studying good exhibit design at a much younger age. And obviously I’m exhibit designer, so that’s my interest and focus. I only really got into understand exhibit design halfway through my career, and it’s only really been in the last 30 years out of 50 that I’ve really sort of started to grasp what good exhibit design is all about. So if I’d been able to go back and talk to or learn from people like David Hancocks, John Coe, Bill Conway in the early seventies and understood what they were talking about because I didn’t understand what it was all about. I mean, even though you go and look at it, look at what they’ve done, I didn’t really get it, I didn’t really get it until actually much, much later on, the subtleties of a good exhibit design. So that’s probably probably one of my things that I would try and change a lot.

To what extent do you continue to be active in the zoological park field?

Well, because of my company, which I set up in 2002, Bernard Harrison and Friends, which designs zoos and ecotourism attractions, little bit of aquariums, not a lot, but we do have aquarium team. I’ve always basically been in the field, I mean in the zoo field. As I said, I attended my first WAZA conference in 1980. So I’ve actually been attending WAZA for the last 43 years. And I still attend today, to this day, because I don’t pick up a lot of work from WAZA, but it just shows that I’m still around, still alive, and I meet new people. And again, the WAZA people are not my clientele, but if they were to recommend somebody to somebody else who wanted to build a zoo, then it’s the tip of the tongue sort of thing that they would do. So I do most of my work in China, India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. These would be the critical areas for me.

These are areas which are growing. Europe and the States and Australia are mature markets. There’s no news news coming up in these countries, maybe eastern Europe, but most of them are just redeveloping existing exhibits and spending huge amounts of money. I mean, I would spend $50 million on a new zoo, Greenfield Zoo India or China. People here in the states spend $50 million on three species of animals. It’s like to me it doesn’t make any sense. I think something’s gone wrong with American designs. I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but it’s something very wrong.

How did Bernard Harrison and Friends come about?

So when I left the zoo, so I had this agonizing six months where I was unhappy and I just couldn’t decided. I had to leave. II couldn’t stand with my being with my chairman, working with my chairman. I went through a period where I talked to people and I was actually headhunted by Sentosa, which is actually a big tourist island of Singapore. I was actually headhunted to be their CEO. It was close enough to doing what I was doing that it wasn’t that different. And actually, I was on the board of directors of Sentosa, but that was knocked back by the powers that said we don’t like poaching from one government company to the other. Although I was leaving anyway, so that was knocked back.

I toyed with the idea of being the CEO of a fast food company and said, “I don’t think that’s really what I want to do.” But it’s like once you’re in the CEO position, it’s kind of like, yeah, I mean you know what you gotta do to be CEO, but that’s not what I want do. So my wife Tina said, “Well, actually, what do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, I think I want to be a consultant,” because I’d set up consulting at Singapore Zoo 10 years before I left. So we actually had a consulting wing and we were doing consulting jobs for zoos in India and China, set up a Night Safari in Guangzhou in China. So I said, “I know how to do consulting. I know how to cost. I know how to pull teams together. So that’s what I’ll do,” and so I set up Bernard Harrison and Friends. Took five years to really get established, but I’ve been doing it now for, what, 20 years.

And it’s fine, it’s good.

Are there any programs or exhibits that you would have liked to have implemented during your tenure just didn’t happen?

Mm.

Was there anything on the drawing board?

Not really. Not really. I think I pretty well pretty much did what I wanted to do. Actually, we’d always talked about doing an aquarium and I never did it, but it was done. It was done by my successors, freshwater aquarium called River Safari. Are there zoos in the world that… ‘Cause you’ve talked about design and implementation that you admire.

Where are they?

Why do you admire them?

I like the Bronx, although I think it’s getting a little old. I think what the Bronx has done under Bill Conway and followed by people like Lee Ehmke and Sue Chin, the present director of VP design, is they have put in new exhibits and they really spend a lot of time and effort on a new exhibit. And so you have things like Congo, which are quite spectacular, but which are 20 years old now. Madagascar, they put in this new shark exhibit in the New York Aquarium. They take a long time to develop a great exhibit and it’s great, but they take a long time. And although they’re patching up bits and pieces in the other parts of the zoo, I think they’re not kind of getting in and kind of patching everything up simultaneously. So you’ve got great exhibits and you’ve got really old-looking stuff. And I think this is something that similarly you have obviously in a lot of other zoos.

So I like Bronx, I like Zurich. I think Zurich is probably one of my favorite exhibits. Zoos, they have a lot of stuff in the old zoo, which is nice. And then they’ve got the new zoo, which really quite, quite spectacular. They’ve got a big African era. They’ve got this Masoala at new exhibits. There are obviously other zoos around the world, which are good. I mean, a lot of the German zoos are good.

Quite a lot of the American zoos are good. Some of the Australian zoos are good.

You talked a little about elephants and do you think that zoos can maintain elephants and how it should be done correctly?

Yeah, I think so. But it’s a sort of a bit of an irony I think, really. Technically, I mean the Asian elephant, not the African elephant, the Asian elephant is a working animal as is a horse, as opposed to wild horses. And so they are in captivity and they can be worked. So with the hands-off policy, which a lot of zoos are going towards, it’s obviously now you have these large exhibits which are totally remote. There’s no contact. And it doesn’t particularly gel in Asia because there’s such a tradition of handling elephants in Asia, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysian Peninsula, Sumatra to a point, Burma, Thailand. So it’s like elephants.

I think there is a role of in with elephants, but as I say, they’re just a problem species because they’re just so big. They’re so expensive. I think there should be elephants kept in captivity. But I think not every Tom Dick and Harry should have the right to say, “I wanna keep elephants.” I think they really need to prove that they have good facilities. And good facilities doesn’t necessarily mean all remote. I think it means space and climate. I mean, elephants are tropical animals, enjoy warmth and humidity.

Was there any one piece or important piece of advice you received that has stayed with you throughout your career?

I think Lyn de Alwis was my guru from Sri Lanka is probably the person who’s had the most impact on my zoo career as opposed to my father. My father taught me the respect for animal life, and Lyn taught me reinforced that respect for animal life, but also respect for staff. And so respect your animals and respect your staff. And I think if you’ve got that combination, then to me that’s a very important philosophy.

Would you recommend the zoo, aquarium field to a young person with sincere interest in wildlife and conservation today and why?

Yeah, I would. But I would really suggest to them to go off and do a course in wild animal management first, so that they really get exposed to animals in the wild. I think a classical zoology degree does not do much for understanding the needs of animals that have to be translated into captivity. So when my son Sean was younger, I mean he talked about getting into the field. And so I said, “Well, let’s go to Arusha in Tanzania and let’s look at the wildlife college there.” And we went and we talked to the principal and looked at the facilities. And I had heard about it from one of my staff who’d done a wildlife management degree there in Arusha. And he was like, we were saying, “this is pretty interesting,” because what happens is Arusha is actually just outside the Serengeti. And so a lot of their trainings in Serengeti and it’s like a diploma course and then you can do a degree course, I think three years.

And one of their things they have to do is they kind of have to climb up Mount Kilimanjaro, but they always have to… They get dropped off somewhere in the middle of the Serengeti with a rifle and three bullets and get picked up five days later or something without any food. And so they have to kinda shoot up or whatever to keep going. And so it’s like a survival course. And these guys, I mean, my sons, they’re all been through army anyway in Singapore. You can go through the army, so two years in the army. So it’s not such a big deal, and using weapons and stuff. But I think it’s very good for city kid who’s never done anything.

And they wanna say they want go and work at a zoo. I say, “Well, go, go, go to…” There’s plenty of colleges in South Africa as well, but I say the one in Tanzania’s, I think, it’s pretty good. Go and experience the animals in the wild first. That gets you into a right frame of mind to start talking about animals in captivity ’cause it’s so different. As I said, I think that’s something that a lot of keepers are not really kind of really in tuned with.

What’s their natural habitat?

What’s their ecological niche?

Why are they like that?

Why do they have those adaptations?

Can you speak to your thoughts on man’s interdependence with nature?

Well, I think it’s just one of those things, it’s like we are totally part of the whole Gaia. And as much as we try not to or try and dissociate ourselves with the natural world, especially living in inner city of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, thank God for Central Park and stuff like that. I think I always say to Singaporeans who bitch about the haze. And you have this, we were talking earlier about being in Kalimantan and being in the haze. The haze is caused by burning of forests to clear land for oil palm, primarily oil palm. It’s a bit of rubber. It’s the quickest way to do it. It just box and matches, bottle of petrol and the dry season.

You’ve cleared a whole bunch of land. And I always tell Singaporean, and so this haze, this smoke, it goes on for months. And this smoke hangs over this smog, hangs over Singapore, Malaysia. And Singaporeans complain about it and they say, “Why can’t our neighbors get the act together and be more environmentally conscious?” And of course when you look at it, you find that actually the culprit companies that are doing the damage were actually Singapore-based companies. So it’s just that we move our shit out of Singapore and do it elsewhere. So I say to them, it’s like it’s so good that we have the haze ’cause it brings us back to be in touch with our nature and our natural roots that we’re all part of this whole environment and ecosystem and we each have to play a part on.

But as you spends multimillion dollars on a gorilla exhibit or an elephant exhibit, tiger exhibit and critics ask why the money is not used to help the animals in the wild, you say what?

Well, I would say that it’s important to educate people about the fact that these are animals that live in the wild. Captive animals are their ambassadors of their wild counterparts. And I agree that it’s getting more and more expensive to make good exhibits which convey the messages of these animals and their environments. And as I’ve said, I mean in the states, obviously it’s spending huge amounts of money on this. I think somewhere in between, there’s sufficient… There should be a kind of a benchmark where you don’t need to go overboard and spend huge amounts of money, but it’s important to spend a good chunk of it. Otherwise you don’t create an exhibit which is gonna convey the right messages to people. And if you have a bad-looking gorilla exhibit, which really doesn’t look anything like the natural habitat, it’s not really conveying the right message.

It’s so much more difficult to do that with elephants because it’s just so massive and destructive. But I mean it’s the same philosophy. But I think more and more zoos should be coupling the development of exhibits for endangered species with some kind of field programs and actively supporting them and actively soliciting money for those field programs, which I think more and more zoos are now starting to do.

Are you concerned about zoos and aquarium staying relevant and pertinent in the next 25 years?

What direction would you say would help them to stay viable?

I think probably zoos are probably at their most vulnerable right now and will get more and more vulnerable and their relevance will be questioned in the future. I think there’s a big anti-zoo movement in the world. And zoos really need to work hard at becoming more relevant and in tune with their potential visitors. And it’s very difficult to know how to do that because on one side, you’re looking at what do people want to do in their leisure time. And it tends to be more entertainment-based. And so that’s why the commercial animal parks, which offer entertainment leisure would win out much more on zoos. And I think that’s why zoos had to come back from the rather high scientific principles of the eighties and nineties. No shows, no presentations, very scientific, to much more, well, let’s try and put in as much entertainment as possible.

Animal Kingdom is a very good example of that sort of hybrid that could be a future for zoos in the next 20, 30 years. No, I’m not a great fan of it myself, but I mean I’m looking at the situation. And I’m saying you really do need to be more entertainment-based theme park base with strong animal content. But I mean, I think the traditional zoo where their animals are laid out and there’s no excitement. Everything’s very sterile and education-based. I think those zoos will suffer. And you will have the zoos which go on this more themed path will tend to do better. For me, it’s one of those things which is kind of really quite disturbing because I don’t think that that’s necessary the way we should go.

But I think that maybe it’s not a question of whether it’s palatable or not. It’s a question of if it’s a choice between that and extinction, then obviously zoo should not go down that path that the giant pandas went down.

Is that what you advise your clients this hybrid?

I don’t go so much on rides because I don’t think necessary, I mean rides, meaning like the sort of rollercoaster-based ride. I’m not really that, but I mean I think like themed rides in Savannah, that kind of ride’s fine. Boat rides where you’re seeing animals, that’s fine. Putting in some kind of interactive elements, I think it’s a good way to go. If you could put in like vehicles, which could drive on land and go in water, great, that kind of stuff. But I think it’s like seeing live animals, getting close to them, going ski lifts, ski chairs, open ski chairs, not cable car, putting them in the canopy, having monkeys at the canopy level, going into aviaries and ski lift and getting up into the canopy. Those kind of things, I think interactive, which are value added, which you can charge for, which get new types of experiences as opposed to the rather more static experiences of the traditional zoo is I think something which is has to come. I think people are looking at, at more entertainment.

That’s why you have these, things are getting more popular.

What do you think is the power of this?

Mm?

The power. The power. I think the live animal. The live animal is the most powerful thing that you can ever have. So if somebody comes to me and say, “Well, zoos are irrelevant because we have National Geographic and Discovery Channel. We have other forms of virtual reality and stuff where I can go and I can see. I can have a 3D, 4D, 5D experience where you can even smell them and almost cap them in your face,” But there’s nothing like having a live animal there. And I think that’s the power of the zoo.

And so it’s how do you enhance that without abusing the animals?

And what do you know about the profession that you’ve devoted so many years of your life to?

What do you know about this profession?

I mean, the the professionals who are really kind of zoo people are really a very dedicated bunch of people. I say especially the technical staff, the zoologists, the veterinarians, the botanists of horticulturalists and some of the exhibit designers. I think those kind of like people that they really love the profession. You can see it when you mix with them in conferences or you go and visit them. And there’s a huge camaraderie I found anyway. I mean, I tell a story of when I was director of Singapore Zoo 40 years ago, a security guard came to my office and said that I have two Germans who are outside and they wanna see you, it’s EAZA show. And they came into my office and they were both curators at Leipzig Zoo. Can’t remember one of them, but one of them was Jörg.

Anyway, I can’t remember his name, but he was a curator of mammals at Leipzig. And he said, “Look, we’re on this boat, it’s gone to the Antarctic. It’s a East German or it’s a Russian vessel and we’ve stopped into Singapore and I have all these East German marks, but I mean I can’t change them, but we said let’s just jump into a cab and go visit the zoo, Singapore Zoo which we’ve heard about.” So I said, “Wow, that’s fantastic.” And so we kind of like, so I said, “Sure, let’s take care of you.” So we take care of them. We fed them. We gave them money. We took them out for dinner. We put them back in a cab. We sent them back to the boat.

And years later, I find that Jörg is now the director of the Munster Zoo. And Adler, Jörg Adler, that’s the director of Munster Zoo. And I meet up with him. I said, “My God, you are the guy who came to see me.” And he said, “You’re the guy who took care of us in Singapore.” And he get went around telling everybody that it is this guy Berny, he took care of me in Singapore when I was with East German marks. And I think that’s the sort of the camaraderie that we have, at least I hope so. I mean, the fact that you and I were offered accommodation in Berlin Zoo, in Frankfurt Zoo, I mean I don’t know what you did, but I just wrote to them and said, “I’m coming. Can you recommend a hotel?” And they said, “No, you stay in our guest house.” It’s like that. That’s camaraderie and that’s something beautiful about the professional.

How would you like to be remembered your legacy?

I think quite honestly, I would think the toilets. I think that the toilets are something brilliant, which nobody really has picked up on. Like the Night Safari, nobody’s really picked up on the Night Safari. I don’t think they even get it, half the people who talk about Night Safari and I’ve designed a lot and they’ve never been built. Pitch report right now in Lucknow, I designed that for a place called Greater Noida outside Delhi, 2006. And that project, that Night Safari has been floating around for the last 18 years and it’s now landed in Lucknow, which is the capital of Uttar Pradesh. And we’re pitching for it. Maybe we’ll get it, maybe we’ll design it, whether they ever do it.

I don’t know. The only other Night Safari that was ever built, we designed in Chiang Mai, which is Thailand, which is still operating. And we built one when I was still at Singapore in China in Guangzhou. And they closed it down, not because it was doing badly, because it had a change in zoning and the zone which was agriculture, where the Night Safari became commercial. And so it’s like they shut the thing and they built commercial stuff there. One of the biggest theme parks, a zoo in China, Chimelong. So I’d like to be remembered for Night Safaris and for the toilets. And I think probably the toilets, sir.

Balodies toilets, sir. Well, thank you, Bernard Harrison. I appreciate you sitting down with us- My pleasure. Talking about your life and legacy. Yeah, good. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.