Rick Barongi

Well, my name is Rick Barongi, although my mother named me Roderick because she liked Rick, but she thought Richard was too common. So I had this name Roderick, which I hated when I was young, but I’m Rick Barongi. I was born May 25th, 1952 in Flushing Hospital in Queens, New York.

And who were your parents? What did they do?

Winnie and Tony Barongi. Winnie or Winifred. My mother was from German and Polish parents, and who died way before I was born and was born in New York City and met my father in, I think, junior high. And then they went out in high school. She was very popular. She had other boyfriends too. My father was a typical Italian and came from a big Italian family, and he was a printer. My mom did a lot of things, but she was also very outgoing. She looked a little bit like Natalie Wood. She was very pretty, my mom, and, and, and she’s, and everybody loved my mom.

My mom was just incredible. My dad was typical Italian dad, you know, always, always, always busting my balls because that’s what Italian dads did. And I was an only child, so I, I took the brunt of everything. So I was a little closer to my mother, which made my father jealous. But it, it worked out, you know, I grew up okay. I was a pretty easy going kid to take care of. I was very disciplined, much more so than I am now. I was in sports, sports saved me, you know, in seventh grade or eighth grade, the gym teacher said, put me on the wrestling team.

And that worked out really well. I became captain of the wrestling team and there, there were things I did, you know, like that. And being the resident advisor at Cornell for two years, that really helped my people skills quite a bit. And you mentioned it, but tell us a little more about your childhood growing up.

Were animals part of your life?

Just dogs. And my mom took care of ’em more than I did. I, I wasn’t the kid that went out there. I, and picked up everything and collected everything. I was fascinated with it. But again, a second grade, I think it started there. There’s not one moment in my life that the light bulb went on, but I had a great second grade teacher, a PhD teacher, Dr. Brubaker. She read a Scarlet Charlotte’s Web, you know, the book with the spider in the pig. And that really, I, I just, I remember that so much.

And then we went to the museum in natural history and I talked about that and, and the Bronx Zoo. So I was fascinated. So I’m in seventh grade in junior high, and they call it middle school now, I guess. And you have guidance counselors. And the guidance counselor said, Ricky, I was Ricky back then.

Ricky, what do you wanna do?

You said, you, you, how old are you in seventh grade, whatever, 13. And I said, well, I like animals. You wanna be a vet. That’s all they knew. You wanna be a veterinarian. So I took that course of, of, you know, of study and got into Cornell. ’cause they had a vet school. So I went undergrad, got an interview after three years at Cornell. Didn’t get in. Thought I’d get in the next year. Didn’t get in to, to vet school and went to Africa. And, and this is the summer I graduated Cornell.

I I was also working at Jungle Habitat. We can get back to that part-time. But I go to Africa on my own with some letters of recommendation from, from an individual at Warner Brothers Jungle Habitat. And I stayed there until my money ran out, which was like four or five months. I lived at the YMCA. One of the letters was to Joy Adamson, the author of Born Free, forever Free, all those, all those movies that they made and books. And I called her up from Nairobi and she answers the phone. And I had this picture of her from the movies, which was very different than the real Joy Adamson, who was a lot older and a very, very Austrian German accent.

And she says, who are you? Why are you calling me?

I said, well, well, well, Ms. Addison. I, I, I, I’m a friend of Dan. I know who Dan Brennan is. What do you want? I said, I, I was wondering if I could come see you. Well, I’m free tomorrow. You can come to lunch. I’m in Lake Nasha. Meet me at 12 o’clock. Okay. So I hang up the phone. I, I talk to people, oh, Nasha is only 50 miles up, down, you just take the bus. I didn’t know African buses at that point. So I said, well, I’ll leave early, you know, I’ll leave like eight o’clock something or nine o’clock.

I get on this bus. I’m the only white guy on the bus, you know, I got, this is 19, you know, 74. I got these, I got a picture. I got these bell bottoms on and this polo shirt. And I’m carrying in a cache case, look like a real yuppie. And I’m on the bus with all these African lot, lot of locals that they bring their goats on. Some are alive, some are dead. There’s blood dripping down. We stop in every 10 or 15 minutes. We finally get up there. It’s, it’s like after 12 into Nasha.

And I go in, I said, I’m, where’s Joy Adamson live?

Oh, she lives 10 miles up the road this way. I didn’t have the money for a taxi one or too much money. So I started hitchhiking. And, and it’s a busy, people are going by, you know, white people are going by, nobody’s picking this kid up. That’s finally this guy, old guy on a bicycle stops. And he gets off the bike and says, here you drive. And he sits on the handlebars. He was a little guy. And so I’m now on the bike off we went.

I got up to, because he knew, I said, joy Adams. And he didn’t speak English, but he, he said, no, I know, I know. He ended up being the cook for, they were shooting a TV series unborn free. And he knew who. So I get off the bike, it’s now one o’clock.

I start walking up and this woman comes out and says, can I help you?

I said, well, I’m looking for Joy Adams. And she, oh, she’s gonna be here in about an hour. She had a lunch appointment. I said, well, I was the lunch appointment. She says, oh boy. She says, okay, you don’t know her, do you? I said, no, no. She says, alright. When she comes, do not introduce yourself. You wait till I tell you. This was the producer. She was very nice. And she knew Joy Adamson really well.

And so I stayed to the side. And Gary Collins, the actor, you know, and we talk. And finally she says, okay, come up.

And I, I introduced myself and she said, where were you?

You know, I was waiting for you. She walks away and, and, and, and, and even don’t worry, she’ll come back. You know, she likes talking to young men. She just, she said, she’ll be back. And she did. She came back. And then she was very nice. She recommended her vet. And I, I, I volunteered with her vet, Dr. Paul Sayer. And he always called me Roderick ’cause he liked Roderick.

And so I did that on the five days a week. And then I would go on trips. But Africa changed my life. That was really, I mean, it was like Peace Corps, but my own version. And, and, and then I was hooked, you know, that first trip to Africa. And I was, I had, I was forced to make friends. ’cause I didn’t go with anybody else. I had to, everything I did was on my own. And we saw gorillas, we did some trips.

I met some other guys. One was on a Fulbright Scholarship, another was on a Rotary scholarship. It was just, it was just a great time to, you know, be young and free and, and, and, and have that adventure. So, let’s me back up a bit.

As you were growing up, you had kind of indicated, what zoos were you, did you go to see if any, and what impression did they have on you?

The Catskill Game Farm. ’cause that was just a, a short drive. Upstate New York, we called it. And then the Bronx Zoo. Those were the two zoos. And I was just fascinated with animals. I remember, I think it was a Spider Monkey. I think that, I think that was actually the A-S-P-C-A. We visited the hospital there.

So it, so some of these school trips helped me out a lot. I think the fact that I was an only child, I gravitated to animals because they were, you know, especially the, the dogs. But I, I, my mother really loved animals too. And I think that, but, but it was just, I’m not sure. I think I was more fascinated with the country of Africa. And I liked, I liked tar. Oh, Tarzan was my hero too. You know, it was everybody’s hero growing up. So, you know, you had these images of, you know, swinging through the jungle and, and all the animals listen, the Dr.

Doolittle type type stuff. So it, I just read a lot of books, call it the Wild and White Fang and all these books that I think at a young age. And I, I I, I had made up my mind early on my life was gonna be with Wild Animals.

Did any teachers have any effect on your life?

My English teacher had a, and it had nothing to do with animals. In 10th grade, I had, that was the best teacher I think I ever had. And he, he, he just took a liking to me. And I was an, I was a pretty good student, but I was a really good student with him. He taught me how to write, really write and, and, and, and, and how to get the most out of a book or a movie sometimes, you know, he said, you’re all gonna go see in the Heat of the Night, it’s gonna win an Oscar for Best Picture. And it did. And, and, but most of the teachers were just okay. But I was, I was a good student and I was an athlete too, so I was very disciplined and I, I was pretty easy student. I didn’t, I didn’t really get into drinking or, or, or drugs or anything like that.

I was just, I was, I was kind of boring, I think at that time. And I was, I’m a late bloomer, so I was kind of shy until I got to my senior year in high school. Then I had three different girlfriends at different times. But, but I made up for it, I guess then. But I just, you know, it was a, it was a, it was a school on Long Island, which is a proud, oh, I would say 75% Jewish. And there was not one African American student in the class. It’s, you know, big school, very good school in new High Park. And all my friends, my best friends still, Howie Stein, Steve Cohen, Neil Bloomberg, Rick Bargi, it was, and I went to more Seders than I went to Communions.

I was raised Catholic, but that wasn’t, that, that certainly didn’t influence me very much at all. So I’m, I’m like Jane Goodall, I believe in God, but religion gets in the way.

So when did you decide if you can remember that you wanted to work in a zoo?

And did you even think that you wanted to run a zoo?

No, I, I didn’t wanna run a zoo. But when I was at Cornell, my freshman or sophomore year, there was a, they had just opened up this theme park, this safari park, sorry, in West Milford, New Jersey, Northern Jersey called Jungle Habitat. And two recruiters were on campus. They had, I saw this advertisement on the wall and they were looking to hire people. And so I went to that interview. You know, they were, they were recruiting from Cornell undergrad. I don’t know why, but, and, and it was, it was two non-animal people. They, they were just recruiting for like, people that would do guest service type stuff and, you know, and food and beverage.

Now they, they had nothing to do with the animals. But I went in and I talked to the guy and he was very sympathetic. He was very nice. He goes, look, this is not what we do, but, you know, we’ll put your name in. You know, I, I think I impressed him. And they did get back to me. And so that summer I got my first job, you know, as Ranger Rick, I sat at a gate and the, you know, ’cause the cars would go through and you’re at the gate, you know, I think it was the, the lion or the, the lion compound is double gates. And you, you make sure that one gate’s closed when the other cars go in and, and you just, that’s all I did. I said, I just stood by a gate.

You know, that, that summer, the next summer they made me the, the vet tech. And then the next summer I was a dolphin trainer. So I just, I did a little bit of everything, but it was, it was a part-time summer job at Warner Brothers Jungle Habitat that really, and that was not the way to run a safari park. But I learned, you learn a lot when they just throw you in with stuff. Like I said, with the rhinos, to get ’em in, you had to run behind them. There were a lot of trees and you just slap ’em on the back to keep ’em running. If they turn around, you hide behind a tree. And because you had to put ’em in every night.

And so it was, it was pretty interesting. So That’s 1972 to 1976, Right? That when you, When you’re working there. Yeah, that’s, I went to Africa during that time and then I went, and then I got into grad school at the end of that.

And you had a unique relationship with the chimpanzee. Can you talk about that?

Oh, Toto. Forgive me, Jane Goodall. ’cause she would not approve. But back then, you know, they had young animals and they had a, a chimp that was in the nursery that was about two years old, Toto. And which is Swahili means child. So Toto was Warner Brothers arranged for him to be on this. He’s a mascot for this children’s show that came on on Sundays. But they filmed during the week and I had to take him in. It was in the wintertime. I would, I would drive him into New York City in the station wagon in the, in the Warner Brothers, zebra, Stripe station wagon. And we’d go in and he’d just be, I didn’t go on tv.

He was always on tv. He just went out in his little cart, got the banana, the, the guy, the, the, the, the host of the, of the show. And he was just a cute chimp. He was very well behaved, but he really enjoyed our outings. You know, he’d just sit there and look out the window and stuff. He was a good little chimp. But in the dressing room, they always put me with the, they always had celebrities. So I got to meet all of these celebrities that it would be me, Toto and whoever. Rodney Dangerfield, I told you Bill Billy Crystal, Gary Bergoff, who played Mash, Joe gr Ola, the sports announcer, some real, some really neat people.

I may have just talked to ’em for a while until we had to go on the show. So it was, it was pretty, it was, it was different. And it was, you know, you did what you did What I, at that point, I, I always volunteered, whatever it was, I wanna try it, you know, I wanna try just get a taste of doing everything. So in 1978, you take a job at Lion Country Safari.

Why did you take this job? What type of place was it?

What did it offer you?

The reason I went to Lion Country Safari is I, I got my master’s at Rutgers. I was in a PhD program. And I said, the heck with this, I, I just, I, I’m just do, I did a master’s thesis and just got out after two years. And I said, well, I wanna work in a zoo and I wanna work in the best zoo in the country. I’m gonna work at San Diego Zoo. So I went out there, figured I, I got a better chance going out there than writing a letter. And they didn’t have a job for me. So that’s in San Diego, lion Country was 65 miles north in Irvine.

So I went up there and they hired me on the spot. ’cause I had experience at Warner Brothers Jungle Habitat. And I worked up there for three months. I think the pay was like $3 and 25 cents an hour or so. Just paid enough for my, my, my gas and, and, and, and the place I was staying. And I was just doing that job in order to get to, to keep applying at San Diego. Keep coming back and back. And, and finally I got hired at San Diego.

Jim Dolan hired me. He, it was Teamsters Union and they didn’t wanna hire anybody from the outside. And they wanted me to work in a restaurant first. And I refused to do that. I said, oh, I’m gonna work at Lion Country. And, but they made an exception for me. And I got hired on January 15th, 1979, I believe was my first keeper job at the san, at the San Diego Safari Park. It was a wild animal park back then.

So this is 1979 to 1982. You’re at the Wild Animal Park. How did you, so you got the job.

How did you decide Wild Animal Park as opposed to the zoo or that’s just what was open?

No, I didn’t have a choice, you know, that, that, that was, was open. But I had Safari Park experience didn’t seem to matter. The other two were from inside the organization. Three of it. They had three new positions. And it was funny ’cause I went in to see Dolan and tell him, thank you for trying, you know, it’s been three months. I can’t keep doing this. I got a job at the Miami Metro Zoo as a keeper.

I’m gonna go back there. And he said, what if, what in if if in another week I can guarantee you a position, would you stay?

I go, well, well, I guess I already committed. But he said, just hang around for a week. He didn’t tell me that was a new position. And so it came. And so he got that position and, and I started, I I started at the Safari Park that, that three and a half years. I remember having lunch with Charlie Schroeder. He used to come, he lived right up above the park. He’d come down and have lunch with the keepers all the time. And a lot of ’em would make fun of him. ’cause he was old.

And he, and I said, it’s Charlie Schroeder. You know, I got a picture of me standing next to him. We’re about the same size. You know, Charlie was even shorter than me. And just, that was, that was special. You know, he’d tell, he’d tell his stories. And then a a lot happened at that time. I made a lot, a lot more friends. And then I started applying for, for, for curator jobs.

At that point, I married a, a woman that was in vet school that didn’t work out because we, it just, the logistics of it didn’t work out. So, and well, first of all, now my dream came true. I’m a keeper at the San Diego Safari Park Zoo. Safari Park didn’t matter. And it was paying a lot more than Lion Country too. I was getting like $5 and 20 cents an hour now. And, and I, and I still, and I was always renting a house in Escondido. ’cause that’s where I wanted to be. So I, I often say that it, it was the most fun I think I’ve had working as a keeper. You always have fun. Then you didn’t have the, the bigger issues that you worry about when you’re a supervisor.

And I started at the same time, Randy Rka started who be, who stayed there and had a long career there. And the two of us together, you know, were paired together. He was the farm boy. I was a city boy. I I, I had the degree, he had the common sense, you know, he taught me how to use a tractor and I don’t know what I taught him, but we, we were very good friends and we just had a great time out there. But after a few years of that, and, and I wrote a couple of articles for Zoo News back then, you know, and, and I, and I was, I hadn’t start, I I was going to a ZA conferences, but I didn’t start presenting papers until a few years later. So then in the, then the, the Miami Metro Zoo was moving to a new location and they were looking for a curator. And I applied, and I can remember at the conference, they interviewed me and then Jim Dolan came up to me and said, the guys at Miami are interested in you, Rick. And so I told him, I said, if I had that position, you wouldn’t be able to touch him.

It just, and then they really wanted me even more. Jim did me a big favor. And, and, and so they hired me. And I was curator there for about six years.

Are we done with, are we done with San Diego or did you want more?

We’ll come back to San Diego again. No, no, of course we will. But your, your curator of mammal’s job was 1982 to 1988. Yeah. At At Miami Metro. It Called Miami Metro. Now it’s Sue Miami. Yeah. And no, go ahead. So they, they hire you, They hire me at 26 years old or about, I guess at that point. And they had a lot of hoof stock, which was my specialty at this point, coming from the Safari Park. And they, they were moving the animals from the Old zoo, the Cran Park Zoo, to the new zoo that was in Lynden South. So it was more hurricane proof.

It wasn’t that hurricane proof we found out later with Andrew. But, and so one of the first things we did was move the giraffe. And, but we were, we moved them ourselves with open crates on the top. So their heads were sticking out and we’re going down. We didn’t get on the highway, but we got on South Dixie Highway, which is Route one, right. A one. So it’s a lot of traffic lights. And so we had to come up and every traffic light we had to stop the big giraffes and wait, and with the, I’m on me and Bill Ziglar, he was on one crate. I was on the other. And there’s a front page of the Miami Herald, his giraffe.

And you know, with the, with with me sitting on top of the crate, you know, trying to get its head down as we went through. So we tr we transported G ass. And it was, it was fun. You know, we had a new zoo. I was lucky to be on the ground floor of several new, new facilities, you know, San Diego. We designed exhibits, mud Zoo, and then we created one at Disney. So, I mean, I had, you know, I, I really was lucky in, in a lot of ways. So we moved the animals to the new zoo. We designed in the new exhibits for the African section.

The zoo had opened before I got there. But that was just a small preview center. That’s why I met Dr. Hubble. We talked about him. He was the director at, at a certain point, but then he became, then he decided they had him as education curator. ’cause getting, getting that zoo built, took somebody that had a construction background and knew how to work with a lot of politics. And, and Dr. Hubble was such a straight shooter. They, we needed, we needed some, we needed somebody like Bob Yokel who got the job done. And, but, and then that’s where I met my future life partner Diane.

She came in for an interview. She was in graduate school, in, in marine biology. And I remember my head gorilla keeper coming up to me one day and said, I gave your number to this girl that I met in this 10 K race. You know, that’s, that’s in marine biology in University of Miami.

And I go, Kurt, I said, why did you give my number out to somebody in grad school in Marine?

We don’t even have marine, marine mammals. What do he said?

Oh, well she was nice. And she came in first in her class. She’s a really good runner. I said, okay, I’ll interview her.

What kind of zoo was Metro Miami was?

It was a brand new zoo. Brand new zoo, 700 acres. Amazing piece of property. And, and all the mostly moats because you just dug down and you had natural and you had water. It was all water moats with coral rock. It was, it was a great learning experience for me. And we had, and we got to hire a lot of people. And I had a good staff. And Bill Ziegler, who was the general creator, he pretty much left me alone.

He was really good about that. And, and then I did, did I got involved, that’s when I started giving papers. ’cause Dr. Hubl was big in a CA, he had been president one year, but he was the head of the programs community for many years. He goes, Rick, you need to do, you need to do papers in a CA conference. You just can’t go, you know, you should do. So, okay. So I did three in a row. I did management at Hoofstock on motor exhibits in 1984. And then 1985 I did something on tapers.

In 1986 I did a copy and a conservation project. And when you start doing papers at a ZA conferences, that, that’s, that certainly helps your resume. And, and also helped me, you know, and then I went back to San Diego. But those, those years in Miami were, were also a lot of fun. And that’s when I really had my first real supervisor job. And then now I was a curator, so now I could go back to San Diego with curator experience. So I leapfrogged all my, all all the guys that I was working with that would’ve been there longer than me because they didn’t have curator experience. I, I didn’t plant it that way, but I had curator on re they didn’t.

So it was easier to get a job back at San Diego.

So from 1988 to 1993, your curator mammals at San Diego Zoo, number one, why do you leave your job at Miami?

What prompts you to want to return to a zoo and not the animal park?

Well, I would’ve preferred the animal park probably, but curator of the San Diego Zoo wasn’t a bad gig. And, and Jim Dolan was the one that wanted me back. So he had been talking to me and it’s, it’s San Diego. Miami was starting to get a little frustrating ’cause it was a county zoo and certain things you could do and certain things you couldn’t. San Diego, you go to San Diego and you got a lot more opportunities, professional development trips. And, and Jim Dolan sent us all on trips too. He was good that way. You know, I, he, he picked me to take Arabian ORs back to Oman to reintroduce him into the wild. I mean, I wouldn’t have gotten that at San, at Miami.

So it was, and, and Diane was fine with going to, to San Diego from Miami across country. So it was, it, you know, I could have stayed at Miami, but I couldn’t, I you can’t turn down San Diego. And I just thought it was a, a, a great opportunity. And it was.

So had the zoo changed any since you were there in 79?

Well, I was at the Safari Park. So the zoo, the zoo and the Safari Park were like separate entities under the same umbrella. They were very different. The keepers at, at the park, we always thought we worked harder than the keepers at the zoo because we were out in the heat and we were outside all the time and they had a cake job. So there was a lot of rivalry. So now I’m, now I’m at the zoo where, where I didn’t have as high an opinion of the work ethic of the keepers. And, and it, to some extent that was true. But there, there were a lot more personnel issues because now I was also, it was teamsters union. So you, you’re working, I was management, but you had to work with Teamsters Union and there’s a certain restrictions there.

But, but there was so many things that happened, you know, in, in use in, in San Diego. Like the day EO Wilson came at Wilson, came to the zoo to see a Sumatra rhino that had just arrived. It was the first time he ever seen a sumach and rhino. And it’s just me and him on a golf cart. And he was like a little kid. He says, Rick, this is the first time I’ve ever seen. I said, Dr. Wilson, he says, call me Ed. I said, ed. I said, yeah, it’s an amazing animal.

Oh, that was, this is just special. Now, who were the senior staff at the zoo when you become the curator of mammals At, at the zoo then it was Jim Dolan now had moved from the park to the zoo and he was director of collections. Art Risa was the general manager. And Doug Myers was a, the newly hired director. And then Chuck Beeler was there. Chuck was always a very good friend and supportive too. So that was pretty much the senior staff. I mean, you had lower people down, like Larry Kilmore, Carm Penny.

But, but it was, you know, the senior staff was really do and called the shots.

Are you in charge of all the mammals at the zoo?

What are your responsibilities?

We had two curator mammals and one was there carmie. And then I came in and we just, you know, overlapped on on and split some duties and stuff. But, and I had worked with Car Ma at, at the park too. So we were both coming to the zoo. It was, you know, when you work for a guy like Jim Dolan, you’re pretty much on your own. He doesn’t, he doesn’t give you a lot of feedback unless he’s mad about something. But he was a collector, you know, back then, that was a good word. Now it’s not. But, and so he was always interested in, in getting a new species.

So you, you were exposed to a lot. Like I said, when I took the Arabian Orx over to Oman, that was right at Christmas time. I, I celebrated Christmas in the Saudi Arabian Desert in the empty quarter it was called. And I’m there with a, a guy named Mark Stanley Price listening to the BBC radio. And he turns to me and said John Lennon was just assassinated in New York City. And so you just remember these, and they actually did a film. There’s a film, a terrific, not terrific, terrific. It was something else. Priscilla Presley narrated it.

And it’s about me and the Arabian ORs. I don’t know where the footage is. It’s, it was some TV show that they did for a while. And so the, the Arabian ORs arrived fine. That was an interesting experience. ’cause we get there with these crates and you got like 20 of these Arabian guys and nobody’s listened to anybody. And they’re just grabbing at the crate. Say, stop, stop. Don’t, don’t, don’t tilt in the crate.

You know, they, they don’t listen to anything. Luckily the animals made it. And, and, but on the way back, Dolan would always make us go see other zoos. So when I got done with the Arabian Orks, I stayed in, in Europe for another, like two weeks on the, the Jim Dolan trip. You know, like we, I I, I was, I visited a friend of mine in, in one German zoo. I, I, I stayed and Stuga Munich, I went to Paris, I went to, it was mostly Paris and German. And German. ’cause Jim could speak fluent German. So he was very close with the German zoos.

So it was just, you wouldn’t get that back then. There were very, no, who I think would let somebody, somebody do that kind of trip and pay for the whole thing.

So when you started at the curator of mammals, you knew people, but did the older keepers resent this young college educated curator coming in?

I don’t think so. I think that, I think my colleagues at the park were happy for me and I stayed friends with them and I wasn’t supervising them. I had a whole nother group at the zoo. And I wasn’t that young now.

I mean, I had, I had curator experience, you know, I was in my early thirties, right?

And I think that I, I was able to, I got along with people very well at that point. And I think that, no, I, I don’t think there was resentment. I think there was just her, it, it, it wasn’t a zoo. That they were very good to their employees. They, they could accu accrue a lot of vacation time and you could take as much time as you wanted. And that there was a lot of backup there. So you weren’t like indispensable. Most of the places I worked, I had to work seven days a week sometimes.

’cause there was no replacement. You know, when I was doing dolphin shows, I was doing it seven days a week, you know, I had no days off. And, and they would pay me extra for that. But San Diego was, was, it was easier. It was easier in in that sense. And then, and the director, Doug Myers was also very supportive of me. But I remember coming to him one day and saying, as curator mammals, we can’t do elephant rides at the zoo anymore.

And, and Doug looked at me and goes, Rick, you know what you’re saying?

You know how much money we make from those elephant rides every year, like $500,000, a half a million dollars. He says, I said, Doug, we’re gonna get in trouble putting people on an elephant that just goes around in a circle all day. And he thought about it and we got rid of the elephant ride in time before we got really criticized. But, you know, for me it was a no brainer. But, you know, Doug had to think about the bottom line. We’re losing a half a million dollars here net. But so Now when you’re working at San Diego’s curator of mammals, at some point in time you are approached by Disney.

How does this happen?

What year does this happen and what role does Bill Conway play?

Well, you know, you know the answer to that, but, ’cause we talked about it earlier. I’m sitting at my desk and I get a call from Art Risa’s office and there’s somebody that from Disney that wants to talk to you. And I said, okay. And I talked to Joe Roddy’s, assistant Patsy, and, and she said, Hey, we need an expert. We’re, we’re working on something very confidential. It’s about animals and it’s going to, it may be in Florida, but we need an animal expert and we’d like to know if you’d be interested. I didn’t know who recommended me. I thought they had called Art Risa’s office.

And, and they said something like, do you have anybody there with Safari experience?

And, and Art would’ve said, yeah, well Rick, you know, Rick worked at the Safari Parks before. So I thought it was a recommendation from them. I thought they just cold called. I didn’t know until years later that Bill Conway was consulting for him. And when he left, he gave them my name, said call Rick Ji. He never told me that. And so I said yes. And I went out there and then I came back ’cause they wanted me to come back and, and consult more.

And I had to go to Doug Myers at that point, the director, and said, Doug, do you mind if I do this?

You know, I’m, I’ll take my own days off. Just, he goes, where are they building? I said, in Florida. He goes, are you sure? I said, yes. He says, if it’s in Florida, you can go. If it’s, if it’s in LA you’re not going. So, and, and then I consulted for about a year and then they were looking to hire the director of animal programs. They wanted an experienced director that didn’t work out. They came to me and said, well look, you, you don’t have the experience, but you know the park and we really like you.

And Joe Rodey wanted me, said, how about we bring you in and give you this opportunity?

And, and I was, Diane and I were pretty happy in San Diego. But again, Michael Eisner came out to the zoo at San Diego. I gave him a tour. He assured me personally, we’re gonna build this park, Rick. Because when I took the job, most of my colleagues said, Disney’s never gonna do it. You know, 90% of what they plan never gets done. It’s always, you know, all stored and attics and basements. But I was pretty sure they were gonna actually do this. It was a big decision.

And there was a lot of, a lot of hurdles as we’ll talk about later. But I said yes. And on, I think it was on December 6th, I, my last day of work was December 3rd, and I guess that was 1993. December 3rd, I left the San Diego Zoo. And two days later I was, I I started at, at, at Disney in Burbank and we worked up there. Let me bring you back a bit. You were working on your days off in a, as a consultant.

And does this responsibility take you away from your full-time job?

I mean, you’re doing Not, not at San Diego. San Diego. There was so much backup there. The San Diego, the job was getting easier, not harder in some ways. And I had time to do it and you know, I was still five days a week at, at the San Diego Zoo. And if I took days off, I had plenty of vacation time. Nobody cared. You know, I just, all I had to do was get, get permission from Doug that I wasn’t doing something that was in conflict with San Diego Zoo. And Doug was very understanding about that. I don’t think he thought I was gonna take a full-time job, you know, but at that point it was, it was time to leave San Diego at that point.

I, I was not getting along as well with, with Jim Dolan. And just because, you know, you just have different opinions and you’re the, you’re looking at where zoos are going and you’re working for somebody that likes where zoos are now and doesn’t want to change Because at some point in time you were put in charge of the Children’s Zoo.

Is this added on to your responsibilities as curator?

Or is this now your responsibility?

No, they gave me the Children’s Zoo because Dolan was not happy with me. So I came in one day and I was told that you’re gonna be in the Children’s Zoo. And he thought that that, I don’t know what he thought, but you know, and he didn’t explain it to me, never did. But, but the Children’s Zoo was like, it was lateral, but it was kind of a step down because the Children’s Zoo was separate. But I got advice from my father-in-law saying, well, you can leave or you can make that children’s zoo the best ever and leave on your own terms. And that’s what I did. And I I I, I spent two years in the children’s zoo and actually we, what we did in that children’s zoo in those two years, and we planned a new children’s Zoom and stuff. It, it was, it was really rewarding. And I, and then I had a, a staff of like 20 keepers that really appreciated me being there.

So it, it, it turned out much better than I thought. But then, and then that’s why I had the time also to do, to do the Disney consulting.

So, you know, it’s, it, it it’s definitely time to go when, when you know, you, you get, you get moved over to, to something else that you didn’t really want to do, you know?

But, but, but you stuck with it and then it, it all worked out for the best. So in, in 93, you’re, you’re take, you’re not going to Orlando, but you’re full time at, at Disney. What did they, what kind of offer did they make you that you said, yeah, this is what I, I want to take this position? Well, I never cared about money. I never asked about money. I would’ve taken a job if it was less. I mean, money is, money never motivated me. I’m always motivated by achievement, not money, not not power, not other things. It, it was always about the opportunity.

It, it, sure it was more money, but that was quite a bit more money. But it was just, I had been consulting on the project. I knew Joe Rodie very well. I believed it was gonna ha and I thought it was Disney now was gonna build a zoo that they would call a theme park. But they were gonna change the way exhibits are designed to some degree, especially back of house. Because we had a chance to build from scratch. And I always knew the back of house was the weak link in Mo You didn’t wanna show people where animals went at night usually. ’cause it was usually smaller and, and, and not conducive to, to, to most animals’ wellbeing or, or the psychology or whatever behavior of the animals.

So Disney, I could do it right, and they would, and they would listen. It was a risk, but it was definitely a risk worth taking because there’s no way I wouldn’t have ever gotten that experience. And the resources they had were just amazing. Do you ask for any considerations to take the job? Did you No, not, not for that job, other than I, I said I’d like to put an advisory board together because I’d like to bring Bill, bill Conway back. They said, well, he, he doesn’t have time. I said he might do it if I ask him. ’cause Bill was always about, bill was, bill would really support people he liked. And he, he, he did a lot for a lot of us that, and he never, never talked about it.

So I think that I didn’t have to have any stipulations with that. I ha I, I just had to believe that it was actually gonna happen. ’cause if it didn’t happen then I was with, without a job. And it, when I took the job in 93, we didn’t open until 98. And during that time, in 94, Frank Wells died and Frank Wells and Mike Eza ran the company together. Frank was the animal guy, the environmentalist, amazing guy. I only met him twice. But, and that, and, and that really delayed the project the whole year. ’cause Frank was the real champion.

Michael wanted to do it, but, but Frank was, Frank was, and and I, when, when I had, when I heard that news, they put our project on hold for a little bit. But, you know, and, and I helped with other projects at Disney, which was kind of interesting, you know, animal stuff and a little bit about, they were, they were developing or finishing the Lion King movie, the first one that came out. So I got a little, I got a little, had a little feedback on that. And it was, you know, again, Disney is so different than anything, any place else I worked, it’s, they may have a lot of resources, but they work your ass off too. You know, it’s a very, very bureaucratic company in some ways. But when you’re on the Imagineering side, you got, you got a lot more leeway until you get to the operation side. And then, then it’s more about making money. Now was your title director, I mean the zoo didn’t exist. What was your I was director of animal program.

So I was over the Living Seas, which was over there, discovery Island and, and the ranch, which had horses. So they put me over everything. So I had, I had plenty to administer at that time. Mary Healy was on Discovery Island. So, you know, I had Discovery Island, that was their zoo. And then the, the, the Living Seas was actually the, you know, the big, big tanks with doll. They had dolphins and, and lots of other stuff. And then the ranch. So yeah, it was, it was, it was a, it it was a lot of responsibility.

Do you have, as they’re building it, do you have carte blanche to hire the staff you want?

Oh yeah. The only, the only stipulation was when I hired management positions, they wanted to do this Gallop profile. It was a, a phone interview that they would do. There’s no right or wrong questions, but they, it’s like a behavioral assessment of people and they’re usually statistically pretty. Right. And they give you feedback on, on people. And in most cases it coincided with who I wanted to hire. But, but there were some instances where they, they warned me not to hire somebody and they were right, but, but they, so, but yeah, I did it. And then, then, then it went down to some of the other, as I hired more staff, when I got hired in 93, I was the only animal person. The first, we’ve hired three people.

Three years later, Bess Stevens came in and then we had the head vet come in and then, and, and then the animal person and, and those three came in. And then we started hiring more people in the next two years, I think we hired keepers from, we hired keepers from, I don’t know, 70 different zoos. You know, we were kind of a, kind of, a little bit of a pirate, I guess is what Conway called it, when we took some people from, from institution. But it gave, it changed the profession a lot because they came to Disney and they learned a whole different set of management skills. And then they, then they left and went back to some other zoos. And I think it made the whole profession much better.

So were you advertising for these people and trade magazines?

You didn’t, you didn’t have to advertise. It was Disney, everybody knew. I mean, did, did They did. They came to us. Resumes just kept coming in. Well, you don’t, you’re building, you’re building the dream zoo for most people. You know, I, I guess they advertised, but we didn’t have to, we, we, we would go to zoos and, and, and schedule some interviews and some zoos were okay with that. It depended on the zoo director. Some zoos presented the fact he took some and others said, Hey, that this is a great employee and, and I’m gonna miss him or her a lot.

But this is such a good opportunity. Those are the zoo directors. I like the ones that, you know, don’t, don’t, don’t prevent their people from advancing because they’re just selfish about it. And so I did some of those and we hired some really good people. Like I said, Were there people you wanted that you would call up and say, Oh yeah, oh yeah, I, I cherry picked, I didn’t wait for resumes. And well, HR would want to really thoroughly vet these people, but what I would do was I would call the, if I knew this, if it was somebody I knew, say, Hey look, this is confidential, but you’re my friend, so and so applied, good or bad. And a couple of times they said stuff that no HR person would ever hear. So, but you know, that’s the, that that’s, that’s the stuff you can do with certain zoo directors. H you gotta follow the rules with HR too, but, but with hr you can’t ask, you can’t ask certain, you can’t ask the questions that you really need to ask.

So it, it was pretty interesting. You make the move from San Diego to Orlando in 1996, what’s going through your mind Relief that we’re now on a construction site and we’re gonna be building that. It took, it was a, the park took five years to plan and three years to build. So those are the eight years from, from 2000 when I started consulting to 93, when I came on full time to 98 when we opened it up. And so we moved to, we moved to Orlando. Diane gets a, a job at Disney also in public affairs and community relations. And I’m busier than ever now, now I have my own assistant. I was sharing with Joe Roadie and she was a, she, she was well vetted by other people, said this, hi, this Leah Logan and Leah was great ’cause she knew, she knew, she knew I, I didn’t, I didn’t know how this giant machine worked.

You know who to go to and what. And so that, so that helped a lot. And then, because it was just the two of us until we got the, the, the three topping sexes and three years later. So it was exciting. Now I, I mean that’s what I like to do. Now we’re building and, and, and then we can modify stuff. There were a lot of change orders and things like that that went in. There was a lot of, I was unprepared for knowing the fact that Disney has their own construction management company. Even though we brought in other companies, you know, outside, but they managed the other companies.

But they managed the budget. And we had, I think it was a $75 million contingency, $75 million contingency, you know, on this project. I didn’t know it at the time, but I also didn’t know that the construction Disney people, their bonuses depended on how if they use less continuously, they got bigger bonuses. So they were always trying a way to cut costs. And they’re telling me stuff like, well, you know, we can use for these overhead doors for the elephants. We could use the stuff that they use in airplane hangers, you know, it’s cheaper. And, you know, they’re already made. And we’re sitting there with the architect and the architect said, there’s one problem with that 7 47 don’t piss on their doors because they’re rhinos in the, the elephant.

They’d throw shit and, and you’re in and things would rust. So you couldn’t, you couldn’t use that kind of doors. But everybody, it, it was just a, and then, and then the horticulture guy, his budget was three times what my animal budget was and he’s just planting the hell out of everything. And I look at him, I said, that’s a smorgasbord. They’re gonna eat it all. It’s just, that doesn’t matter. I’ll just replace it doesn’t, it’s Disney, we’ll just keep throwing more up money at it. So they had a field day.

Now how do you fit into this Disney culture?

Because the animals are obviously a brand new concept. It was a, it was an adjustment and I made a lot of mistakes. But they were very nice to me, Rick. We just, you know, don’t say that. We know that’s true, but, you know, don’t fall on your sword on this. We’ll figure that out later. It was, it was mostly though I needed that advisory board and that, that was, that was the key that Joe Joe supported. But, but they would change pretty much everything in the drawings and, and there and there were, so there were, there were some big modifications that we had to make sometimes where they, they they, the distance wasn’t right with moats and things like that.

And, and I think the imagineers wanted to have invisible barriers on everything. And it was just not possible to do everything like that. So we had to make some compromises with the storyline. And then, and they didn’t want the keepers out there during the day at all, you know, ’cause they wanted to look like Africa. I said, that’s not possible. You gotta go out there and check the animals. You gotta, you know, feed, put more feed out and stuff to keep the animals active. And so they were fine with that. But you learn that the imagineers, again, are the builders and the operators take over afterwards.

So the imagineers are giving their baby, you know, over to somebody else that’s gonna do it. Totally different than them. So very different, very, very different schools of thought. And you know, they, they, they didn’t always appreciate each other very well. The imagineers didn’t care about budgets so much. The operations people did. Now what comes first, the animal keepers to take care of the animals.

How do you start to bring animals into Orlando and where do you keep them?

We, we knew we had to stage the animals offsite. First of all, you have to hire staff. So you hire staff. But right after you get staff in, at least the core staff and the core staff are really experienced people We could hire, inexperienced people get trained by.

So, so we had, we had some really good people from other zoos, but now where are we gonna put ’em?

So first I went to White Oak because I was good friends with John Lucas and we were gonna put ’em up there. They have a lot of room up there. But then the lawyers got involved, their lawyers and our lawyers and they wanted to control the animals when they were there. And I said, no, our keepers take care of him. John was fine, but it, it just got outta hand. And then they, then they asked for an ungodly amount of money because it was Disney. So I had to find an alternative. So I had this place, Luby Foundation, which was even closer, near, near Ga outside of Gainesville.

And they had a lot of land and, but we had to build the facilities there ’cause they had bats. They didn’t have, they Bacardi ran that back then. And so we approached them and they were fine with it. And they were very reasonable. So we built all the facilities. It was for the Hoofstock, it was mostly Hoofstock, you know, at that point for the safari and stuff. So, and then we had staff that lived out there and that, that worked out very well to, to keep the animals there. And then from there we moved them in when the facilities were done.

So it was, our first animals arrived probably a year and a half before we, before we opened Animal Kingdom. Once we staged the animals at Luby, then we’d move them over the first barn I wanted to get done with the giraffes. ’cause we really didn’t house the giraffe at Luby. That would’ve been too much of an expense. So I had to coordinate the first giraffe. So the first animals that arrived at Disney were two giraffes. The female was from Portland. Dennis Pate was up there at that point.

And she was, and then we got the male from St. Louis Miles and Kiva, I think her name was. And so we have this, we, we gave everybody a picture of the, of the two, the two giraffes in the barn. And we set the first ambassadors. E everybody was, everybody was there that day when we unloaded the giraffes, you know, it, it was just animals on site. And it’s giraffes too, you know, a really significant species.

So where were you getting animals?

Did you get them internationally?

Did you get them from private people?

Did you get them from all zoos?

Mostly we did a ZA accredited zoos. We made a few exceptions, but there were, there, it wasn’t, there was really no problem. Getting in. The challenge was gorillas, and we’ll get into that, you know, the, the, but most of these animals, zoos were, you know, had extra hippos. Everybody was breeding baby hippo, take our hippo, take our hippos, and, and putting all these hippos together. Nobody had done that before. So we learned from that. But I, most of the, like I said, we, we were going to, we got our crocodiles from Africa because we wanted like 30 crocodiles in this exhibit. Like a river, a big, like, it looked like a river section. But we wanted big crocodiles because when you open a a Disney park, it has to look like it’s been there for a long time.

You can’t say, well come back in five years and it’ll look really impressive. That’s not Disney. Opening day looks like, you know, it’s a finished product. So the crocodiles couldn’t be, oh, well they’re, they’re gonna get bigger. No, we had to have, you know, three meter, nine foot, 10 foot crocodiles. And you just, so I go to the crocodile guys in Crocodile Ranch, and, and I knew the guy, Andrew Erickson.

I said, Andrew, how do we do this?

He says, I said, we both said, we get all males and I’ll put ’em in a small area because they, they don’t fight when they’re all together. When you give ’em too much room, they get territorial. He says, I’ll put ’em all together, only males. And we, and, and, and I, I went over and I flew over, I flew back with the crocodiles. They, they had ’em all wrapped up. They gave ’em some kind of drug that kept them a little quiet. And that worked really well. You know, the, you know, that instant crocodiles and, and like I said, elephants were, that, that was a big issue too.

We were gonna get them, we’re gonna rescue ’em outta Kruger. ’cause they were due to be cold. But then that year they put a moratorium on culling. So, okay, we’re not gonna do that. We’re getting lu anyway, protesting that were getting animals from Africa and that, that, that would’ve just given them more ammunition, even though it would’ve been, it would’ve been good for the elephant that, that group of elephants. So now we had to get, now we had to source elephants, African elephants from other zoos. And, and we had some good elephant people that everybody went out and looked at elephants and profiled. But I think all the elephants came from, from the United States.

Some of the hippos came from overseas. I remember that. You know, we, we got young hippos. ’cause young hippos got along. If you put an older cranky female that, that didn’t work. So, so, so, but all but they’re social animals and they wanna be together. And then, and then gorillas was, we had these two incredible gorilla exhibits and gorillas. There was a waiting list. There was so many zoos that wanted gorillas and families who, gorillas and I, I, I go to the SSP and they say, we’ll wait in line. I go, well, that’s not how Disney does it.

I don’t mean to be arrogant, but it’s not the Disney way. And we’ll, you know, you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s the best exhibit. It’s, it’s better than a lot of the zoos that are waiting in line. But you can’t, you know, you can’t tell a zoo, Hey, you know, your exhibit’s not as good.

So, so then I, then I went to you guys in Lincoln Park, and I don’t know if you wanna, if, if you, you wanna tell that story?

I have to tell that story. So you, you remember it, I think better than I do. But I remember we came to visit and, well, first of all, I thought to myself the, the, the, the gorilla coordinator was a guy named Dan Wharton who worked at the Central Park Zoo at that time. Really nice guy. I said, Dan, I understand the diplomacy here and the waiting. I said, but what if I can make a, I mean, you can make a recommendation, but the zoo has the final decision where their gorillas go. If I can make a deal with a zoo, I, I said Lincoln Park, because they have, they have two families. They could, you know, they have plenty of gorillas that, you know, they’re known for their gorillas.

There’s Gorilla capital. And if I can make, if they, if they think it’s the best place to go, would you be okay with that?

He said yes. You know, if you, if if, because because they weren’t designated to go any place else at that point, because you hadn’t told, you hadn’t let the SSP know, I think that you had available. ’cause you, you could have kept, you know, you know, both, both groups. And so then I approached you guys, we came to visit you, you and Pat sas and some of the other people. We had an incredible visit with the gorillas. You guys saw, we shared our plans with you and everything we were gonna do. And at first, you know, it wasn’t even a consideration, but I think because the former director, Les Fisher, had come out to Disney and he was a real, you know, everybody loved Les. He was such a great guy. I think he told you guys, Hey, at least listen to this guy, Rick, because it’s Disney and they’re gonna do it.

Right. And, and then I think you, you know, you had to, you had to recommend it. And then we had to go, then we said, well, we can’t buy ’em. And, but we gotta do something here.

If, if what what would incentivize Lincoln Park to, you know, consider doing something like this?

Because they could use the room too. But they, they didn’t need to do it. So then we just developed a conservation fund. And so we put this amount of money into a conservation fund, a significant amount of money. And, and in return, we got Gino and two females, one pregnant, and another one with a, a baby. And I, I didn’t think we’d get Gino. He was just a incredible animal that I, I don’t you tell, you have to tell me why you picked Gino. We, we couldn’t pick the gorillas, but I was just, I was on cloud nine when we got, when we were able to do that.

And he was such an amazing animal. And, you know, we talked about his history. He was born at the Rotterdam Zoo, and his mother didn’t take care of him, so they had to bottle raise him. And, and the director there, Dick Van Dam, I think it was, he called, he calls his friend Les Fisher and says, Hey, I’m gonna send you this baby gorilla so he can be a gorilla. I can’t do that here. You, and so he, he came to you guys and he grew up there. And then he, then he came to Disney. I mean, how many millions of people that, that saw that gorilla and how gentle he was and what a incredible silverback male he was. What a, a great ambassador.

He just passed away a few months ago. So as part of all of this, you had recommended this conservation fund that you wanted to do, although you had worked with Lincoln Park on this specific fund, but you wanted to have Disney have a conservation fund.

Was this well received by your bosses?

When was it implemented before there were animals?

When the zoo opened, when Animal Kingdom opened?

Well, it was the only species that we did this with. I mean, the others, a lot, most of the animals were free people just, you know, they, they, they, they were what we called surplus animals back then. So, but, but with we, I mean, we had to pay for transportation, obviously, and, and some animals. But gorillas was just because it was such, there weren’t a lot of gorillas to go around. Everybody wanted a family of gorillas that we had to do something different. So it was, it was right at the beginning of that. I said, if we’re gonna go to the front of the line, we gotta do this. Right. And the only way to do this right, that, that would work is to, to, to work with Lincoln Park.

And I, you know, it was a two-way street. It may have been your idea, but now, now I’m trying to remember, you know, that we would do something significant for you that would help gorillas in the wild. And because we all, in the end, we wanted to help save them in the wild. So that conservation fund wa was, that was, that was your fund. You got to do what you want with it. Most of it, I think probably went to Gorilla Conservation with Dave Morgan and Cricket, probably their, their projects that you guys support in, in, in dokey.

Well, how, how, but how hard was it to sell your concept of a conservation fund to Disney?

They, they didn’t look at it like it was a good thing to do. It was just a net to them. It was a net to them. It was like, well, you know, I guess we gotta pay ’em in some way. I said, no, you’re not buying the gorillas. I think they just, they, they were fine with the, I had worn them in the, in the, I had warned them up front, gorillas are gonna be, it’s gonna cost you some money. The, the, the, the exhibit, the transport. And I said, and, and you can’t buy gorillas. I said, there’s no way you can do that.

Although at the time, there was a family of gorillas, I think it was the Tarago Zoo in Sydney that they were selling and remember that. And, and they wanted a, a lot of money. But that was a backup. We could have taken them out of Australia, but we went to you guys first and it worked out much better. But you were trying to have a major conservation fund for Disney. A total umbrella. Well, this, this kind of set the stage for that is what is, I think what you’re getting. It was a precursor to, okay, we gave money the conservation, but it’s a win-win for everybody. So now let’s, let’s form a bigger co We, before we open up this park, we have to have a track record that we’re helping animals in the wild. The only real solid argument to, for Disney building a zoo is that it’s gonna help animals in the wild.

If it’s just gonna become a cash cow and make money for Disney, it’s not gonna fly. People are questioning the motives too much. It’s gotta be, it’s gotta be something that is, has an impact that’s really beneficial to, to endangered species. So, so, so that was our first conservation dollar donation. And then we had our advisory board and we, and then we funded a ZA we, we decided every year to give them a million dollars. I don’t know what it is now. And that went to their conservation endowment. And then we did, and then we funded Conservation International, a million dollars. And then we did Roger Carris, we did A-S-P-C-A for a million, and the Peregrine fund, all good causes.

And, and, and then that was, that was the foundation of the Disney Conservation Fund, which was very unusual because it was the only park where we were allowed to solicit donations for something other than Disney. And that was Judson Green. The head of the parks made that exception. So we could sell stuff and, and, and take donations in, only in our park.

We weren’t allowed to do, ’cause the other parks said, why, why can’t we do that for our charities?

You know, or something else. Everybody wanted to do it. But we were the exception to the rule because they were very sensitive that, hey, you know, these are live animals. We gotta tread carefully here. We can’t make mistakes because there’s a lot of people watching. And, you know, and, and, and a lot of people do not wanna see zoos built. Not a lot, but a a vocal minority, let’s put it that way. And, and these are, these are the, the animal rights people. And we had an organization in Florida that was just totally opposed to, no matter what we said, you know, as a small group.

But, but again, like I said before, they, they just thought all animals should be left in the wild and not knowing what was going on in the wild. Because, you know, they just thought, they just thought everything was the wild was a picnic. And, and zoos were a prison. And they didn’t realize that, that that whole impression was getting reversed slowly. Now, in 1998, animal Kingdom officially opens On Earth Day.

You have said it was better building than running it. Why?

Well, that was because I was better as a builder than an operator. I think for me, the, the excitement is hiring the people, finding the right animals, providing the right facilities, moving them in that you’re just, so this, that, that was what my experience was. I had moved animals from, you know, an old zoo to a new zoo. You know, I had worked on big exhibits at San Diego. We had moved gorillas at San to San Diego Zoo. So I had experience doing that too, when we built the new gorillas exhibit there. So for me, that was my wheelhouse. That was what I was good at.

They, they originally hired me, said, Rick, you’re gonna help build it and then you’re gonna run it. And and Dieter was right that, that German guys, I was not prepared to run the operation side of a zoo. I could do it, but I I, there were better people than me that could do that better, I think. And, and you have to do that when you, when, when you’re a zoo director. But I certainly en enjoyed the, the, the concept phase. Making the, the concept into a reality and then, and then handing it over to people that are really good at maintaining and growing a facility. Now, now you had developed for Disney, a collection plan of animals that you wanted to have for various exhibits in areas.

Why did you not consider, or did you giant pandas or koalas that might have been very popular with the public?

Well, Joe Rodie, who was really the lead on the whole project, the head of Matir, he had the final say. He realized that pandas were a big draw for zoos. But whether we had pandas at Disney’s Animal Kingdom or not, the people are still coming. It would not have made much of a difference, if any, at, at Disney. ’cause people, people come to Disney because there’s so much more to see. So it would’ve just been another nice thing to have, but it wouldn’t, and it was also Florida, so it’d have to be indoors. And we really didn’t want to do a lot of indoor stuff. We wanted to take advantage of the climate.

So that was part of it. The money wasn’t really an object. Disney could have gotten pandas. I’m sure Koalas were, I would argue that, you know, they don’t do much. It’s just the name and they look cute. I said, you know, I, I don’t think I, I don’t think we need pandas. It’s like, it’s like Conway’s philosophy, how to exhibit a bullfrog. You know, you could have a bullfrog exhibit and make it the best in the, you know, ever. And talk about all the dynamics in the ecosystem and, and, and, and, and that we had, we had that philosophy.

You could take any species and make it, you know, very interesting. And without having to, to go with the typical stereotype opinion that giant pandas and koalas are. If you don’t have those, you don’t, you know, you’re not a really big zoo. We want, we did not want to be victims of that same assumption. Now you become director of the Houston Zoo in 2000 to 2015.

So my first question is, what prompts you to leave Disney?

A place you built to go to Houston?

I was done at Disney the last year. It was apparent that they did not really need me and they kind of made a different position for me. Same. They wanted me to run Safari, do Disney safaris to Africa, which I, which I wanted to do. I suggested it. So we had this program and the head of Disney Parks, the man I mentioned before, Justin Green, really supportive. Then he leaves the company. And so his, the guy below him was okay with it. But then, but then, but, but the, but then the marketing team, I, we did a lot of work on this and present. And when I finally presented it, the marketing guy convinced them to not do it that year.

Said, let, let’s, we’re too busy this year.

And I, I remember the head guy because he said, what’s, and next year’s gonna be less busy, why are we delaying it?

But he still, so when they did that, I said, I, that’s it. I’m, I’m, you know, there’s not much more for me to do here. So then I, I left on my own. But at that time, I, I consulted for about eight months and I, I I, I worked with a couple of architect firms and, and then I got some job offers. It didn’t really apply for anything, but there was some, you know, when you’re coming outta Disney, it, it was pretty easy. And I was offered, I, I went down to Australia. I was, there was the Zeus Victoria was just at the end of a contract with the guy that was the CEO. And I went down there reluctantly with Diane.

And because I was reluctant, I think they liked more. So they offered me the, the job. And I remember talking to Conway about it, bill Conway. And he said, Rickett’s, the other side of the world. He says, you know, it’s a good experience, but you’re so isolated.

And then Diane, my senior, says, do you really want to go there?

You know, that I, I don’t think I really wanna go. So I, I didn’t do that. And then, and then Houston called me and said, you know, would you, our director is, is resigning Don Olson at the time. And, and he called me Don Olson and said, you know, I think they’d be interested in you, Rick. I said, yeah, but the Houston Zoo isn’t much of a zoo and you know, it’s a city run zoo got a lot of issues. He goes, yeah, but it’s got a lot of potential. You should come down and see it. So I went down there and, and I came back thinking what it could be, not what it was at that point.

And I thought it had a lot of potential. And so, you know, one thing led to another. And then I got that one, I made a stipulation that if I take the job, I can put together a task force within the first year to evaluate. I wanted to privatize the zoo, but I didn’t wanna say it that way to the mayor. The mayor and the parks and rec director who was, did the hiring, said, okay, we’ll let you put that task force together if you take the job. Because they were gonna do a search. And then, then they saved the money on the search and just hired me. So, so then I take, now now I’m a city employee for two years city in all these ridiculous city meetings that you don’t, that have nothing to do with you half the time.

But the task force then came about and I got a really good leader for the task force. A guy named Bill Barnett, who was just amazing leader. And we got, we got the, we, we privatized the zoo. We had McKinsey, a big consulting firm, do pro bono work for us. It was a, it was like a five month project. We had four, four meetings. We made a, a huge report recommendation to the, to the city. The city council had to vote on it.

We met with each one of them individually.

’cause they were a little skeptical because wait a minute, you’re gonna make the zoo better, but you’re gonna charge people more?

I said, well, yeah, it’s $2 and 50 cents right now and 50 cents for kids. It’s $3 for, you know, a parent and a child to come to the zoo. I said, and they’re not getting a very good experience. We can charge more and they’ll get a much better experience too. And the city doesn’t have to pay. They go and we don’t have to pay anything. I said, no, no, no. You have to pay what you’re paying now. You just don’t have to pay more.

You know, and we’ll take it from there because we had talked to people like Terry Maple and he said they, they left too much money on the table. They didn’t ask for enough when they privatized. And they struggled at first, you know, so we still had, the city was still contributing, you know, their, I don’t know, it was a seven or $8 million at the time. But, but then we would make up more than that. So anyway, it, the city council voted like 13 to one to pass it. And then we had, and then they agreed to do this management fee, which is which, which helped us out immensely. And the privatization thing was very tricky. It had been tried a few times before, but we didn’t have the big guns on the task force that we had this time with Bill Barnett leading it.

I remember Bill, who, who was a managing partner of Baker Bots law firm, good friend of James Baker, secretary of state, chairman of the board of Rice University. Bill had impeccable credentials. Nobody knew he likes Zeus. But another board member introduced me to him. We had lunch and he called me up a month a week later and said, okay, Rick, I’ll lead the task force. But as long as it’s just for four months. And he was there for the rest almost for many, many years. He became the first chair of the board, the new board that we formed. And he became a, a really good friend and mentor for me.

And it proves that if you try to do everything yourself, it’s either not gonna work or it’s not gonna work well. And, and I, and I got, that was some of the best advice I got. ’cause the mayor said, you can do a task force, but you have to lead the task force. You are the guy. And, and then I and another board member of the society at that point said, Rick, you know, you, you gotta have somebody else. You, you, you be the vice chair. ’cause the, you know, you’re not gonna get anybody’s attention. You get. And, and Bill Barnett was, when I told the mayor and, and, and the parks director, I said, okay, I got the task force together, but there’s one wrinkle.

They go, what? I’m not gonna lead it. What do you mean?

You, you we told you to lead it. No, I got somebody, I’m gonna be the vice chair. Bill Barnett’s gonna lead it. Their drawers dropped. They knew the train had left the station. They were giving me kind of lip service. But now I had somebody in there. They, they knew it was, it was gonna happen.

So when you first got to Houston, what kind of zoo were you finding that you needed privatization, you wanted to do things?

What kind of zoo was it?

It was a zoo that had long lines. When the, when the lines got busy, the cashiers took a break because it was too stressful for them.

It was a zoo where I’m, I’m in my office and a lady comes in and says, could you come out to the restrooms?

They’re all flooded, you know, had to wade through water and squeegee. The bathrooms were like third world bathrooms, you know, things were overflowing. They ran outta toilet paper. Nobody did. The animal, the animals were taken well care of. But the public was like, they didn’t get, they didn’t care about the public at all. And, and, and, and we, we had to the frontline people at the, at the cashiers. We, we changed all that around then we had, we had quite a bit of, when we privatized the way we did it was the county agreed to offer them all alternative jobs. If they didn’t wanna stay at the zoo, we had the right, we had to offer everybody their position at the zoo.

But if we wanted somebody, we could offer them more money and a promotion. So the ones we did that we want, the ones we wanted to save, we offered more money. The others we’d get the same. And so we only had a few people leave. Well, we had quite a few people leave. Not the an all the animal staff stayed, but you know what it’s like private is because now they’ve got, now they don’t have a city pension anymore. And so if they had a certain number of years in with the city, they could stay on at the zoo as a city employee. And until they retired.

So, so we had some semi employees, but most of them that were five years or less, they didn’t, they they, they, they then went to to, to the new zoo and had a 401k instead of a retirement fund. And there were, there were a few keepers that didn’t want to do it, but it didn’t get as nasty as some zoos. We had to fire everybody and rehire ’em. We didn’t do that. You know, I didn’t get death threats or stuff like that. ’cause it was well thought out. And, and we had the, the, the county backed us up, you know, and gave, gave the people that wanted to leave other jobs. And frankly, the ones that left are the ones we wanted to leave. And the ones we wanted, we gave made a more office that they, that they couldn’t refuse.

So it worked out, it worked out, it worked out pretty well. But it was stressful. It’s always stressful. It’s all, you know, and that, you know, the end result was worth it. But God, you know, there was a lot of debates When you were there looking at the zoo, seeing all the things you saw.

Were there certain exhibits in your mind?

You said, I gotta change this right away. The pair exhibit was horrible. It was so small, you know, and it was little and either get rid of it. And then we had a small mammal building that I said, we gotta close this thing. It’s just these window, you know, it was like a reptile house but with mam small mammals in it. And I said, we can’t have that. So we closed that building and we opened it like two years later. And the, and the bears, we just knocked down partitions and made one big exhibit instead of three small exhibits.

Excuse me. How does the zoo, now you’re Houston Zoo and, and there have been hurricanes.

How does the zoo prepare for natural weather disasters?

Did you have to deal with any We were in hurricane, we, we were very vulnerable to hurricanes. And it’s a low lying area where the zoo is in Herman Park. And we had a sign, one very significant hurricane when I was there. But we had a lot of holding areas where we could put animals to. And we, we, we always had a, a ride out crew for that, for that hurricane. So, but there were, it was, it’s still challenging. ’cause the zoo is, you know, it’s, it’s landlocked there. You’re surrounded by the medical center on one side, rice University and the museum district on the other.

It was in, it was in the, the nicest area of town. Most city zoos are, are usually not in very nice areas of town, or they used to be, but that now they’re not. So we, we, we were in a very good area for, for fundraising to improve the zoo. And before we took over the zoo from the city, we did an assessment of all the facilities, a structural and the foundation. And, and we, and we told the city, okay, this is besides giving us this money, this is the deferred maintenance that you’ve ignored for all these years. You need to pay for that too. And, and they did. But it, it, it was, it was just the right timing to do it, I think. And having the right people.

But again, I, did I answer the question?

’cause weather, just the weather. Making sure you were prepared for disasters. Yeah, I, you know, almost everything could go inside and the flamingos could go in the bathrooms. That’s what you usually do with flamingos for hurricanes, you know, ’cause the flamingos just stand there. They’re fine. But, and we didn’t lose any, we lost one kudu because the next day all electricity was off in the hospitals. And these giant military copers helicopters were airlifting the patients out. And they came too low to an exhibit and they spooked a, they spooked a, a kudu that ran into the fence. We had to euthanize it, but considering everything else.

But there was the question before that. There was something else I was gonna add before the weather. You were talking about what you want to change right away. Yeah, I, the, the culture had to be changed too, you know, and that when you take over a new facility, you’re also taking over a staff that’s there some good, some bad. It takes about two years to trans to get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off, to establish that new culture that you need to, to run a zoo. And, and that’s what it took about that long and a lot of tough decisions in some cases. But by, by the year 2002 when we privatized, we, we, we had already, by privatizing we also were able to hire the people we wanted. We could reward people now.

Yeah, it, and it didn’t, it wasn’t based on seniority, just ’cause this person worked longer, had to get more money. We could reward the younger person that was working their ass off and doing a lot more. So, you know, your, your your bonuses, you didn’t get bonuses with the city were based on, you know, your performance, your, your performance reviews. So get the, getting the right people on was, was so important. And that, so that was the biggest, you know, that was the biggest change. You, you can do the fac. And the other thing I wanna say about facilities, some zoo directors make the mistake. They come in and the first thing they do is they, they do the front entrance. They want it to look good for the public.

When the animal staff is crying that we have these horrible exhibits, you need the, the, these animals are in these horrible clo small areas in the back. The exhibit’s not, there’s no shade. So we had to address the animal issues first. At the same time I had to do something for the public. So we did a car, we did one of those wildlife carousels too, you know, at the beginning. And that was very popular. That, but, but I was careful to make sure that we addressed animal care issues before we addressed some of the public issues the bathrooms had. We, we, we eventually built all new bathrooms obviously too.

Ones that did not overflow, the toilets didn’t overflow. And, and the old ones had natural ventilation that didn’t go very well. They weren’t even air condition, you know, it, it was, it was a pretty rundown old city zoo, you know, in 2000 and in the year 2000. So you’re big on conservation.

Did your conservation programs have difficulties getting off the ground?

No, not at all. Because what I did is, first of all, I had a board, at least leaders of the board that were big already attributed to conservation, especially the chair after Bill Barnett, Bob Graham. He was a, he and his wife Annie were incredible funders of conservation and Yellowstone Park wolves and some other stuff. They did. They, he really got it. And when he got it, the board realized, you know, I, I ran the zoo at that time as the director, but we had a CEO and she was very good at making money. She was a banker. I, but, but she didn’t understand conservation because you can’t measure it. And, and, and you can’t, you can’t really say what the return on investment is, you know, in the short term at least. So she didn’t really get conservation, but, you know, we pushed, we pushed that together.

We made the zoo a lot better. But it, it, it wasn’t, it was hard convincing her, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t hard convincing the board. And then, and then we had these galas that were all devoted to conservation. And I hired Bill Constant, he was my college buddy, but he was working for Russ Meyer at Conservation International. I hired him full-time to run the conservation program. And then he hired again a guy named Peter Rieger, who was amazing, came out of the Bronx Zoo in Nashville to lead the conservation. And then we got another woman in Renee Bumps and that group, they were the superstars. They were, and the conservation committee was the committee everybody wanted to be on.

All the board members wanted to be on that committee. It was ’cause it was exciting. We were bringing people in, you know, now, now we had all these conservationists in the field that were part of our family. We had these great stories to tell. So that, that, that was, that was very exciting. If I could bridge too. The next biggest challenge at the zoo was elephants. It was a small exhibit.

And every elephant that we had born there died of elephant herpes, EEHV. We had a history of that to the point that the animal rights people, and even well, animal welfare people, you have no business having elephants. They’re all dying eventually. Not the adults, you know. So we had, we had a 2-year-old die when I was there. I, he got sick and died within 36 hours. And now we’re at a point where we either get rid of the elephants or we got, and these are Asian elephants which are more susceptible or, or, or we, or we fix this problem. So I went before the board and I said, look, you got two things, we got two, two ways to do this. But what I’m suggesting is we don’t run away from this problem.

We need to, we need to be the leaders in research for, for the herpes. And we have the largest medical center in the world next door. And I just got a call from the head virologist of Baylor College of Medicine and he asked if he could help. He works on herpes for humans, but he’s, he thinks he could maybe help Paul, Dr. Paul Ling, amazing guy. So we put a special task force together led by the chairman of the board. And I brought, I brought people in like Mike Hutchins and we talked about the pros and cons and they said, well if we’re gonna go into this, it’s gonna cost us a lot more money. We’re gonna fund all that research. I’ll get you a donor. I found a, you know, one, a woman that in the end donated maybe 10 or $12 million funded all the Baylor research.

It’s the best money she ever spent because it took many years. But now, now there’s a vaccine. First of all, we learned how to treat it better. And then we started saving elephants. But now he’s got a vaccine that actually works and they can test the efficacy of it. Before there were vaccines outta Europe, but they didn’t work. You know, vaccines are, you know, sometimes are a magic bullet. But Paul Ling then, now he’s, he’s full-time only on elephants and he goes around the world and to elephant camps.

’cause this is a problem in the wild, you know, they weren’t just dying in zoos. And it was probably, it was our darkest moment. It was kind of like, NASA failure is not an option. You know, we we’re not gonna fail here, we’re gonna attack this problem, we’re not gonna run away from it. And we took a big risk. But because of Paul Ling and the board, it, it’s probably the proudest moment that I can think of at the zoo. Because you’re saving elephants worldwide.

When you were developing at Houston, when you were developing exhibits, what staff did you include when developing the new exhibits?

Oh, we included the, the senior keepers, the curators. We would bring zoo architects in. Obviously that had experience because sometimes with the animal staff, they haven’t built a new exhibit yet. And a lot of times they would ask for stuff that sounded nice, but maybe a bit extravagant. And you needed the, the zoo architect to say, well we tried that, but this might work better. They meant well, but like if the wall needed to be 12 foot high, they said, well let’s make it 14 foot high.

Well do we really need a 14 high foot wall when 12 works in every other zoo for chimps?

You know, something like that. So, but we, we, we always included the appropriate animal staff and facilities was in there, you know, the, the normal planning that you would do. But I, I used, i, I changed architects, but first I used Pat Janowski, who, who worked with me at Disney. ’cause he really knew the back of house and he was really good. And then we went on to other architects like Studio Hanson, Roberts, Keith, Keith McClintock and, and Jason Hill. So those, there’s a lot of good firms out there, but some are better, more better fish for us. When we were doing Africa, pat came with us on a trip to Gaon. So we, we did, I took six people that were, I took the conservation guy and I had Raymond Daz with us too. ’cause Ray was, he’s, he’s an exhibit designer that, that had a lot of experience working with animal staffs.

I mean, he’s known for his Nick and Moore exhibits, but Ray knows a lot about a lot of, he knows interpretive stuff too. And we, and we had a videographer with us too. So we tion a lot of footage of gorillas, elephants and other things that, that we used in some of the videos, you know, that reinforced the exhibits.

So during your time in Houston, what would you say were some of your more frustrating or challenging times?

The beginning and the end. The middle was great. The beginning because I had, there were two years for the city and as that changed, as soon as we privatized, you know, then my, my salary increased dramatically finally. And the, and, and we could, but those, those first two years I had, I had a society that, it was the old society. We, we, we had, we took people from that society and from another group and from, and, and formed this new Houston Zoo Zoological Society. But it was very stressful. ’cause there’s some people that didn’t want to do it, they didn’t understand it, you know, again, they’re comfortable the way things are. It was a lot of work. And, and, and then, and then, and then Bill Barnett said, Rick, the board wants you to be the zoo director, but we need somebody with a more of a stronger business background because this is a big deal. And so you’re gonna have a CEO, but you both report to the board and you work together.

And the first one I worked very well with, but he didn’t work, work very well with the board. He was a great fundraiser. So then they brought the second one in the banker and we, we did okay together for a while, but in the end it was more of a, it, it seemed to be more of a competition. So it just wasn’t the right fit. We both left the same year and then we, then we combined the positions and Lee MP took both positions and that worked a lot better. But we, we always made the zoo better. It just wasn’t as fun. That, that my my, my first two years and then, and then the last year I felt like I was just working on conservation programs more.

So she had the, the board chair then was somebody that was much more geared to the, the, the revenue side of it rather than the conservation side of it. I, it was good. It was, it was just the, I was 63 and I knew I still had another zoo left of me. If I want, not many zoos are gonna hire somebody in their sixties. Even though I, for I, you know, I’m pretty, I was a pretty young 63 at the time, but it allowed me to do more consulting and then, and then, and then develop what I had been talking about for 20 years. You know, my own my own facility. So, so that, that, that was pretty much it. I had 15 years at the Houston Zoo and I would say that most of that time the majority of it was very rewarding and very proud that the Houston Zoo should be included in at least the top 10 zoos in the country. Certainly from the conservation side.

So tell me what, how would you describe your management style?

Somewhat unpredictable because we’d have, I’d like to plan things and, and we have plans, but then sometimes you have a plan and as you go through it you realize you gotta change things a little bit. Some people say, no, we gotta stick to the plan. No, sometimes we have to change things. And I, I kind of sometimes that, that was good for the zoo. I think it sometimes it, it depends on, on the, on the staff member, you know, how much they’re willing to change something that, that, that they think was set in stone. But, but I think I delegated a lot because I knew that I was more of a big picture guy and I di if I got in the weeds and the little stuff, it would, it, it, it would take away from what I was good at. Disney when I was there sent me to a management, an executive leadership management school in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Gallup organization, they did more than just polls.

Gallup, they did our profiles and other sub and with all these other top executives from oil companies and medical companies. And what they taught us or what they kind of made us believe more of is go with your strengths. Don’t try to do stuff you’re not good at. You know, stick with your good stuff and hire the other people to do the other stuff. And that was very helpful to me. And, and the other executives, I, you know, we had, we gave presentations up there.

I got the vision award because my presentation started out with how many of you remember your first visit to a zoo?

And, and, and they all remembered it and they all liked it, you know, because you weren’t critical back then you, but, but it was, and then I built on that. And so, so you know, you, you, you, you, you start accumulating all this stuff. So I think my management style was a combination of what I learned from other people. But what worked for Rick, I, I think sometimes I was always very upfront with people and, and my opinion, but I tried not to dominate even though maybe I usually have the final say in, in, in a lot of the animal stuff.

But I, I think if people said Rick ji’s animal style management style was hire the best people and get out of their way and let them do their work, What would your staff, how would they describe your management style do you think?

Most of the staff I’ve worked with, I keep in touch with quite a bit. The curator of mammals at the San Diego Zoo now. I hired her. I gave her an opportunity when other people didn’t. And she’ll never forget that. The same thing at Houston. I mean there were, there, there were, there were some people there that did that didn’t like me at the end, but, but then, but the ones that are there now respected me. So you, you have to make tough decisions again. They, they misinterpreted sometimes that I was friendly, but in the end, I’m gonna do what’s right for the organization. I’m not gonna just, I’m not gonna just keep you because you’re loyal to me.

You have to be good. And I think that was sometimes surprising to people. ’cause you know, oh well I thought we were friendly, Rick. Yeah, we were, but you, you’re not doing your job. So I, I think I was pretty, I was upfront maybe too upfront sometimes, but, and I think that I was, I was very hands on and, and sometimes they appreciated that and sometimes they didn’t. ’cause they, a lot of times they look at a zoo director, well, you know, you don’t, you’ve never worked with these animals. Yeah, yeah. I have just not your animals. And, and they don’t, they don’t ask your advice. So you, you let ’em do it their way.

But if it doesn’t work you say, Hey, let’s try it a different way. You don’t wanna get in the weeds too much. You, you wanna hire good people, but you gotta tell ’em, Hey, don’t be afraid to make a mistake. I would always forgive people for making a mistake if they, if, if they really were doing it in good faith.

Because rather than looking for people to making mistakes, you, you encourage them to, did you, what’d you learn from that mistake?

I mean, that’s a question I would ask a lot in interviews.

You know, you know, you had a great career, but, you know, what decisions did you make that that were not a, a good decision at the time?

And what did you learn from it?

People that are willing to omi their mistakes are more likely to grow more professionally and be better leaders than ones that just think that they’re always right and demand, you know, that and dominate everybody else. I, I always surrounded myself with, with good people that were always better at something than I was. I was more the, the consensus builder.

How important to you was professional growth for your staff?

Extremely important. I think the Houston Zoo would send more people to workshops and conferences than most zoos of its of its size. You have to be careful ’cause they all want to go to conferences no matter what. But I said if you’re gonna go to a conference, you gotta present something you gotta do or be on a committee. You just can’t go and listen, you know, unless it’s your first time and it’s new. But I, I made a promise to my staff at Long Neck, ’cause I have a small staff that if you’re with me for more than three years and you do a good job, you’re gonna go to Africa in the next few years, I’m gonna send you, I think every keeper needs, ’cause we have African animals. Every keeper that I know would prefer a trip to Africa than a raise.

Is there a shelf life for a zoo master plan?

Oh, I would think so. The way things change nowadays, you know, if you, if you can’t design it, build it and open it within five years, you better not do it. First of all. The other thing is you got donors that, you know, they don’t wanna give you money and, and, and and and die before the thing is done. Right. Some of these donors are pretty old. You got you, you, you wanna get things done pretty fast. Even, even if it’s a big project, at least you get the first phase done. So, but yeah, there’s technology changes, there’s new materials, you know, enrichment, like I said, enrichment is so important in the zoo. You want animals to that, again, I’m talking mostly the large, larger, more intelligent animals that need enrichment every day. You don’t want the highlight of the day just to be when they’re being fed or, or else you’re doing something wrong.

You want, you want them to really seem to be active or comfortable in their exhibits, in, in ways that you only know by watching, you know, watching your animals and not, I try to, you know, which they also, interacting with the public really helps I think the animal staff to feel that they’re making a difference.

When you retired as zoo director, did you give the new Zoo director any advice?

Did they ask?

Well, Lee Empty is a good friend of mine, so I knew him really well. I convinced him to apply. He, he wasn’t sure ’cause he was really happy in Minnesota, so I, you know, I didn’t have to give Lee advice. I I, I just said, Lee, you got a really good zoo and you got a good boy. He says, but I’m really happy in Minnesota. I said, they want you here. I I I think you should consider it. And you know, he probably would’ve done it anyway.

But the initial conversation, and this was off, this was off the line because I wasn’t part of the selection committee, I was told not to be involved, but this is Lee, he’s my friend, you know, and he wanted to know from me and I worked with the, I worked with the search committee too on the side to make sure that Lee was by far the best candidate they could have hired for that. Because now we had the money. Lee was a designer and a builder and now he, he had, he had the foundation to do that. The zoo was making a lot of money, you know, thanks to the CEO was very good at that. And so he inherited a zoo. He had the re you give Lee the resources and he’s gonna give you some of the best exhibits that any zoo director could do. He’s, he’s a very talented guy. He is got a law degree and a degree in architect architecture.

Did you have a good relationship with the, the press?

How did you nurture that?

I, I had a good relationship with the press almost every place because I, I I, I don’t think I ever had a bad relationship unless they were looking for something bad. But we’d always invite them out and, and, and if we had a, if we had a, if we had a, a mistake or, or, or a death or something, we’d explain it. We’d explain it to ’em. We would, we never, you never hide anything. You had to be as transparent as possible. And I think the press appreciated that. The Houston Zoo always, almost always generated good press. It was just when the elephant calves were dying that, you know, they were questioning us.

As we look at things today, how does, how do you feel new technology can assist in promoting zoos?

There’s Twitter, there’s Facebook, there’s remote cameras.

Does that help draw attention to wildlife?

Does it help the zoo If it’s used the right way?

It’s, it’s a tremendous tool because most of our marketing now, it’s much cheaper to market now because, you know, we, you, you, you put something on a a, a YouTube video. One of our, one of our hospitality people, she, we used to pay her to do all our videos and commercials and like website stuff. And now she’s doing it full time for us and capturing a lot of stuff is mostly the keepers talking about their animals and, and we make it fun and sometimes just entertaining for holidays. I think it, I think you’re, and when you type in giraffes overnight experience, we’re number one in search engine optimization in, in the country. So, and that, and you just have to keep on that. You have to right, have the right people. But I, I learned a lot of that. Right now we have, we, we put a lot of money into the marketing budget and, and we have an outside firm that analyzes the data because there’s, you, you, you get a lot of data, but you gotta analyze it the right way in terms of where our visits are coming from.

You know, the, the, you know, how season out, what the seasons are, you know, sometimes we’ll have specials rates for the villas, the, the, the giraffe suite. We’ll talk about animal king, animal kingdom. We’ll talk about long neck manner more later. But that’s where digital, I’ve really gotten appreciation for it. Again, you can, the, you can do all that stuff, but you really have to come to the facility to see the, the real magic of a facility. You can see all these YouTube videos and all these clever interviews and, and stories we tell. But coming to the facility itself, most people say, Hey, it’s even better than what I saw on the, on the website.

How important was it to get the Houston community to embrace the zoo?

Did you have strategies for that?

They, they loved the zoo from the beginning. It, it, it was a, even when it was not a very good zoo or a decaying zoo, you know, the stroller moms were in there every morning. It was, it, it, there was no opposition to the zoo other than, well if you, you’re gonna, you’re gonna increase the price. Yeah, that, that, that, that gener we learned that once we increased the price, we would, every year we’d increase the price by $1. We didn’t wait like three years and increase the place $5. That generated criticism, but it seems like $1 a year to people that didn’t mind. So just, just different strategies on how you did it. But the us a community always loved their zoo, but they didn’t realize how good it could be.

I brought the whole board in two different trips to Disney. Not to say we’re gonna be Disney, but to show them, you know, some of the things that Disney did that we could do in Houston. Then, you know, bringing all these adults to Disney World was, was kind of funny, you know, ’cause then they all that come back with their families ’cause their families got jealous. ’cause you know, I, I had, I was allowed to bring people behind the scenes and we entertained them at our house. And I, I Bill Barnett really, I took him and his wife just special to Disney and he really got it. He says, I know we’re not gonna be Disney, but I know we can do some of this stuff in Houston. This is amazing stuff. You, storytelling, Signage has always been an issue with zoos.

What do you think one needs to think about in designing signage for animal exhibits?

Well, no matter what you do, some people are gonna look at the signs and some, aren’t you, there are better signs than others. Again, we don’t use signage. We don’t need signage at, at, at long neck manner. ’cause we can deliver all of one-on-one. But when you can’t do that, you have to have, I’m, I, I wouldn’t overdo it with heavy in text, but, but signage that, that doesn’t break down on you, that’s not too high tech. There’s some clever things that can be done out there that reinforce the exhibit. They don’t take away from the exhibit. And so that they’re just focused on, you know, playing with some kind of game that how far you can jump compared to a cheetah or a kangaroo.

But I, I’m, I’m fine. I think you need, you know, in, in traditional zoos or big zoos, you, there are, you need the tech nowadays you can just scan the QR code and get everything. So I’m not so sure how sign, how the future of signage and zoos, I think it’s gonna all be on your phone eventually. You have acknowledged, you visited a lot of zoos in your career, Invisio zoos.

Has that helped to shape your overall philosophy?

Definitely. I think I, it, it definitely influenced me. No matter how good you think your zoo is, there’s always a zoo out there that does something better. They may do a lot of things not as good as you, but you can always take away some, there’s always something that you can learn from going to another zoo and, and talking to other zoo directors. And I always gravitated to the one, the zoo directors that I really respected and, and I’m going to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo probably next month just to talk to their giraffe. They a really, they have some really good giraffe. They’ve got a, a giraffe keeper looks like a giraffe whisperer, and I want to talk to ’em about their giraffe that, that, that had her first calf and did not take care of it. And, you know, and it died to see, just to get his opinion too, you know, I think we know what to do this next time, but, but I, but, but, but that’s not, that’s, you know, if you, if you think you’re the best and you don’t ask anybody else, you’re not gonna be the best in the future. You know, every zoo has, almost every zoo has something, whether it’s a design of a railing or a new shade structure or a new enrichment thing, or, or a different type of graphic, or, or, or they have, they’ve trained a certain behavior with a program animal or the way they use their animals with the public or, and yeah.

It’s, it’s essential that you do that and not think that you can resolve everything with your staff and it, and, and sometimes you have animal staff to think, you know, we can design this. We, we know our animals better than anybody else. Yeah. But you need to look at others zoo have, have done it differently in its work. You need to at least look and see, you know, if you wanna try something different. That, that’s where I think some people get, they get in their comfort zone. And I don’t want my staff to be comfortable, that comfortable that they’re complacent. I want them to know that, you know, we have an obligation here to always get better.

You’ve had to, have you had to deal with animal scapes in your career?

Certainly at Houston Zoo? Any stories?

Yeah, a few, I guess in Miami, one day, one night, our male Malayan taper got out and he was, he’s a nasty animal. He, and he was out on the walkway. The public wasn’t there. And I can remember being in the back of a cart and, you know, and he would chase me. But, but, but he chased me with the car. I was in the cart. And then he just chased me back into his pen. You know, again, I don’t recommend that’s the best way to do things, but it, you know, rather you can dart animals, but they’re already stressed out already. And, and giving ’em a drug at that point is sometimes can kill ’em. We had most of the animals that got out, we just gave them time to get back in.

I’m trying to think of in Miami, a funny story. We had, we opened up the TIC exhibit and the tic is a small animal. They’re called tic because they’re, they, they, when they vocalize it sounds, so, it sounds like dick, Dick. So they’re called dick, Dick, DIK, DIK. So we open up the exhibit the first day and I told the security guy, I said, keep an eye on that Dick dick exhibit, because it’s a moat. And they may jump in the moat, they might not get out, but they’ll jump in the moat. And the mo the moat had sand on the bottom, but, you know, they, the public wouldn’t be able to see him. And I have to get him out. So I get a call on the radio about an hour later.

He goes, Rick, Rick, we got a problem over the dick, Dick. He said, but we got one dick on the paddock and one dick in the moat. He thought, he thought we called him dick, Dick. ’cause it was two of ’em. It just sounded pretty funny on the radio. I didn’t have any dangerous stuff. I, I, I almost, I, I almost, I guess the closest call I ever had was at Lion Country Safari. I was working with another guy who was pretty inexperienced, were in the back. They had a mother with Cubs and she was taking the young cubs and we put her in the next pen in the back and closed the door.

And she was pa pissed, but we had to just check the cubs and clean up. And so I did that, and he’s over on the other side, and he hears the door closed and he lets mom in. She comes in. I hadn’t locked the door, and the door was like this much open. She came in, hit, went after me and hit that door. But, you know, the door, it doesn’t swing open that way, you know, it stops. And she stayed on the door because if she got off the door, it would’ve, it would’ve sprung back open.

And I carefully put the lock on I, and I said, Malcolm, what the, you did, you just do?

He goes, well, I heard the door close. No, you wait till I tell you that. I mean, you gotta be, sometimes it’s just luck. Now you, you, in, in 2015, you leave Houston Zoo, you do some zoo consulting, but ultimately in 2019, you open up your own place.

And number one, can you kind of go through why did you not retire?

Why did you open up this, this new facility?

What is it And, and how did it come into being and what was your philosophy?

Well, I was, if you know Rick Bargi, I’m not gonna retire until I die. You know, it’s just not in my DNA. And I was young enough, and I had been thinking about this for a long time, and we had the right piece of property to do it. And we opened in, in 2021. In 2019 is when I, I got my nonprofit designation and we started building some of the stuff. I, I built my house. But, but I wanted to try something that I thought was an a, a different model and, and keep it small. ’cause I’ve worked in all these big places and I thought something, something that was very more intimate, more a personal, you know, like a VIP concierge level type experience.

People would pay money for it if it was done in the right way. And I started with the, with the bo, with the draft barn. So I built a much bigger draft barn than I designed a Disney or a in Miami, because I learned that, yeah, you, you need more space, you, and designed to hold a lot more animals. So I built this 10,000 square foot barn. And then on one end I got the keeper office and the, and the food storage. But that doesn’t need to be 20 foot high like the rest of the barn. So I said, I can make two stories there. So why not build a giraff suite and have giant windows floor to ceiling in the living room, the kitchen and the master bedroom, so the drafts can come, come right up, at least the adult giraffes.

So I did that in, in 2001. Again, this is just me, no partners, just my money. I had architect friends that helped me a lot. I had a lot of help along the way. I hired just two keepers at that point and me. And so we opened up in the suite, opened up in September, and I got a few people coming. They liked it. But, you know, I didn’t have any marketing, I didn’t have anything on the website like that. And money was more, money was going out than coming in.

And I’m down to not a lot of money left, you know, in my savings. I didn’t ask for any help. And then, and then a couple came in and did this film, eight seconds or 10 seconds. And they put it on their website, which had a lot more exposure. And the film, that little clip, it had the music, the Lion sleeps tonight. A weam away. A weam away. Apparently when you do little clips like that, you don’t have to pay for the rights because it’s too, it’s not enough. It’s not long enough or something.

So it, it starts, you walk in, there’s giraffes looking right at you, right?

And then there’s a little door under supervision. You open it up and the tongue comes in the living room and you feed ’em. And then it ends with them on the, on the catwalk with the whole giraffe right there. It went viral on TikTok. And when I say viral, we’re talking 31 million viewers. Okay? It, it went viral all over the world because we had a kid working there. He was adopted from Ukraine just the year before. But he, you know, he was older and he had friends in Ukraine that, you know, this was during the war.

And, and, and his friend wrote him and said, Hey, have you heard about this place?

He’s, he’s in a bomb shelter texting his friend. They heard about Long Neck Matter. So TikTok, this is January of the next year. It went viral. And we booked out the Giraff suite. It’s two night minimum for that whole year. Every single night. Bam, bam, bam. And you had to pay in, in advance. And then you had like up to two months before your visit to get a refund.

But you e everything came into the bank account. And then I opened up, I said, well, let’s increase the price and open up 20, 23. Three about three weeks that took. So now I’m booked for, for the next two years. Now TikTok first of all, is not the audience that comes to Longneck matter. Those are, those are young kids, but they went to their parents, mom, dad, we need to go to this place. So you could say, well, TikTok iss not your audience. Well it is if you get this rebound effect or whatever you want to call it, you know, to the adults.

And then the kicker was, my bank account went from $10,000 to over a million dollars in, in a month. So the bank calls me up and said, Mr.

Ji, we’re very happy for you, but could you explain what just happened?

They didn’t know. That just doesn’t happen. And so TikTok saved my butt, even though I’m not a fan of TikTok. And, and they’re, you know, it’s, it is built up since then. We’re not sold out now. ’cause we built four villas now. And we have, so we have some, it, it took the pressure, but the suite is our flagship. That never gets discounted. That is always a, the same price and more on holidays. And, and giraffes are people’s spirit animal.

They, they love giraffes and they don’t have time to go to Africa. They know they can’t feed ’em in Africa unless they go to the Giraff Manor place, which is really nice. But I think then my model worked, but it was all, it, it, it was, it was all because of a viral TikTok eight second video that really propelled us. I, it probably would’ve worked eventually, but I don’t know if I could have lasted that long.

But you expanded tother animals. Why Not yet?

I’m, I’m raising money now to do that. Yeah, But you, have you expanded to Rhinoceros?

Oh no, they came at the same time. Ah, – I, I, I didn’t, I didn’t copy giraffe manner. I, I want, I rhinos came in the same week as the, as I wanted to, I wanted to do rhinos, giraffes, and cheetahs. And I didn’t do the cheetahs because the regulations were changing. And I didn’t, I didn’t think it was, you couldn’t, they, they were treating the cheetah like a, a large cat. And it’s, it’s not the same behavior at all. But, so I, so I just did those two animals and then I got a sloth that, because everybody likes slot and, and he’s, he’s just an extra bonus. So now I’m gonna expand to my favorite animal or the one that I have the most history with in the wild and in captivity in zoos.

And that’s the oppi. And that’s a special, special animal. And we’ve got a far, we’ve got a whole forest area. So now I’m doing a, a campaign, a $5 million campaign. Two and a half million is for the Rhino Conservation Center. ’cause it’s not just the barn, it’s got a whole wing for small mammals and it’s really spacious. And then I can breed rhinos. ’cause right now I have three males when I get females and they’re not gonna get along. So I gotta separate ’em in the barn.

And, and, and I, again, it’s gonna allow me to do more tours simultaneously. ’cause I don’t want to increase the number of people on a tour. Again, I like that 10 to 12. The most people that will do, we do private tours too, where you can just go with your family and pay extra. Those are daytime tours, and that makes about a half a million dollars a year. But the overnights really are, are, you know, we have almost a $2 million budget now. So you continue to be active in conservation matters, More active than ever because you have more connections now. And of course, now that I’m making money and giving money to people, you know, they, they’re also want to, you know, be supported by us too.

So my goal is that by the year 2030, that we’re budgeting a million dollars for conservation every year. And, and then in addition to that will be other donations, but that’ll be budgeted into our earned revenue model. And for a zoo our size, that’s more, that’s at least 10% of our, of our budget, not the 3% model that a lot of zoos use or try to use. Now you’ve, you’ve had famous people come to visit you, at least one famous person who not only came to your new facility, but you were involved with at Disney.

Can you relate the story of your experience with that person at Disney and then at Long Neck Manor?

You mean Jane Goodall? Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes. Well, Jane was at our facility just, just 10 days before she passed away. And I’ll get to that in a minute. But I have a 30 year relationship with Jane. I have like a five or six page blog that I did just recently. It’s on our website that, that can go into this more. But I met Jane because of Disney. Her executive director at the time was in LA and I was told that Jane was visiting LA and, and so I told him, I said, Hey, I’m, I’m working on this project, it’s very confidential.

We’re gonna build this park. And I know Jane’s not a super fan of zoos, but we’re gonna do this the right way. And he said, well, I’ll let her know. And he did, because a couple of nights later, my phone rings, I’m working late and I pick it up and she goes, hello, this is Jane Goodall. And you know that voice? You go, yeah, I know. And she said, I’ve heard about a little bit about your project. I’d like to know more and I’d like to, I’d like to get to know you better to see if I, like, she didn’t say it that way, but she meant to see if I like you. So I said, well, that would be great.

She says, well, are you free for dinner tonight?

So, so we had dinner with her friend, with her assistant Mary Lewis. Then we came out to Disney. She got a tour, which nobody gets a tour at that point, but we made an exception. All the imagineers are like little kids lined up with their, with their, in the shadow of man books she signed. And, and she, that, that was the beginning of a great relationship. But the story was two years later, we’re building Animal kingdom and the tree of life is being built. And the tree of life is 150 foot tall from a distance. It looks like all this gnarly bark.

And then you get closer and all those crevices are animals, different animals, herds of animals, wildebeests, migrating, just an amazing tree, right?

And so it was being built and we had the scaffolding at about a hundred feet up. And it was called the dance floor. And this was after hours, or I wouldn’t have been able to do this.

So Jane’s looking at the tree, I said, you wanna go up?

She was, you know, at that point, she was in her sixties, but she, she was very spry and she scooted up that thing. And we went up and we talked about it. And she just, it’s amazing. And then she looks at me and says, but Rick, I don’t see a chimpanzee. There’s a lot of animals on this tree. I go, well, I I, I didn’t have anything to do with the tree. Jane says, well, there’s a baboon and there’s a monkey, but there’s, I looked pretty closely. I said, okay. I said, and so we, we left that, and the next day I found the guy that was in charge of the carving.

There was a lot of people, but his name was Jolt from, he was a Hungarian guy that, that immigrated a few years earlier. And he was just so talented. And I went up to him and I said, I never met him before. ’cause that wasn’t my area.

And I said, Joel, I said, do you have a chimp on the tree?

He goes, no, I got monkeys.

I said, do you know who Jane Goodall is?

And he said, yeah, yeah. The lady with the chimps, he knew who she was. I said, is there any way I know the tree’s almost finished, you can put a chimp on this tree. And he goes, well, send me a picture. So I sent him a picture of David Grave Beard. And I didn’t hear from him. I think he talked to Joe Rodie, I think Joe Rodie cooked this up. And so I called him up about a month later. He says, come on down, I’ll show you what I did.

Come down, stop.

I don’t know why did I get choked up about this stuff?

Because it’s good. You, you didn’t stop, did you?

No, it’s, it’s, no, it’s good. It’s good stuff. Yeah, No, I mean, just ’cause she’s gone now. But Yeah. So he shows me this larger than life. David Graybeard at the entrance to the amphitheater that you go inside the, the bug show. And he’s, he’s got his hand over the, and he’s got a twig, you know, like he’s fishing for termites and they put a plaque on there. Amazing. Yeah. And it’s so lifelike. And, and you know, David Graybeard was her favorite by far, you know, he was the first chimp that came up to her. He dyed of polio. She, he just disappeared. But she was in love with David Graybeard.

And so it was like that Gary Lawson cartoon where, where the two chimps are on the, on the t. Did you ever see that one? And the one chase another blonde hair you’re doing, you’re doing research with that tramp Jane got all again. And Jane loved that. She, she actually gave me that cartoon and signed it with Love Jane. And so anyway, we didn’t tell her opening day. Michael Ener shows her that I made sure Jolt was there. So he, she, she wanted to thank him in person. Oh, how wonderful. So, but it’s one of those stories, the the thing about that tree is there’s all animals on it, but there’s only one animal on there that has a name out of 400 animals.

So, I don’t know, it’s just a nice story. That’s why it chokes me up sometimes. But it’s just, She must have been amazed. I think she was, I th she, I know she appreciated it. But Jane is very reserved at first. She’s not, she’s not gonna say, oh, she’s not like a game show contestant. You know, she’s not anything like, she’s always, but yeah, yeah, that was, that was pretty, because she, she si she took a great, later on, she sent me a picture of David Graybeard and wrote something really nice on it for me. Very nice. Now it transition though that Jane now comes to Long Neck Manor because she wanted to see your place because you invited her. She was in, I told Jane a few years earlier, you know, we, we communicated sometimes we didn’t communicate for a while. And she, she used me and maybe a few others questions about zoos.

She would ask about elephants and other stuff. And, and sometimes I give her the answers she wanted to hear. And sometimes, sometimes she didn’t. She did it her way.

So when, when I told her what I was doing, I said, would you give me a, could you give me a quote?

So she said, yeah, well write something. I did, of course she changed a little bit, but she hadn’t been there. And I said, Jane, is there any way, you know, if you come to Austin, she was in, and I saw her in Austin the year before.

I said, are you coming back to that donor?

And she didn’t know. And then about two months before she came to Long Neck Matter, so about four months ago, I get a call from her assistant. Susanna said, look, we’re gonna be in Austin, and then she’s gotta be in New York, but she’s got three days Rick and she needs some rest.

Can we do, I, I know you promised you could do a fundraiser, could she rest for two days?

And on the third day we do a fundraiser. I guaranteed her a hundred thousand dollars for her project in, in, in Tanzania. Jane’s Dream, which is her legacy project, which is just being built. Joe Roddy, Joe Roddy is designing it for free, the Imagineer. So it’s great. And so I said, yeah, let’s do it. So I blocked out the whole place and I had people come in $5,000, a couple, if they stayed, it was $25,000 for two nights. But they didn’t have real access to Jane just, just that night. But it was, we only had 30 people in, in the welcome center with Jane.

So, so it was intimate. She got to, everybody got a book signed, she got a pic. Every it was, it was, it was a special night. And Joe Rody was there, you know, and he introduced Jane. I had, because he’s an, he’s just an amazing, he’s so dynamic and he’s just incredible speaker. But Jane is, Jane is more inspirational and just impactful. Excuse me. And so the three of us kind of tag teamed after she spoke. And she was the old Jane.

It was like she was 30 years ago, you know. But afterwards, you could see she was spent, we had, we had to drink. She always had her little scotch, single malt scotch every night. And we sat there and talked for a while. And then, and then when I said goodbye to her that Saturday morning, you know, it was 10 days later, you know, one of my keepers come and say, Hey, I just heard on the radio changes, it’ll just die. And so she wrote in the book, you know, and in the, in the villa she was staying, I put her in the last villa, the Oppy villa and some really nice stuff. And just said, at such a hectic schedule, I just really appreciated the rest. ’cause we just had dinner together the first night.

And then Joe Roadie came the second night. And the third night we had the fundraiser. So it, it was probably her most, it was the last contact with animals. And I have a picture with her. You have it, I think with the giraffe and our big male giraffe who, he’s really good with people, but he doesn’t always like to be touched or very rarely. And there was something about Jane, she just leaned against him. She had that, she had that ability because animals get sensed. She’s not scared of anything.

She’s so steady and, and it’s just, I had a, another photographer capture that picture. And then we had her with the rhinos too. And she just, she really enjoyed it. I know she did. And that was, you know, that, that was really special. She got to meet the keepers. The keepers spend time with her, obviously. I mean that was, you know, those are the things you wanna do for your keepers because you have to inspire them. And they had, they got to see Jane.

I had, I had, I had some, we had families come up, we had some two, two girls. A friend of mine’s girls that are really Jane Goodall fans. They’re 10 and 12. They were amazing with Jane. And Jane was amazing with them. And then my dogs, you know, dogs are her favorite animal, you know, ’cause she said, your chi chimps, you know, I love chimps, but, but dogs are what her, her first dog was her, you know, was probably her best teacher. She said Rusty. And so my dogs, my labs just loved her, you know, and I got pictures with the two of them and her. So it was really special to have her for three days.

So, and then it was even more special because now she’s gone. But she has a, a memorial on Tuesday in Washington DC at the National Cathedral. And Diana going to that. Joe Roddy’s going, bill, con’s going. A lot of people will be there.

Tell me to begin with, what made you a good director?

What do you think?

Well, first of all, I’m not sure I was a good director.

What, what’s the definition of a good director?

You know, it depends on the time period. But I would think that I did okay as a zoo director. ’cause I had good communication skills. You have to have good people skills. It’s not about the animals, it’s about the people. You know, you, you board especially, you have to have a good relationship with your board. I had that. And then just being on the ground, you know, management by walking around that, that, I think that helps a lot. And I cared. I cared about the animals and the people.

And sometimes that doesn’t make you a good director in certain senses, but it makes you a good person.

Well, but what then, what kind of skillset do you think as your director needs today as compared to when you started?

Well, today you have to be very charismatic. ’cause you’re raising money all the time. Most of the zoos are, are not municipal anymore. So they have to raise their own money. And, and that, I think that is number one is fundraising skills. But you should have a good background in a good knowledge of animals that, I mean, it is you, you have live animals. Is is your core mission, your core, you know, focus in a zoo. So I think I prefer a zoo director that has an animal background and, and, and understands business, but has a good CFO.

I think those, there, there’s a lot of qualities, other qualities. When you read the job descriptions, there’s so many, there’s so many other, you have to have good writer. You have to be a good writer, good verbal skills. And, and even then sometimes it, it, it doesn’t work. It depends on the board. Now you’ve been associated with, in your crew with fairly large organizations.

What do you think though that a small or a medium, medium size zoo, particularly a municipal, municipal one, could do today to be involved in wildlife conservation?

Either nationally or could it be internationally?

Well, it’s an interesting question for me because I went from big to small instead of small to big. ’cause now I’m in a very small organization, long neck manner. So, but I got the experience from the larger zoos. There are differences, obviously the resources. But basically the, the, the missions are the same. You just have to balance the, the money isn’t always the same. So you have to balance the budget better. Sometimes in a small organization, you have to do more yourself.

You don’t have a lot of the other resources. I’m learning that now. I don’t have an executive assistant anymore. That used to keep me so organized. A a, a good executive assistant is, is really what saves you in a big organization. You, you have to have somebody that’s not a gatekeeper. But my board would always love talking to Pam, who was my executive assistant at Houston. And same with Leah, who I had at at Disney. They were wonderful people.

I i, you gotta have a team, you know, to make you look good. You cannot do it yourself Well. But with the small zoos or the medium zoos, they have financial resources, big and small.

What do you think should be the focus of their type of collection?

Should it be regional, endangered, just animals that no one wants?

What, what type of collection should small or medium zoos be focused on?

I think it’s a balance. I, I wouldn’t, just because you’re a small facility doesn’t mean you should just do local animals. You have to analyze what your audience is, who’s coming to that zoo. And maybe I would, if I would have a balance of maybe some exotic species, if you can do it well and some, and some local species, I don’t think you, you make assumptions sometimes, well I can’t afford that or I can’t afford this. There’s always a way to do it, to do it right. So I would not limit myself in a small zoo to just a pigeonhole, well I can’t do this or I can’t do that. You just do a few things and do them really well. That’s the key with all zoos right now is the collections are getting smaller, but the quality is getting better. Of is the quality of care and the quality of exhibition, the habitats, they’re not exhibits anymore.

They’re habitats are getting much better. And, and there’s more space for them because now the collections are getting much smaller.

As an aside, do you think the collections you mentioned are getting smaller of financial constraints because of why are they getting smaller?

Not because finance. I, I mean that’s an easy out, I guess to say that. But I, they’re getting smaller because they should be smaller. I think you can do things. Quality is better than quantity. It used to be the encyclopedia, you know, collection of animals. You have to have one of everything. And the, the zoo that had the most species was, would brag more about that. That’s, that’s a detriment now to say something like that. I think, think if, if your audience is much more educated, they know about, they know more about what is appropriate for animals.

There’s a much more empathy for animals than there used to be in the past. Before it was this, oh, there there’s a freak show. You know, I’m talking 50 years ago or more, you know, the wild and the weird, you know, is what you came to see. And if it died you just, you just, you just got another, yeah, you just, you know, ordered another zebra or whatever. In the, in the, in the Bronx Zoo, in their guidebook up until the late twenties, you get to gorilla and it said, and we encourage you to come as soon as possible before it dies of gloom and so solemness or something, or depression. And, and they said that right in their guidebook, you know, just come before it dies. Well, I get off on tangents there, but No, no, but that’s okay. But when you talked about, you know, people are much more aware of zoos, but zoos in, in a lot of cases today are afraid to confront animal rights or welfare groups that are against zoos.

Could you give us some thoughts on how best to deal with these kind of groups?

And did you have to do that?

Well, I had to do that a lot. But the best advice I can give about that as be proactive, don’t get defensive. If you do it right and you care about your animals and it’s quality over quantity, again, you’re not gonna have, you, you might have problems with some really extreme animal rights that just don’t want any animals in captivity. And think the wild is just paradise. But in the most cases, you need to be proactive and you need to spend money on it too. There’s a lot of zoo directors and, and oh, we can’t, again, we can’t afford that. Or they nickel and dime everything. Don’t do, don’t do that. You know, if, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna have a species, you, you, you do whatever is you exceed optimal care.

Optimal cons connected to, to the wild conservation. I think that to me, animal rights is there because zoos dropped the ball. We didn’t deliver on our promise. Our promise is to take good care of animals and we weren’t doing that. And behind the scenes, you know, we have the behind the scenes zoos should, should be totally transparent and everything they do. And if they can be transparent and the visitor can see everything, they’re not gonna have a problem with animal rights. And you, you, you talked that, You got me fired up on that one.

Well, as you should because I, well, my question was then with dealing with animal zoo anti zoo groups, was this a issue in Houston?

Was it an issue in Disney?

Huge issue with Disney. Why?

Because we, this is the nineties and Disney was gonna do live animals. Mickey Mouse lived forever. Now we’re gonna bring in animals, real animals. And they, and they thought they were getting ’em off in the wild. First of all, they don’t realize that almost ever, all the animals that came from Disney came, all the large mammals for sure were born in other zoos. They, but they didn’t, they just, the assumption was Disney’s gonna go and bring all, all these animals in from Africa and Asia. So that was number one. But we got all sorts of letters. ’cause they thought that Disney should do an animatronic zoo, everything.

’cause they’re so good at it, virtual reality now.

But it was, you know, they could, why you, why are you doing real animals?

You can do, you can do all this fake stuff. And so we got a lot of form letters and we had a whole letter writing and there was like 20 people that just responded to letters at Disney. And I did the form letter once and there was one little lady, older lady, it sounded like on a letter, and I answered her questions and, and addressed it to her. We sent that letter out. She came back and says, oh, okay, if, if you’re really, I didn’t realize it was that and it’s gonna be responsible and you’re gonna give money back to conservation. She says, I, I congratulate you. So, so we use that as a template. It, it didn’t always work, but it worked sometimes. But I still have a lot of those letters because it was like better off dead than captive bread, you know, we heard that a lot.

It, it was, it, they just had this, the word zoo, we didn’t use the word zoo, but they, they called it a zoo. And that that’s got such a negative connotation historically that we had to deal with a lot of, a lot of letters, a lot of protests locally. But we had an advisory board that came in and we had Jane Goodall on our side too. And Jane was the magic bullet because Jane was also animal welfare, animal rights and conservation. The only person that could be in all three areas of influence and, and, and be accepted. And she really went to bat for us because she, they’re good zoos and there are not so good zoo. Disney is doing it right and it’s gonna help animals in the wild. So did just to continue that, did Disney have a, were they telling you the animal guy, we know how to talk and deal with people, here’s what we need you to say.

Or were they relying more on you as the animal guy to help them form a message?

Yeah, I’m not trying to be egotistical here, but no, they, they let me decide. Michael Eisner and I would sit down and talk about this when he was the CEO and ’cause he wanted to, one time he wanted to buy the circus, you know, he thought that was a good idea. And we said, no, don’t. I said, okay. He says, no, we’ll buy the circus and we’ll put it in, we’ll put it in animal kingdom. I, I said, nah, that’s probably not gonna work. You can rescue some of the animals. But no, they really did listen, because I said we need an advisory board, we need independent spokespersons that can support us. We can’t have, we can’t just have our companies saying how great we are.

If you have a Jane Goodall, you have a Bill Conway, you have a Russ Meyer, all these guys that are on our board, Terry Maple, they, Mike Hutchins. All we had, we had an incredible advisory board that that said, no Disney’s doing it right. And they’ll listen to a third party advocate more than they’re gonna listen to yourself. Well then you were talking about the, the good zoos and so forth.

Another question that we kind of said, why do you, are you, were you a good director?

What do you think makes a good zoo? A great zoo?

Well, let me start with Charlie Schroder’s. He was asked that question in a book called Mr. Zoo. And, and Charlie’s answer was, you go to the restrooms and if the bathrooms are clean, then you know they’re taking good care of the animals. That’s a quote from Charlie Schroeder, the, the, the, you know, the, the icon director of the San Diego Zoo. But it’s more than just clean bathrooms. What makes a good zoo is you have to have staff that is really good at what they do. They, the animal staff especially, you can’t just put ’em in front of an exhibit and say, talk to the public. You know, they, they have to, they have to be trained to do that.

They have to tell stories about their animals, individual animals. What makes a good zoo is that the back of house is the same as the front of house. It’s, there’s no difference. You know, if, if you’re embarrassed to show people where the animals go at night, then you should not be a zoo. Talked about people at times. There’s been a complaint from zoo directors that there are too few good curators in the community today.

Is that an issue? And how should curators, in your opinion, be trained today to do what you think is expected of them?

Well, I think it’s a double-edged sword. Sometimes it’s too much education and not enough hands-on. Experience is what seems to be the trend now. And they think they can solve everything in front of a computer and, and, and just day to day to data. But you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta be out there. That’s how it all started with most people. You know, you, my, I was second grade grade of visiting the Bronx Zoo. That, that certainly had a lot to do with, with enlightening this New York City kid.

So I think that the, what was the question again? The, Do you think that, what kind of training, how would you, yeah, What would you include In a training program if you had to develop it for curators?

What kind of things would you emphasize?

Well, again, they usually come in with the technical skills, but they don’t have the, the hands-on abilities. So I would send them to other zoos to benchmark and, and, and it’s a network too, so they get to know other people. ’cause a lot about leadership is, is, is about working with other leaders and, and Curatives have to learn also to delegate and to develop their staff. And professional development is so important these days. You gotta send your your keepers to conferences and workshops. You can’t let them work in a bubble. It doesn’t work that way anymore. We’re talking about your staff, but then you mentioned the what restroom and what visitors would see.

What changes have you seen during your years in the zoo field regarding visitor attitudes?

Boy, well, when I was 55 years ago when I was ranger rick and a safari park, I I, I didn’t even look at the visitors very much. You know, they, they were there just to, you know, they were just checking the boxes and driving through and taking pictures and it was much more of a recreational experience. The audiences today are much more savvy. They’re, they’re much more demanding. You, you’re competing with a lot of other things. Virtual reality type stuff, computer generated stuff. People can stay in their, they can put these goggles on now and feel the breath of an animal. They can do stuff that even, we don’t, we can’t even do it at zoos.

So we, we’ve got a work cut out for us. But I still think that an experience, a firsthand experience is the most important thing that you can do for your audience. So the audience has changed. And the zoos are changing too. We’re just not changing fast enough. You just mentioned the goggles and so forth. I have seen zoos who have these rides now and, you know, go through Africa and so forth.

Good, bad. Should they be there?

It depends on the person. I think you need a combination. I think it, it can, it can reinforce the message or it can substitute, it can replace the message, which is not a good thing. So the, the balance of artificial intelligence that we’re coming up with and the real life experience, because the real life experience isn’t scripted. Artificial intelligence is scripted. And so there’s a wonder in nature that there’s an element of surprise that, that I think needs to be preserved. It’s a challenge in the future. I, I don’t know what’s gonna happen in 25 years. Will there be a, I think there’ll still be zoos because I think that people are gonna know there’s a difference between watching something on a screen and actually being there with the animal.

You’re preempting some good questions here. I’m making you jump around too. No, you are. That’s okay. We’re gonna cover that. What, what issues though, and you had a long career within the, the zoo profession.

What issues caused you the most concern during your career and how do you see the future regarding those concerns?

Well, we’ve touched on a few of them, but let, let me start with the evolution of Rick, because zoos changed my life dramatically. I started as, oh man, this is great. I’m running behind these rhinos, slapping ’em on the butt, you know, to get ’em inside. We did stuff that, you know, OSHA would’ve shut us down, you know, 20, 55 years ago. But as I became more aware of the animals, I became much more compassionate and empathetic. And now I care so much more. I think I, I cared, but I, I cared in as a kid. It was an adventure. It now it’s a commitment.

Now it’s a passion of, you know, helping the animals, realizing that those animals that we’re seeing in zoos are doing okay in good zoos, but they’re counterparts in the wild. God. It’s, it’s tough out there, especially Africa where I go a lot. So I changed in, in terms of looking through the animal’s eyes more than just, this is a cool job. And, and then, and I think that has influenced me in many ways, in the way I talk to visitors, guests, donors, the keepers that I hire also, you, you, you can see the genuine empathy is the word we use now. We used to be other words, you know, I used, i I love the doctors, the Lorax book, you know, unless, unless someone cares an awful lot, nothing’s ever gonna be done. It’s not. And and that always in, in influenced me too. I almost get choked up when I talk about that, you know. But I just, I changed and, and I think I changed for the better.

I, I became a little bit more animal rightsy. I’m not, not, I’m not a, you know, animal rights will talk about, you know, that, that’s more of a philosophical belief. But I, you know, I I really thought I developed much more of a, a, of a full understanding of this complicated world that we call conservation. Well, let’s talk about it. You, you mentioned animal rights. It’s an issue in the zoo world.

What’s your opinion about the balance of animal rights?

Well, instead Of and welfare and animal Welfare.

Yeah. Animal welfare and animal rights are, they overlap a lot, right?

And, and so does conservation to some, I mean, animal welfare conservation is animal welfare in the wild, kind of, you know, if you want to look at it that way. But I think that 90, 95% of animal rights, people believe in what, what we believe in. You know, nobody wants to be cruel to an animal. Everybody wants to do the right thing. But we’re gonna sacrifice animals from medical research if we have, if we can do it, you know, in a, in a sort of humane way. I think that the animal rights can be a philosophical belief that animals have the same rights as people and that’s just not realistic. It’s just not gonna work. And that, so they also are, if they understood what went on in nature, they’d wanna shut down nature, not zoos because they, they won’t go out there.

I’ve been on safaris with people, oh, you wanna see you?

Oh, there’s a kill. Oh, I, I don’t think I wanna see that. Okay, but that’s Africa then. So I don’t think, I think they’re alienated from nature and they, and then they have the benefit of, of having a return of lifestyle that a lot of people don’t. So, but I work with them and try to find the common ground that we have. And then the extremists, you’re not gonna do anything about that again, it’s like, it’s like, it’s like politics don’t, don’t work with the extremes on both sides. Try to work with the middle. ’cause there’s a lot of common ground. And my mother told me one time she had given money to PETA people for the ethical treat of animals. I said, why mom? She says, it sounds like a good name.

It’s really good. I said, yeah, but they do a lot of things that are not good, especially where your son’s working, you know, as a profession. And so she didn’t give to PETA anymore. But, but again, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of common common tenets of, of, of, of beliefs that, that we have. And we should focus on what we can, what we can work on together rather than, rather than going after the, you know, the small percentage of things that we differ on like elephants in captivity. But animal welfare, different Animal welfare is more realistic. Animal welfare to me is about just don’t be cruel to animals to treat everything like you would your household pet. Assuming you’re a good, you’re good with your household pet. I, I think, but we also have the luxury in the, in the western world of being able to do that.

You know, if you’ve got a family in Africa and your kids are starving and there’s one wildebeests left, you’re gonna shoot the wildebeests. ’cause you have no alternative. You gotta give people alternative. That’s why ecotourism is important, you know, that’s why we go over there too, so that they have another source. If they realize that if they don’t cut down the forest, they shoot the last animal, people are gonna come to see it and they have a sustainable income that might work. But it, but if, if we don’t give them that alternative, then, then, then protecting nature in, in developing countries is gonna be very difficult in the future. One of the other things, ’cause you’ve just kind of touched on it, is that zoos had at one time adopt a national park to help and do things that maybe national parks in Africa couldn’t do. But, and it seemed like a good idea, but you don’t hear about zoos champion championing that Issue.

It, it’s a great idea. And, and it, the reason it didn’t work, and Conway, bill Conway called it extractive reserves. You know, we, we, we can, the zoo can also support kind of a, a, a park or, or a habitat in the wild that’s kind of a, a extension of the zoo. A satellite, I think it didn’t work because it’s a long-term commitment with money. And you’ve got one director that champions it. He or she leaves the next one comes in and says, oh, we’re not gonna do that. So I, I don’t think there’s consistency in the commitment. It has to be written into your constitution, you know, it has to be, and your board changes too.

But I think money and leadership is what is what challenged it. But it’s a great idea and it should. And there are some zoos, little Boise Zoo had a great in Idaho, had a great program with Steve Burns when he was there with, with the park in, in Mozambique. And they’re still doing it, but it’s not as as good because the, the leadership changed.

There are some, there are many issues, but are, is there one or two or major issues that you’d like zoos to address in the future?

Well, money always comes up as well. Conservation’s a nice to have if we have it in the budget. And most zoos do not budget for conservation. They ask for donations. You have to use your earned revenue that you make from the gate and sales. You have to put that in your budget. The Houston Zoo budgets $6 million a year in their budget for conservation. And, and whatever they get after that is, is gravy.

And they do more. You can never, there’s no finish line in conservation. So, you know, you’re never gonna get to the point where we’ve done enough.

You know, is it 3% of your budget? Is it 5% of your budget?

But it needs to be part of your budget because I don’t think zoos can exist if they’re not proving that they can save, help save animals in the wild. If you can’t do that, I’m not so sure you can justify why you should have animals in captivity. You’ve probably seen programs, you said the budget is built in, baked in the budget.

Do visitors, are there ways that one can engage visitors to help conservation to give when they’re at the zoo to give money?

Is there methodologies that can help them buy into it?

You know, yes. And, and, but they’re little steps. You know, we talk about the behavior change. You can change a visitor’s perspective, but you don’t do that by attacking them. When they first come in saying, oh, do you realize, you know how urgent this is and we need your money. You, you get them to care first. I, I call it the, the three Hs. You go to their heart first and then you get them to care. And that’s by feeding an animal, doing something special.

So now they care about the animal, then you go to their head and then you can educate them. And then you can say, well, you know, these guys are doing okay, but they could use help in the wild. And we have organizations that we can help. And then you go to their hand and that and, you know, whether, whether it’s to help actively or, or money. So that’s my three H philosophy. Everybody has a different way of interpreting it. But definitely you gotta get people to care first.

And, and then maybe it’s about giving to people, right?

They care about, and the keepers are your frontline fundraisers, not your director. You know, when people come to the zoo, they’re talking to a keeper, usually they’re not talking to the zoo director. So you have to, you have to have keepers. We call ’em animal care specialists now. They all have degrees, so they’re not keepers anymore. Right. But, but they’re, they’re very educated. So use that, you know, education and those communication skills. And I always tell my animal care specialist, don’t just tell ’em what’s in a book.

Tell ’em about Betty White. She was born on Betty White’s birthday. She’s had five calves. She’s a great mother. And she, and she would rather stay in the bar and then come outside half the time. You know, so just tell ’em what you’ve learned. You’ve gotta do the Jane Goodall thing. You’ve gotta make these animals have personalities. ’cause you’ll, they’ll care much more about, about ’em.

It’s anthropomorphic, but it works. And it’s the way we should, we should move forward with that On another event. Zoos have to at sometimes acquire animals.

How do you think that private breeders can be partners with zoos?

That’s a struggle for the last few decades. It’s worked. In some cases it doesn’t work long term. I was talking to David Bamberger, who’s 93 years old now. He was, he did, I don’t know if you know the name. He did Hor Orx on his ranch. He has 5,000 acres in Texas. He’s very close to where I am.

So I said, David, why didn’t it work in the long run?

He said, well, I got the Ator Rx and I put ’em out there like a herd and let them, you know, survive. And, and they were fine. And he says, and I worked with the, and I had directors back then, like Conway that understood it. The directors changed, then they wanted to manage my collection. They said, no, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. He said it didn’t work. They, you know, it, he said it was just a change in leadership. Again, change in philosophy. They wanted, ’cause he wanted to manage them as, as a herd.

And sue’s tend to sometimes, you know, intensive management, individual animals. So he was, he was disappointed that it, it didn’t work. But nowadays there are some very wealthy people out there doing, there’s a guy in India that has this incredible thing. He’s calling it a sanctuary, but it’s, it’s a giant zoo. There’s a guy outside of Pittsburgh that’s got a lot of money too. I won’t mention names, but they wanna do it right. And they, and they wanna help zoos. But what happens with a lot of these private guys is when they die, their kids say, I don’t want it.

Well why? This is what the land’s worth more money. Just get rid of it. Again, the legacy has to be solid so that it’s passed on to the kids or somebody else. And I’ll, I’ll tell you what I’m doing at Long Neck Matter for that. ’cause I’m 73, I’m no spring chicken here either. But, but it, but it doesn’t, that’s what’s at risk because a lot of these rich guys do it. And then their kids say, I’m not interested in that. And, and you, you’ve kind of answered the question, but there are a number of private people who have private zoos.

What will happen to them?

Will they be, will they live the same amount of years as a municipal zoo because of this?

And you believe No, they may not. I think private individuals that are wealthy that are not doing it to make money, but doing it because they just like animals or their, their, their wife or their kids think it’s a cool thing to do. Their intentions are very good, but as time goes on, they get older. It’s not always the same with the, the kids that they don’t have that same commitment. They have other interests and, and that’s the risk. They can’t write it into a contract. Like we said, you, you, you want it to continue. And sometimes it does for a while.

It’s not gonna continue forever. Nothing’s gonna last forever. But I, but, but I think that they, the wealthier ones, especially in Texas, they’re, they’re doing it right for the animals. But eventually they get too many animals. And then the animals do go to other places. Whether they, they give ’em away. They’re not it, the private people that are in in the business to make money off it are, are, are, are not, are, are not gonna help conservation at all. They’re just interested in the commercial value.

And you got a lot of, the little, the little private facilities are, are kind of like that. The, the big billionaires, they do it for different reasons, but I just don’t see unless, and they don’t wanna have a board because they don’t wanna be billionaires, don’t want to be told what to do.

I made a billion dollars, why do I need to use your advice?

I’ll figure that one out too. But conservation’s different, it’s much more complex ’cause you have to cooperate with other people. And most of these, most of these people made their money not by cooperating, not by diversifying but by taking big risks and it worked for them. So, you know, white Oak is a good example. You know, we have a, the White Oak Conservation Center in Yulee, Florida was, was founded by a guy named Howard Gilman. And he hired John Lucas and he who from the Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx Zoo. And he let John have free reign on what to do. And, and he combined his arts background Gilman with, with animals.

And it was, it is a beautiful place. He sold it to a a where he died and then the, and then the attorneys got, didn’t handle the finances right. So it had to go for sale. Fortunately, the new owner, Mark Walter, who owns the Dodgers and a lot of other stuff, is very committed to conservation. He does it differently, but he’s very committed to conservation. But it’s a different, it’s a, it’s a different type of philosophy. Mark will, will buy properties and manage properties and save things, but he’s not, he’s too busy also to, to, to work collaborative w with others. So, but, but it, it could have been a lot worse.

It’s still an in incredible place, white oak. And, and I think that, that, that one could be a model for the future for private ownership. I’m not sure the one in India is gonna be that way. ’cause I think that, that, that’s a much larger collection of animals. And, and the way that they’re acquiring the animals is, is not always upfront.

The, the, when you use the word rescue sometimes, and you, you, you gotta make sure, is it really a rescue?

Was it a capture? But in the end, he’s got very good facilities. I haven’t been to the one in, in India. I was talking to a colleague that had been there and was really blown away with what he’s doing. But it, if he’s not also helping animals in the wild, I don’t know what his concept, if he’s giving money to conservation, then, then I really don’t think it’s, it’s, it’s then it’s just a personal hobby and a whim that will eventually extinguish himself. When, when the owner dies. Now there are some unusual animals that have been in zoos and you’ve been involved.

What are the, the, the goods and the bads of white tigers?

Like you said, there’s, there was good aspects to it. If you ask Ed Marca, it really, it really helped his zoo. ’cause he would, he would breed them. I, I’m not a fan of white tigers because it’s, it’s, it occurs in nature very rarely, but it usually occurs because of inbreeding. It’s just the color phase that, that we marketed as something very, very unique. When I was at Miami as Curator of mammals, my director came to me and said, I want white tigers in our exhibit. He said, we got a beautiful exhibit, this tiger temple. And I said, okay. I said, then you gotta talk to Ed Morasca.

So I, so I went to, I went to Cincinnati and bought two cups, you know, from the same litter, a male and a female. I think there was $60,000 each at that point, $120,000. My director said, no problem. We put ’em out there. Public loved them, but it generat if it, if the ends can justify the means, you know, then it’s worth doing. I mean, that Tiger Exhibit brought more people in. We made more money. We could give more money to the conservation. It doesn’t always work that way. So I, I was okay with it at that point.

And, but you know, you, you, you draw a line in the sand and you fall on your sword for certain things. But white tigers to me was, you know, it was a phase and now, now you can get ’em almost free. You know, they’re not, they’re not very expensive anymore and they’re very inbred and they’re, there are a lot of problems, but you don’t see them in zoos very often.

But it really helped certain zoos, like Cincinnati, We’re gonna talk about different aspects of conservation, but what do you think was the most difficult concept for zoos to understand and implement regarding their relationship to conservation?

Again, I don’t think zoos thought that they should budget for conservation. They thought it was a nice to have. It’s not, it’s your core mission. It’s almost the word or, or it’s implied that every, almost every mission statement in any major accredited a ZA zoo in this country.

And do they walk the talk? Do they deliver on their promise?

Some do more than others. Some are doing great jobs and, and we’re getting better at it. But I don’t think zoo directors thought that the board was that interested in conservation. The board was interested in, oh, just make this zoo great for our community. It’s all about our community. Well, your community and that community in Africa are, are one and the same in a way, conservation’s about helping people. And if the board understands that community conservation over, over in Africa will, will help save animals by, by helping people giving first, giving them education, clean water, you know, solar power, and then, then they’ll help protect the animals. But if you just fence it off and sit and say, stay out, that’s not gonna work. So then I think boards under started to understand too that, hey, we’re a conservation organization.

We’re not just a, a zoo for the, for the public here. We have, we have a much broader, more encompassing mission. And that, and those boards that get that, because the, the director answers to the board, if the, if you get the board to, to support you, you can do a lot. That’s, that was the key in Houston. I had a board that were already there. They just got even more. We went to Africa with them a lot, mostly Africa. And they, they understood that conservation is something that’s part of our budget. It’s part, and the people that we support come to the zoo, the, the, the, the field biologists.

It’s part of one family. We’re all one family. And if you can do that family approach, I call it the one team approach. There’s the one plan approach that everybody talks about that, you know, that’s, that’s about working together too. But the one team approach is everybody’s on the same team, whether they’re at your facility or they’re on the front lines in conservation or your board member, you keep everybody involved.

Did you feel that the people who worked at the Houston Zoo and, and possibly Disney, but certainly the Houston Zoo from the groundskeeper up understood the mission of the zoo At Houston?

Yes, and it got even better after I left because they just, we, we had an incredible conservation team. We, we, a lot of times you’ll send animal people over on a conservation project, but we were able to send technical people over sometimes to help with websites. We could send maintenance people over to help sometimes, you know, with projects in a community that, that was close to animals. We were trying to save everybody at the zoo. They even had it on their t-shirts, ask us how we’re saving animals in the wild. And we had days where they just wore the, everybody, everybody wore that shirt. You just, it wasn’t just an animal department exclusive. Everybody, everybody understood it or appreciated it.

And they didn’t all know how to answer the questions to the public the same way. But they knew who to go to. So a a a lot of people get more pride for working for the zoo because now they’re working for something that’s making a difference and they can brag about that to their family. I think it helps with HR with retention, because now you, you are working for an organization that really makes you feel good about what you’re doing. And you’re not just punching it, punching a time clock to get some money so you can sit home and watch football at night, you know, in the, on the weekends. Now you’ve said this, I assume you’ve said it many times, you can’t run a zoo today without conservation. I don’t know how you can have a double standard and have a mission statement that says that you are connecting people to the wild and you’re saving animals and habitats without, without doing, without addressing your mission. If that’s your core mission, you have to deliver on that.

And you have to get better every year. Like I said, there’s no finish line. The more you do, the more you can do, the more you’re gonna have to do.

I, how do you justify a zoo to, to an educated public?

If you’re not helping animals in the wild and you’re just having a, you know, what we call a living museum, I guess, you know, to me maybe that’s just me and a few people, but there’s no future in zoos if we don’t connect it better to saving habitats animals and working with people in those communities. I mean, we’re, we’re much, it’s almost, it’s, it is almost like missionary work in a way. You know, we, we, we go, we have to go out, we help. If we help the people, they’ll help the animals. We can’t just go directly from helping the animals without and ignoring the community. So conservation to me is the foundation, is gonna be the foundation of, of, if we don’t have foundation, I don’t, I just don’t see how you justify having, having animals in, in, in artificial habitats in this country, no matter how good they are. If they, if if they’re going extinct in the wild and you’re singing their praises at your zoo, you gotta prove that you’re, that, that, that, that you’re doing, that you’re part of that story. You’re not just writing a check.

If you just write a check, you can brag about, oh yeah, we gave a million dollars to conservation this year. But it’s the quality of what you do. It has to be part of your family, your story. If you do that, I think you’re gonna have a much better zoo. The the caveat is you can’t sacrifice fun. You better make sure that, that the guest that comes to the zoo has fun.

And that, and fun isn’t like, oh, do you know what we did in the wild yesterday?

You know, or, or last year. No, wait on that. Go to their heart first. You know, get them to have fun at that zoo and, and the animals have to earn their keep. I think that’s a question you were gonna ask me too. I mean, that doesn’t mean we’re, you know, we’re making them be suburban or anything. But, but yeah, if, if, if there’s a win-win here, our drafts love to be fed. So let the keep let the, the guests feed ’em. You don’t always have to have the keepers of the animal care specialists feed them. And, and there’s, and the more enrichment you do, the more you get people involved.

I mean, kids sometimes just want to get up early and shovel and shovel the, the, the, you know, the feces with the, the animal poop with the, with the keepers. They just love doing that. So I think it’s all part of the, you know, the animals, animals can’t be forced to do something. But if you give them free choice and, and you have this rapport with them, some keepers think they just should stay as wild as possible. No, they’re in a zoo. They have to be. They, the more they’re used to people, the more calm they’re gonna be. So, so I’m a big proponent of if you do it right and the right, and I I call it enrichment, you know, not training because it’s stuff that we know that animals normally wanna do. And you just let you let the, the audience, the audience, the, the guests help you do it.

And I think that in that way, the animals do earn their, keep The animals are ambassadors. We, we always talk about that. But they’re real life ambassadors that will draw your attention to their plight in the wild. And, and giraffes and rhinos, which I have, are two of the most charismatic animals. And they have great, great, they have very inspiring conservation stories.

Do you think every animal in a zoo collection should have a component in the wild of conservation? Every exhibit?

Yeah. Metaphorically. Yes. I, I think that, I mean, if you, if you’ve got a, if you’ve got a frog, if you’ve got frogs and you’re doing something, you, you can do something local with local frog populations. It doesn’t have to be that species. It could just be that ecosystem or that habitat the animal came from. But it, it is just a more complete story to, to say again, we’re, we’re not these little bubbles, you know, these little freak show menagerie anymore. You know, we’re collaborating in, in a much bigger way. And if you don’t do that, there’s, there’s no, the story gets very, very dicey in terms of delivering it to the public. Even if the public doesn’t support it.

They want, they wanna make sure that their zoo is, is, is making a difference and, and, and making a difference in their community.

Again, why am I in the business?

’cause I went to the Bronx Zoo, I went to the American Museum of Natural History. I still have this postcard that I brought back in second grade of this gorilla in the diorama, the ley hole of mammals. And, you know, little did I know, he went out there and shot the whole family, you know, and stuffed them, you know, he must have shot a lot more. But it inspired me because I saw this and I looked at the, the, the, the, the, you know, the diorama behind it. And I said, I want to go to Africa. And I think that really, you know, we, we haven’t talked about my history, but I was in semi We will. Yeah. So, so we’ll get on that. But, but I think that all back then, it didn’t take a lot to, to push my buttons.

But today there’s a lot more competition out there with technology and other, you know, OO other venues that provide a lot, maybe more exciting type of thrills. But di Disney is, Disney has that combination. Now they have that Pandora, that avatar ride that is incredible. But, but people still appreciate the safari at the same time. But it’s, I think time will tell, you know what that balance, what that balance should be. Just a quote that somebody told me that I listened to in lecture one time, Sylvia Earl said, I’m big on pictures.

It it, you know, a picture, what does it say?

A, a picture’s worth a thousand words. Right?

Something like that. Right? Yeah. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, an experience is worth a thousand pictures. So yeah. So you gotta get ’em out there. We talked about white oak and, and their large space, which they have.

Do you think space continues to be a problem for zoos and aquariums?

Let’s talk about space. Quality of space is, is different than the amount of space animals need, need space. But certain animals, if the, like, you could give one chimpanzee and acres of land, but if you give him a half an acre with a family, he’s gonna be a lot happier. Right. So there’s, there’s difference in the, in the quality of that space. Yes. I think most zoos are in cities and their, and their landlocked that they don’t have the space. So that’s why their collections are getting different. And they’re gonna focus, like if you want elephants and you’re in a small zoo, zoo, then you’re gonna have, half your zoo is gonna be an elephant habitat or, or don’t have ’em. And climate is, is is also a factor there.

If you’re in the northern climate, you might wanna focus on animals that do better in, in cold weather and don’t suffer in the summer. So I, yeah, space can be a problem. But what I would do with space is I would do something like get couple of 20,000, 50,000 acre properties in southern states and have zoos contribute to that. And that’s where you manage, that’s where you manage. One could be, they could be for hoofstock, they could be for carnivores, they could be for great apes. Kind of like the National Elephant Center. That didn’t work. But, but it, it was a good idea too late. But I think if we all contributed to having these giant ranches, we, we could eliminate a, a lot of the, the space issues that we have because not breeding animals that need to be bred.

And one of the biggest enrichment you can have from mammals, we’re talking mostly and birds is, is is having them breed and take care of their young. We’re not doing it just so we can have a baby to show the public. That’s nice too. But it really is important for animals to reproduce. That’s, that’s what they do biologically. And when you start screwing around with that, it can cause problems.

You mentioned and something we’re gonna touch on, why didn’t the American Zoo Association or any organization, why weren’t they successful in setting up a while ago?

A national elephant breeding center?

I wish Mark Reed was here. ’cause we were both chairs of that National Elephant Center initiative for many years. It was probably our biggest disappointment. We, if we had done it earlier, mark would agree, when there was a need to place elephants, we, we instead the animal rights people beat us to it. And they both, and they’d have these sanctuaries that they use. One, one of them now is a ZA accredited that the one in Tennessee. But sometimes we wait too long and then we become reactive and it’s not the right time. It was just not the right time.

We would’ve had more elephants to put in. There were a lot of issues about, we had a, we finally had a good location in Florida, but then we didn’t, we just didn’t have the right people running it. Talked about conservation wild.

Is there still a wild out there or have the majority of wild spaces kind of been turned into managed wild zoos?

Oh, I think there’s still wild out there for, I if you’re talking about charismatic land mammals, that, that, that’s where, that’s where it gets tricky because elephants, lions, tigers, bears wolves. Wolves for instance, you know, we put ’em, we put ’em back, but the habitat’s much smaller and it’s fragmented. So, you know, if, if you’re talking killer whales, orcas, there’s plenty of wild left for those guys. But it is shrinking and the elephant in the room is human population. It always is. No matter what we do, we have 8 billion people on this planet and they all wanna have the same standard of living. They don’t even come close, at least most of that population. What EO Wilson say, you need four more planets like Earth to bring everybody up to the standard of living that we have in, in, in the United States. Pretty much. So it, it, it, it, the wild is changing.

It is gonna be more managed by people because humans are now the key factor in the, in the future evolution of, of the environment. We have the biggest impact on, on what’s going on in the, on the planet. And, and unfortunately, I don’t think most people, a lot of people don’t will argue that, but it’s an argument that, you know, by the time they realize they’re wrong, it may be too late. So I think that spa, we do have to, we do have to play God to some degree and manage some areas, but if we now we’re doing these corridors, you know, between habitats and I think that’s, that it’s a little, it’s a little late in the game because there’s a lot of communities popping up now. But if you can, if you, if if we can do these, you know, Carters or land bridges and things over highways, I think what we’re doing is buying time until we can find a better solution. I, I talked to Bill Conway and I used to always talk about What we’re doing now is, is helping, but we we’re doing something good over here, but over here something bigger is and worse is happening. So all we can do is have hope that, that we can, some of these models will then become copied and, and, and duplicate it so that we will have more hope and, and more successes in the wild. But I think, I know we have to do something with human population.

A lot of that is about liberating women and educating women in other countries. So they don’t just keep popping out babies. They don’t want to do that either. But sometimes they don’t have a choice, you know, that, that gets into politics, religion, you know, family planning. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s beyond the scope of conservation, but it’s not because it is the elephant in the room. If we, if we keep increasing the human population, there’s, I just, there’s not gonna be room for everything else. And we’re also gonna have other, you know, global warming. Climate change is definitely caused by, it’s, it’s, it’s a cycle that’s not gonna, it is not gonna repeat itself.

It’s just gonna keep getting worse in the future unless we can be a pro. Are we a proactive species? I don’t think so. I think most people take the money and run right now. That’s, that’s, that’s the, that’s the challenge we have. That’s, that’s what politicians do. They only wanna look good right now. They don’t really care about the future. They’ll let the next guy come in and clean up the mess.

And, and if, if we have that attitude, if we’re not, if we’re not proactive, I use that word a lot. I don’t think there’s hope for the human race. Isn’t that a dismal Well, it’s Philosophy In the wild then.

How successful would you say zoo and or aquariums have been in achieving the reintroduction of species back into the wild?

I think we cite, you know, the, the few exceptions that work, bison definitely worked, right?

That was, we brought back the bison. We al well it was almost extinct. The condor, the the black-footed ferret the wolf in some cases. Although now, now that now once you get successful, then you get too successful. And now, and now you have that, you know, wildlife conflict with people again. There, there are some great examples of, with golden lion tamarinds with Arabian orx, hond ORs, the desert antelopes. But it’s tough to do because there’s not, the habitat’s not left anymore or, or it’s not protected and you can’t, like, and carnivores is, is really difficult. You can’t put lions back into a habitat where there’s other wild lions.

The a wild lion would just eat, its a zoo borne lion wouldn’t, wouldn’t have a chance in, in a situation like that. So it’s, it’s very complex, but it’s something we should do. It, it’s definitely, I don’t want it to become an expectation that, that that, that that’s a zoo’s sole responsibility. I think it’s better to save the habitat and save the animals in it then to get to the point where you gotta bring zoo animals back in. And then the zoo animals can be questionable in terms of their pedigrees. And they may be a mixed subspecies, you know, there’s the lumpers and the splitters out there, you know, we can’t put a zoo animal back. We don’t know. It’s, its background, you know, DNA and genetics gets into it too. But I think reintroduction it, some of those projects are really worthwhile to do.

But again, let’s, let’s protect the habitat so we don’t get to that point that we have to keep doing this. Now you’ve worked within a ZA American Zoo Association organization.

You’ve worked with them, has their selection criteria to decide which animals become part of the survival species program Met with what you envisioned?

I don’t know. It it, it changes so much. You have a lot of people that rely on genetics and inbreeding more than, I mean, inbreeding goes on in the wild sometimes too. It’s, so, I, I think sometimes we get too obsessed with certain elements. Everything’s a tool in the toolbox. You don’t use one tool more than another. So how sometimes we analyze or overanalyze populations too much and, and sometimes we have to when there’s only a few animals left. But, but I don’t believe in having a subspecies of animal where there’s only a few and you just keep reading them because you won’t outcross them with a, a another, a related subspecies that, you know, in, in, in the past, maybe those two species did overlap populations because we had a lot of zones of integration. We called it with large mammals.

Like giraffes is a good one. You know, they keep trying to say if there’s four species and, and seven subspecies, there’s seven species and few subspecies. You know, to me the, that, that, that’s a technicality that in the end when we’re down to just a few animals, we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna use those animals. And the habitat changes too. So it’s such a complex question, but I don’t, but I, it shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t be directed solely by people working on a computer and looking at breeding coefficients. There needs to be some real field people out there, you know, in, in, in that equation talking about what, what we’re selecting and what species. I don’t, I didn’t agree with tapers in that we have two, two species of the four species of tapers that a ZA will recognize as, and the other two, they said we, the mountain taper and the Brazilian taper one’s too rare and one, there’s enough. So we don’t deal with them.

So they’re in the private sector now. And that gets complicated because it sounds like, oh, well we only care about these species and we don’t care about these. When you start playing triage, you get in trouble. But then again, sometimes it’s necessary.

What would you say has been the greatest areas of development that you’ve seen in the way zoos have interpreted their collections to their visitors?

Again, we used to brag years ago about having species from every species, you know, the, the encyclopedia of, of, of, of species. Nowadays it’s more about zoo geographic. So animals from a certain certain area are in one section of the zoo and another section. I mean, that’s fine. I don’t think the public gets that or cares that much, but, but there’s definitely been a change in more is better. It’s now it’s about quality again, of what you have there. I I do have people that come to long named man and says, you only have two species, you know, you’re gonna get more. I said, I might get one or two, but it’s not about the number of species, it’s about the quality of the experience you have with each species.

So you get to know them better. And, and, and that, that works for what I’m doing, but I’m not so sure the general public is, is is there yet the, the the, we, we have a lot of history. I wish we could change the name zoo. I, I wish the definition could change at least. I, I like to say zoological park, it’s pretty close. But, but I also, I don’t even call what, what I do a zoo, I call it a conservation park because I only, I only developed it, I only built it so that I could raise money to save animals in the wild. That that’s, that’s why I did it. I, or else I could have set around and with my investments and wrote checks, you know, and did little endowments and stuff.

Instead, I’m doing something that is a model that will eventually generate more funds than I could ever generate in my lifetime. So I think that that’s the, you know, that that’s the change in, in attitudes of most zoos is that, you know, less species. Not, not, not dramatically less, but, but with better stories and better immersion effects and better conservation, I think will, will also add to the satisfaction of the guest as it is fun. It’s gonna be more rewarding and more inspiring if that’s fun, that’s great. But I think they’re, you know, I can’t, you can’t, you can’t change an audience overnight. They have certain expectations. Well, and, and, and you’ve kind of touched on it in 2017 in Time Magazine, you said if you cannot connect every single exhibit to something in the wild, then you shouldn’t build it. That’s back to conservation.

What I’m meaning is, if if you’re not making, if you’re not every year doing something to help people and, and animals in remote communities save the habitat for the animals, then I, I I, I don’t, I I can’t justify a zoo that is just, that just, you know, green washes and, and, and says, oh well, you know, we’re breeding these animals so someday they can go back in the wild and be reintroduced. That was, that was like our battle cry 50 years ago. We’re breeding endangered species to put them back in the wild. That is very deceptive. And if we have to get to that point, then, then we, then we failed at our job in protecting them to begin with. So yes, if you’re not, if you’re not doing good conservation and doing it consistently every year and growing it, then I wouldn’t then I don’t, I don’t, I don’t respect that zoo. You, you talked about the name zoo.

When you were director of the Houston Zoo, did you ever contemplate trying to change the name?

No, not after I saw what Bill Conway went through in the Bronx. What, what’d they call that Species conservation center or something there, there was a cartoon in the New Yorker where these two gorillas are behind bars at the Central Park Zoo. And one looks at the other and says, well, at least we’re not in a zoo anymore. ’cause they had the new name up there. It doesn’t, the name game doesn’t always work, but the definition of the name needs to change. You know, instead of, you know, a place to go where you see captive animals in captivity or whatever, is a place where you go to learn about the care of animals and how, and how you can help save them in the wild.

And as we continue to talk about conservation, what worries you about it, but what gives you hope?

What worries me is the politics and the governments that make these decisions, you know, probably isolated from, from the communities that are there, I think. And, and politics doesn’t seem to, it’s not a long term conservation’s, long term commitment. Political, you know, political stuff is not, or even corporations, you know, you, you, you’ll you’ll get a, a CEO in that says, oh, we don’t have to do r and d research and development anymore. You know, and we’ll save money. Then the next guy comes in and says, we got, we have no pipeline now with drugs or, or stuff to do.

What, what are we gonna do now?

You know, you gotta be innovative. So I, I think that’s the ch the challenge, the, the what I see, I see that, I see the, the, the benefit is that people are seeing the results of long-term thinking. The the triple bottom line approach, which is a, is a, is a book and a term where it’s not just, you know, it, it, it’s not just about money and it it’s also about social responsibility. It’s not just about the profit line, but social responsibility is another, you know, euphemism for conservation or caring or doing, doing something good besides, you know, making, making that, you know, making your, your organization richer every year and your share and your shareholders.

So I, I think that there is a growing subset of people and I think the, the generation Z of the millennials do ask those questions that we never asked in the, in the past, well this is nice, there’s this habitat, but what are you doing for these animals in the wild?

I think that question gets asked more now than it has in the past. And I think that, I think the pressure from the outside, from outside has changed zoos a lot. Which is, again, reactive, then proactive, I think it was the guy from GM said something, when the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is in sight. So if the rate of change on the inside is first, you’re proactive, then, then you got a chance of surviving. Now you talked about you’ve been to Africa many times.

How important do you believe tourism in Africa is to protect species? Long term, Short term?

It’s a great idea. Long term. If you have too many people that go over to Africa and they’re all over the place, you’re gonna destroy the, everything you’re trying to save. So you’re gonna limit the amount of tourism. But, but, but I lead tours all the time. I’ve been to Africa over 60 times now. Half of those have been leading tours. And I see the change in those communities appreciate so much that we’re over there. ’cause you know, we’re spending money and, and, and so one person working in lodge is supporting, you know, a family of 10 or 20.

So it’s very important for that reason. It’s important. ’cause now they realize that they have a sustainable, you know, rather than poaching. And some of these guys were poachers before and now they’re, now they’re now they’re helping to save the animals because, because there’s a direct connection with, they’re getting some of the money. It’s not all going to the tour operator. So ecotourism is very, very important, but it’s not, it’s, it’s not a long-term solution that, ’cause we can’t send everybody over to Africa. And if we did that then, then there’d be no Africa. There’d be no wildlife left. So again, it’s, it, it, I’ve seen it change the lives.

I’ve seen people I’ve taken to Africa. The husband goes, well, my wife wanted to go. I didn’t really wanna go on this trip. And afterwards, he’s like a kid in a camp. He’s just, he’s, he just, he, he’s thanking me. This was the greatest trip I’ve ever been on. You know, when, when you see when, when, when the lion’s walking right by your open Land Rover. I said, just don’t get outta the Land Rover and you’re gonna be fine.

And, and, but I wish, I wish I could do that. I wish we could do that for every person in this country. The country would be a lot better off, but that’s not gonna happen. But you’ve been involved in trying to put together exhibits and exhibit design in a number of places.

How did you try and achieve what I would call a wow impact in exhibit design?

Well, being a chair of the exhibits award committee and a CA for many years, we had to, we got all the applications in and we, we looked at exhibit design and there we had a lot of different criteria for what makes a good exhibit. But in the end it’s, it’s people come out of there and they had a good time.

How do you measure the smile on a kid’s face?

I don’t, we can’t quantify that. But that if that smile leads to something like it did for me or some other children, then, then it’s not anecdotal, but, but it’s also not something you can easily measure. So the wow factor is the animals are active to some degree, or, or you’ve, you, you see something that you, you, you don’t, you wanna make the, the exhibit or the habitat naturalistic, but not so naturalistic that the animal’s hiding all the time. So you put the shade in front of the exhibit. Most people have moats where the animals can, where the shade is. They don’t put the shade in the right place. They don’t put the feeders in the right place. They don’t have the right combination of animals.

They don’t have the right combination of vegetation. There’s so many things wrong with, with habitats. Don’t get me started. I go to a habitat. I say, oh, if you just did this and this, you know, or you put the keeper or you rotate animals. Yeah. You know, don’t keep the same animals out. Or if it’s, if it’s, if it’s, if it’s a, if there’s suffering from the heat, then then you have an indoor area where you can see the animals too. There’s so much more we can do to, to solve this. And sometimes the keepers, I remember going to Russia years ago in the, the, the St.

Petersburg Zoo, that enclosures were so small, but the keepers took such good care of those animals that they were part of the animal’s life that, that, that, that helped. But if the highlight of the animal’s day is to see their keeper and be fed, then you’re doing something wrong too. The highlight of their day should be the whole day that they can interact with other animals and their habitat. It shouldn’t be that they’re just waiting at the door to be fed. ’cause So that’s a whole enrichment, you know, ar argument. But it’s, it’s exhibit design or habitat design. I wouldn’t spend millions of dollars on rock work, but I I, at Disney, they did that. I, and then they had the vegetation.

So within three years you couldn’t even see the rock work, the vegetation covered.

I said, why, why, why did we put the rock bar?

’cause it had to look good on day one. I said, well then we should have brought more vines in on day one. But, Well, but you’ve seen these different exhibits. You’ve been, you know, intimately involved.

Have you seen this evolution of how zoo exhibits are approached?

What has been, in your opinion, the evolution of zoo exhibits?

Well, definitely there’s more planning involved and there’s more people involved in the planning. It used to be the, it used to be the curator said, oh, I like that. That’s my favorite animal. Let’s just put, I don’t care what the public thinks that, you know, I like prairie dogs or you know, or, or you know, whatever. And so you had a collection of animals that only the staff liked. Sometimes it worked for the public. Now it’s not like that. Now we, now we do focus groups. Now we ask the public what they want to see.

We bring architects in that are zoo architects that know what they’re doing. Not architects that just build these monuments to themselves, you know, with, with no source of budget. So the planning process is much more strategic, much more comprehensive. And it includes the animal care staff. It makes it more, much more expensive. But in the long run, it makes for a better exhibit. ’cause the three things you have to, the three things about a good exhibit has to be great for the animal, has to be easy for the keeper to care for. And it has to be for the public.

It has to be an engaging exhibit. If you can do all three of those things, you’ve got a pretty good habitat. We had talked about national parks and the goods and the bads and why they were or were not working.

Why do you think more zoos don’t have sister zoo relationships?

’cause they don’t know what that means. Sometimes some sister zoos, the, the zoos aren’t equal. Usually the, the, the, the rich zoo is in the United States and the sister zoo is in some developing country, and then they expect you to, you know, maybe fund the whole zoo. So it’s, some of it’s just very symbolic. Also, I think it’s, it’s not a bad idea, but, but eventually you have to have a program where your sister zoo is elevated to the same level as your zoo without you having to subsidize it all the time. Because again, then we come down to a money issue. I, it works again, it works because of relationships. And if those relationships change over time, then it doesn’t work.

I mean, you, you, you just can’t clone the, the same zoo director every time. But, but he or she has to build into, you know, their legacy. A continuity. I see it all the time with the new, the new person comes in and, and, and it’s amazing how they think. The old person knew nothing. I was, I was in a Disney conference one time with the head of Imagineering and, and, and they brought this new guy in. I forget what he, what expertise it was. And he says, okay, this new guy is so good.

And, and then why did we have, how, how come the old guy was so bad?

What, what was wrong with the old?

Why didn’t you, why didn’t you fix this before?

You know, but, but you gotta be careful because you can’t throw somebody under the bus when you don’t know what, what they, the, the variables, the constraints that they had to deal with. When I left Disney, they said, you built holding areas too small. I said, I built them as big as I could because they told me that I didn’t have any more money. We did have more money, but they did, they lied to me. But, so, so we could have, we could have had bigger holding. But I said, but now you can do that now. Okay, I did the best I could, but, but don’t throw the, the guy under the bus before you, unless they really deserve it. But, but understand what the constraints they had and, and see if you can change that to make, to make it to, to, you’ve gotta grow.

Like Lee Eke came after me and he made that zoo incredible. The Houston Zoo. ’cause ’cause we, we built a platform for him and we had donor base, but then Lee took it to the next level and that, that’s what you want.

Now you had alluded before, how important is it for the zoo director to make rounds?

I think it’s important, first of all, for their own psyche. If you’re gonna sit in your desk all the time and just be in meetings all the time and worry about things, you are gonna get depressed. You’re not gonna enjoy your job. Nobody sees you. No. You know, you, you’re, you, you’ve gotta get out there and, and, and talk to and talk and not just superficial stuff. You, so you, you’ve got, you’ve gotta make an effort, especially the, the non-Animal Zoo directors. I did it a lot. But I, but, but I also had other people. I sometimes I got in trouble. If you do it too much. I’ve seen zoo directors get fired because they, they, they, they spent too much time going on trips and, and, and going to see projects.

And they weren’t, they weren’t, the board didn’t think they were at the zoo enough. So you have to be, it’s a, it’s a balance. And I’ve seen zoo directors that do a good job and then the new chair, chairman of the board comes in and says, I don’t like what you’re doing. You know? So the continuity is not there. And the only way the continuity can be there is if everybody’s on the same page about conservation and animal care. You know, it is care and conservation. You gotta, if you saw if, if, if you’re addressing those two things, all the other stuff, will you, you gotta build on that. And leadership is, is a tricky issue.

And, and being a good leader means NBWA management by walking around. You’ve said the difficulty is always the people, not the animals.

What’d you mean?

I’ve had so many people come up and says, wow, you know, you, you’ve, you’ve worked with all these animals.

What, what was the most challenging animal?

I said, the human. I said, I said, the animals aren’t always looking to change. They’re creatures of habit. Don’t change too much. You know, unless it’s for the good, you know. But, but people, the more you give ’em, the more they want. Sometimes the, when you have 400 people at the Houston Zoo, every week somebody did something really stupid.

And you go, why, why did you do that?

You know, you came in late 10 times, we’ve warned you now you come in late and now you’re gonna be fired because you just, it just doesn’t sink in. So dealing with people as, as you get promoted to more supervisory positions, you get more alienated from the animals and you get more into meetings and you get, and it, it doesn’t become as fun.

I I think many of my colleagues that are still directors, if I say, are you having fun right now?

They don’t know how to answer that. We talked about animal rights, animal welfare.

Do you think zoos and aquariums need to, are more involved with animal welfare as a group?

Definitely. So animal wellbeing is a, I guess is the term that they use now. But, you know, Terry Maple was a big, he led the charge on that a lot. I think sometimes we, we make assumptions about animals though. Like we handle them with kit gloves and we just, we, we, like I said before, they wanna keep ’em as wild as possible, but that, that adds more stress to the animal when you have to, you know, when you have to examine it or you have to move it. So, so it’s a, it it’s, it, it’s tricky to take good care of an animal without overdoing it so that when it does hit a stressful situation, it doesn’t just drop dead on you or break it or run into the fence and break its neck. You know, we’ve all seen that happen too. So you have to expose them to, in the wild, they’re exposed, you know, there’s ups and downs. It’s just like raising a kid.

Do you just reward the kid every time for whatever they do?

Do you give it a, a trophy even when it comes in last, you know, you, you gotta exper you’ve gotta experience both, you know, the, the highs and the lows of life. And I don’t know how you do that with animal welfare. ’cause animal welfare is just always give the, just treat the animal. Like it’s, you know, it, it’s a VIP you know, it, it, they, they then become animals that are not really a, a cat becomes a kitten instead of a, a tiger. Because now it’s just so domesticated. So I think that sounds maybe a, a little bit like non, not so much animal welfare, but it, I think the, the key is the, the, the animal care specialists, the keepers that work with the animals can make, make the biggest difference with the, with the animals. You’ve worked in different places with different cultures.

Is there, what do you think is the most efficient way to deal with elected officials and municipal bureaucrats in order to develop and manage the zoo today?

Invite, did You have to do it at Disney?

Oh, in, oh no, it, well, Disney, you had higher ups that did that kind of stuff. You know, if they had to meet with the mayor, sometimes we have, we’d have them come out the, the local mayor and stuff. But you bring them to your facility and you show them what you’re doing and you bring ’em behind the scenes or you bring ’em, you give ’em special, it’s, it’s very hard for them to criticize a zoo. I mean, not Disney. I’m talking about the municipal zoos. The zoo is at the end of the alphabet in more ways than one. Right? When, when, when they’re public funded, the, the Houston Zoo had issues with the mayors and, and finally they brought the mayor came out and spent time with them and then became a big support. ’cause the mayor realized, hey, I’m not just, I’m not just giving, we’re not just giving money to take care of animals. This zoo is this incredible melting pot of diversity of people coming in from all walks of life and all levels of the economy.

It’s really good for our city. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a community treasure.

It’s not that, why should we give money to animals when we got people starving over here?

No, it’s not that comparison. That’s not what a zoo is about. A zoo is about, you know, inspiring, enlightening people and giving hope. And, and once you bring those politicians out, most of them will, will become your, you know, they’ll be, they’ll become your supporters rather than your detractors.

So as you look back on it now, curiously, is there a difference in the culture between a government or municipal type zoo and a private zoo and the corporate zoo such as Disney? Was there a different culture?

Well, the, it, it, I don’t know the, if it’s a different culture or it’s just a different structure and way of doing business. You have non-profit and for-profit, I would put it in those terms. They’re, they, they act non-profits are not gonna be successful unless they run like a for-profit, first of all. So, so, so there’s a lot of commonalities. Again, common denominators. What, what di what Disney was doing, di Disney is to make money for their shareholders, but they also have that social responsibility part that we talked about before. The triple bottom line that Disney really gets as a company that you know that it’s about their staff, it’s about the community and giving back to the community. Not just bringing people to, to the parks, but having that lasting impression.

75% of the people that come to Walt Disney World are return visits. So they spend a lot of time on that. They’re coming back for a reason. You know, they’re, they’re having fun, but they’re also, they also know that it’s, it, it that just by, just by coming to a zoo, we have a sign up at Houston and other zoos. Thank you for coming. Your visit today has helped us save animals in the wild. Just by, you know, just, just making them feel that, that, that, that, that, that they’ve helped. And then maybe they can do some more the culture between Disney and a municipal zoo and, and more of a privatized zoo, which is more the norm now. You know, the ones that are run by boards but owned by the city.

But the city doesn’t run ’em, the city is not set up to run zoos anymore. Maybe it, it was, it was the best way to do it 50 years ago, but now it’s, it’s certainly not the model for the future. The, that’s why all these zoos, we’ve privatized the Houston Zoo in 2002. You know, Denver came before us and, and then after us was Dallas, new Orleans and Atlanta were the first two I think that really, they, they waited till the zoo was almost had to close. They were so bad. And, and, and they played that card that, that, that’s a dangerous card to play. You, you wait till it gets that bad. But, but Houston didn’t do it that way and it, it, it, it laid the foundation so that now there’s no way that zoo, the zoo would be as popular as good a facility if we didn’t privatize the zoo back then. It, it, the, the, it was just way too, it was way too limited that the, that you, you did it at Lincoln Park.

The, the key was, you mean you’re gonna charge more to come in?

Yes, we’re gonna charge you more to come in, but you’re gonna have a better experience. That was, that was the, that was the hard pill to swallow. ’cause when I came to the Houston Zoo, it was $2 and 50 cents for an adult and 50 cents for a kid. So for $3, you, you and your, your kid could come to the zoo. Now it’s, you know, over $20. But they’re not complaining. But they were complaining when they, when they were told that to begin with. They said, we went from, we went to $5 when we privatized. And, and, and zoos talk a lot about education as they should.

Would you say education is, is doing good, particularly in boosting the image of zoos among the public when you have people who are against zoos?

It depends on the type of education and the education people, we tend to focus in zoos on mo Most, a lot of the education is, is younger, younger age kids. And I don’t think we do enough for adults and I, because adults are the, are the ones that are making the decisions right now. And if they don’t make the right decisions, the kids aren’t gonna have a lot to work with when, when they get older. So I think education is not my area of expertise because to me, again, the way I educate is we don’t have one graphic at the, at, at, at longneck manner because we have a one-to-one ratio of, of animals to keepers. And we, and we limit the number of people. We only have 10 people on a tour. So everybody that comes interacts directly for the whole time they’re there with an animal care specialist, you can’t do that at the Lincoln Parks Zoo. You can’t do that when you have 3 million people. Right.

So it’s different. And so if you could, the way I would educate is you have, you have that animal person, you know, with, with every guest that comes in and tells those stories and brings ’em back and do does stuff. But, but you can’t do that at Disney either. They say they personalize the experience, but it’s not, not not to the level that I’m talking about. So education obviously is so important, but I, I like to call it conservation education. I think that the two words get separated, but I think they, they, those departments need to be together as one department and not, and not have, because you end up with silos sometimes between educators and keepers. And then the educators are not, are not allowed to go in the behind the scenes because they’re not animal people. And you get, and you get all these personality traits, but you know, it’s one team again. And they need to respect each other and, and, and have some synergy between the departments to maximize the, the impact on the guests.

They, you gotta, you gotta inspire that guest, motivate those guests so that they just don’t go away. Some of them will anyway, just go away with some nice pictures. Statistics, safe families are very big in coming to zoos.

What did you want families and their kids to feel when they had left your zoo?

That they want to come back. Because, Because they not only had a good time, but they learned something that their children repeated to them and then they maybe went to the library and took out a book. God, they read a book and instead of looked at the computer screen, you know, or they Googled something because something stimulated them, interested them at the zoo so that, so the parents, and we have parents that have said that we brought our kids back. The zoo changes their lives and their, you know, their future career options. We’re not gonna, the goal is not to make everybody that comes to the zoo, you know, an animal, a keeper or, or, or a conservationist, but at least get them to understand how important it is that they support, they support other people that do that. So families come back because their, their, their, the whole family enjoyed the zoo more than just the fact that it was a nice family outing. If they, obviously that’s, they, they come and the cultures are different too. Hispanic cultures, they come in, big families and they have picnics and they do a lot of stuff.

But, but if, if they, if if we have the right messages out there and we’re delivering the right messages to the right audience, then I think it makes, it makes a difference. Families are probably, you know, what we focus on most at zoos, but when you look at some of the demographics, it’s not, it’s usually two adults to one child is, is a ratio in a lot of zoos, you would think there’s more kids, but quite often there’s a lot of adults, more adults that come to the zoo than kids. You had a large organization behind you in, in Disney, but you had the privatized now, but Municipal Zoo in Houston.

Any advice for the neophyte Zoo director about the importance of marketing zoos?

You have to have a good product if you’re gonna market your zoo. You don’t, don’t, don’t say things that are a nice to have. If you’re not doing it before you do the marketing, make sure you got the substance behind the image. If you don’t have the substance behind the image, you’re gonna get in trouble with marketing and marketing nowadays is all this digital stuff. And, and, and, and all, they have all these terms that I don’t, I don’t even know the definitions, but organic marketing is very important. And organic is that, you know, they just, that you, you’re not, they didn’t, you didn’t reach them by some kind of, you know, gimmick or something, or, or, or discount. But that, but that they heard word of mouth that, Hey, that, that place Longneck manner was incredible. You gotta go there. We get that all the time.

You know, and that’s, that’s more organic. And so I think you get, you, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna market a product, you wanna make sure that the product, that’s your marketing is a quality product. And sometimes I think marketing departments go a little, they’re a little overboard on saying things like, oh, you know, animals roam free. It’s like a piece of Africa. Be careful how you market the zoo. Yes. It’s, it’s, it’s, it, it is, it is, it is a precursor to Africa, but it doesn’t replace Africa. You know, the animals aren’t really free roaming, but they do have a lot of space. But, you know, you, you marketing, it’s usually the consultants that come in.

I remember we came to Chicago for two days straight with Leo Burnett, big advertising agency. I came with all, I was the lowest ranking person at Disney in, in that committee. Michael Nigel didn’t come, but all the top executives for two days.

We sat there. What is Disney Animal Kingdom gonna be?

This is before it was built. Joe Roadie was in there. We’re all writing down stuff, you know, you know, and, and we, it’s definitely not a zoo, it’s a theme park. Because we had real imaginary and extinct animals. We had three lands and stuff. And just two top executives were discussing if Goofy was really a dog or not. I mean, it was, it was a pretty, it was a, they, they’d been at Disney for a long time and nobody knew who Goofy, what Goofy really was. I don’t know who, I think he was a dog. Pluto was a dog. But anyway, I, I think that marketing, those, those exercises were good.

As long as you do it beforehand and you’re all on the same page.

How you gonna, how you gonna market?

How you gonna market Disney’s Animal Kingdom?

Because it was not only it, it was something very different than Disney did. I mean, now you had animals that were gonna die and you’re gonna make them celebrities and famous, and then they were gonna die.

And how are you gonna explain that?

Pursue that, how, how did people think about that?

That animals were gonna die and that it was going to be explained or discussed?

Well, as long as they didn’t die from being run over by a, a vehicle, which, which happened at the beginning with a, with a crown crane. I, I think, but if, if you don’t be afraid of talking about that animal and the if and, and telling the challenges with that animal and, and when it’s in, it’s also don’t send the animal out when it gets geriatric. A lot of zoos would send their animals to other sanctuaries or other places. ’cause they didn’t want to have old downs. They just wanted young animals. You know, they don’t do that now, but, but we would, if an animal came to Disney, especially large mammals, it would stay there for the rest of its life. You know, whatever they call it. You know, care forever, but Forever Care.

But that, I think that, that, that was a challenge for Disney. But they also knew that the inter the history of the company, there were a lot of animal movies. True Life Adventures was, of course. And, and Roy Disney was sitting next to me and a lot of these strategy sessions. What a wonderful man he was. He was Walt’s nephew. Amazing. And he did, he did the True Life Adventure films, but Old Yeller, I mean, they had some sad movies too. You don’t wanna watch that one again. But Bambi, I mean, all the stuff that Disney, it was a natural for Disney to get into it.

Walt was fascinated because I think Roy said, you know, nature is the greatest storyteller in the world that he used to Tell me Now, again, one of the hardest, it appears to make the connection is with kids in teenagers.

So how do you think Zoo could improve that connection to height, to heighten the, the awareness about the natural world and the caring?

Well, if you wait till they’re a teenager, you, you’re probably going to have a challenge. I think. I think you gotta start earlier because once, if, if they haven’t been exposed to it and they’re a teenager, there’s, there’s so much competition out there. There’s still the, there’s still the, you know, the rare exceptions that are just, and, and they come to, they come to a long matter, a lot these families. And you can tell almost right away. Some, some kids are amazing with animals. Like, my dogs come up, dogs are a great indication. You know, I got two yellow labs that are just the nicest and, and, and some, and the way people, they, they react to the dogs. They react to feeding the animals eventually.

You know, even if they’re a little intimidated by this big giraffe, you know, they, they see other people doing it.

But, but if you have to wait, teenagers, hey, you know, what do I know about teenagers?

I never, I was one, but I was one back in the, in the sixties. So I, I, I don’t, if I had all the distractions and all the temptations that they have now, I don’t know if I’d be sitting here today. Mark. I mean, that, that’s, that’s scary. Again, you’ve been involved with national, international organizations.

Are there certain issues that you’d like to see these national or international organizations be addressing now?

’cause they’re, they’re organizations. They have so much power. Yeah, well, I, I, I did associate myself a lot with some of the NGOs, non-government institutions, especially with Conservation International with, ’cause Russ Meyer was there, a friend of mine. And then of course, you know, the, the, the Waza community, the World Association Zoo and Aquariums and, and, and the, the conservation groups. I remember them telling me that Peter Seligman, who was the head of Conservation International, he goes, I don’t understand why zoos can’t do more for conservation. They should be a powerhouse. He says, I have an organization. I don’t have live animals. I can’t bring people to, to, to, to, you know, to pet a ride or feed a giraffe.

He says, you bring ’em to your house, you got ’em captured there, and then you can ask ’em for money. All I can do is send out notices and mailers and tell ’em how dire the situation is. And, and, and great videos and stuff. I mean, you know, they did some great stuff with celebrities too. He said, but you guys, you, you guys have live animals and if you do it right, you can inspire people a lot more, a lot more than we can. And, and he’s right. We don’t, but we, I don’t know if we take advantage of that enough, because then we got this approach. Well, you don’t wanna do too, you know, you don’t wanna bring too many people in.

You don’t wanna feed the draft too much.

You know, or, or is it too risky, this or that?

Hey, there’s always a little bit of risk. But when you have a one-to-one ratio, or you have a, if you’ve got, if your animal care staff has plenty of time to work with the, the more the animal does something, the more reliable and the more dependable it is, rather than just going in there every once in a while and bringing somebody in to see it. You know, they get used to it and it’s a, it’s a much better experience and it’s a safe and more responsible experience. So it’s Now there are two major North American associations. The, the A ZA American Association and the ZAA, the Zoological Association of America, as we talk presently. Do you feel there’s room for both? What are We’ve made room for both by kind of competing with each other and, and alienated each other from they don’t like each other to, to some degree. I’ve been to both, you know, and, and, and I think it ended up being that ZAA has more of the private owners and they have more of the commercial members that are doing this for, as a business. And, and it doesn’t always, it doesn’t fit with the, the, the kind of unwritten philosophy of a, of an a ZA accredited zoo.

I think this should, ideally it should be one organization. And, and, but I just, I don’t see that happening. ’cause it got it, it it, it started because this, a ZA was such an exclusive club and it was more expensive than people wanted. And the accreditations facility, the approval process was a lot more strenuous. And some of these smaller zoos couldn’t do it. You, they said, well, when we’re too small, well, I’m small, you know, I got, I got, I got nine animals, you know, I’m one of the, and I got accredited. You can do it where there’s a will, there’s a way. But this, you know, when, when the questions always overshadow the commitment, it’s not gonna work.

You know, you can, you can, you can focus on, well, yeah, well this, and this is, I I, I don’t wanna be told to do this. I don’t want to. Hey, that’s part of the game guys. You can play that. These are recommendations sometimes too. They’re not like, you know, you have to do it exactly this way. I think there’s a big misunderstanding. There’s, there’s, there’s organizations in both a ZA and ZAA that shouldn’t be accredited. You know, it’s not like a ZA is the gold standard. It like, people like to say it, it, it’s, it doesn’t have, not all 240 institutions are gold standard by any means.

And ZAA is the same way. You know, they have some very good owners in there. And there are a few institutions that are, are members of both, but very few. But it’s a shame. It should be, to me it should be one organization. ’cause it’s, it’s confusing. ’cause ZAA sounds more like what people would ’cause it starts with the ZZ and yet a ZA is a much bigger organization that is definitely more scientific and, and, and, and more and much more difficult to be accredited.

Now if you could go back in time, what, if anything, as a zoo director, would you have done differently?

You know, there’s little things, but as far as me as a person, I probably should have been a little bit more diplomatic. Not sacrifice my principles, but I was pretty outspoken. I could see some of the people that had to manage Rick Bargi had their hands full. ’cause I, I always believed I was doing the right thing, but it wasn’t always, I, I, I learned as I got older, if a boss tells you to do something and, and it’s not, you don’t think it’s the right thing. You don’t say, no, we can’t do it.

You say, well, you could do that, but how about we do this instead?

You know? Yeah, it is, I think it’s, it’s the approach you use. It got me in trouble. It got me slapped down a couple of times. But you get back up, you know, I, I think it taught me resilience. You know, there, there were bosses I had that hired me that at the end wanted didn’t like me. I never got really fired. I got pushed to the side a few times, but I always left the institution better than it was. But I was always willing to sacrifice myself. And what I mean by that is I would hire people way smarter than me. And, and that would challenge me all the time because I knew it would make the organization better.

But I knew in the long run, I knew at Disney, I hired a woman, Beth Stevens, that would run this place. I knew she was capable of doing that. It’s not what I wanted to do. I wasn’t good at, I was good at, I was a builder, not a, not a maintainer. And, and Beth was really competent. And Terry Maple told me, and Beth, I apologize, but, but, but I have a lot of respect for you. Beth Terry said, you hire her, she’s gonna have your job. I said, that’s fine with me.

But, so I, and I still agree, I still agree with that philosophy. I don’t agree with people hiring puppets. That, and basic, you, if you’re loyal to me, I don’t care how qualified you are.

This sounds a little political right now, you know?

But it is, you know, then you’re hired. That is bullshit.

There’s, there’s my curse word. Okay?

You don’t, you hire people that are better than you, that challenge you, that make the organization better. And if you can’t, and you’re eventually gonna get phased out, and then you do something else, or you, or you stay. But the best advice I got, and that’s your question there too, when somebody says, Rick, there’s two types of people. There’s the ones you bring in to, to, to conceptualize it, to build it. And, but you don’t have them run it because they’re not, they, they don’t wanna run it. They just want to go on to the next innovative thing. And you’re, you’re a builder. You’re not, and I’m not saying maintainers are, are boring.

That’s all that’s operate. Those are operators. I’m not an operator. I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m more about, you know, going outside the, the, the envelope and, and trying new things and a little bit more risky, you know, which I think is important as a leader, that, that, that you, that you take risks and, you know, calculated risks, obviously. But I think, and, and so that’s, that’s kind of been my philosophy and it’s worked for me to some degree. I, I know I turned down jobs. I’ve turned down several jobs, some big jobs in zoos. And then even before that, I have other friends. I said, Rick, you could have been an attorney, or you could have done this. You know, you had other skills.

You would’ve made a lot more money. You could have retired at 40 and you would’ve had millions of dollars to give to conservation. You would’ve made a bigger impact. I said, I don’t wanna do it that way. I wanted to have fun. Now, when I was young, not, not say, well, I’m gonna wait till I retire, then I can do what I want. And now, now I’ve got this other thing that I think will be a legacy.

Who gave you that advice of builders and maintainers?

He was the guy that built all the restaurants for Disney. He was Dietrich, his name was d Dieter Dieter. And he had a German accent. And he was brilliant guy. And he said, Rick, when I design these restaurants, I have one group, but then when I open ’em, I have a whole different group.

You can’t be both. He said, very rarely. Can you be both?

So when you were at Houston and Disney as the leader, were there programs or exhibits that you would’ve wanted to implement during the time you were there, but just didn’t happen?

Well, the big one that did happen was the advisory board. Joe Rody was on my side on this. I I, I, I reported more to Joe than I did the operations guy. Bob was later, but Bob hired me. But I was really an imagine with the imagineers. And my office was next to Joe Roadies for two and a half years. So that definitely rub when you’re sitting next to the most creative guy in the company.

A little bit rubs off, you know?

But, but I, I was, I was, so the biggest achievement was Joe and I, we convinced Conway to come back. You know, Conway was, they were using Conway as a consultant, and then Conway couldn’t do it anymore. And he recommended me, but he never told me that. I only found out that years later. And, and so, and then, then when I was a consultant, I said, guys, whatever I say you’re listening to, ’cause I’m the only animal guy in the room. I gotta have some colleagues. We gotta argue. You gotta hear us argue. ’cause there’s not one way to exhibit this animal. There’s not one way to do this or that.

You know, I, I think I’m right, but I, I wanna be challenged here too. And so we brought in an advisory board, and then we brought in the big guys, you know, and then, then Conway and, and Meyer and Terry Maple. I said, we had Bill Burnham from the Paragon Fund. We had Roger Harris from A-S-P-C-A. So we had the animal wealth. Roger was great. You know, most of these guys have passed away now, but they were really super people. So again, you bring in people that are not just gonna agree with you, but are gonna challenge you because it’s, it’s, it’s a pain in the ass. And it’s a longer process, but it’s a much better result at the end.

But are things that you wanted to, that you Yeah, bring an elephant, bring, bringing, bringing a herd of elephants in from Krueger, very controversial, but they were calling elephants in Krueger National Park. This is 1994. Because they had too many, well, they said they had too many. So I, we worked with the vet and they had, they had these families, and instead of shooting this family, we were gonna take this family. And it was a, a really calm family, the matriarch. We did this whole thing. And but that year, the animal rights, people convinced Kruger not to shoot, not to, not to cull elephants anymore. So the argument was before you bring ’em in or they’re gonna be killed. Now, I couldn’t say that. So we stayed away from that.

But it would’ve been an incredible exhibit for, for, and, and I, the el the elephants would’ve been better off too. I think Chris Krueger was getting decimated the, the habitat. But, so that, that was kind of a disappointment, but it was a, it it was a political it, whatever, lightly rod. So, so I, that, that disappointed me a little bit. But in the most part, like I said before, they listened to, they listened to me. They didn’t wanna bring in the advisory board because these parks are top secret Disney. They didn’t want anybody else to steal their ideas. They didn’t want, you know, other, there was competition in the area too.

Like Bush Gardens was not too far away either. Right. And we’re building a safari park, you know, and Bush Gardens already had one. So they, they wanted to keep it really close knit. But they, they gave, with Joe’s, Joe’s support we got, and then Michael Eisner would, he came and met, you know, he was the CEO. He met with, he, he mostly talked to Conway. ’cause Conway had, Conway could talk to somebody. Any, anybody. He, he was used to talking to billionaires on his board. So Michael Eisner was easy for him.

And, but that dynamic there, it, it got, it got tension filled. One time when Judson Green, who was our, the head of Disney Parks, was talking to Bill Conway and, and the board, and, and Bill and Russ, and were recommending that they establish a fund for conservation before you open the park. And, but they wanted a certain number. And Judson said, well, that’s too much. And finally, and he is given all his justifications. And finally Conway looks at him and says, Judson, I understand what you’re saying, but you’re a billion multi-billion dollar company. That argument’s not gonna fly. And Judson’s, who is nobody ever said that to.

Justin Judson said, you’re, he didn’t say you’re right at that point. But we, we had, we got a lot more money. Only ’cause of, only ’cause of Bill Connoway. So the, the board, the advisory board was a wonderful accomplishment.

Were there other things that you were very proud of achieving at Houston?

Or, or Disney?

Well, I saw that question earlier, you know, and I, I, I always am I just anxious to go on to the next thing all the time. So, you know, I go back to Disney and I say, yeah, I guess, I guess the, the forming that, that, that advisory committee which, and led us form the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund, which now has raised, oh, I don’t know, over a $150 million or something for conservation, you know, and we, we planted the, the seed for that. So, I mean, obviously opening the park and stuff like that, but I, I thought the conservation side for dizzy, for, excuse me, for Houston is privatizing the zoo for sure.

I came in, they, they headhunted me and they, and, and people said, why the hell you wanna go to Houston?

This is the year 2000, right?

I’d just come off at Disney, you know, I was getting paid pretty well, you know, now, now I come to, I’m gonna accept a job at Houston, which was a city zoo. The salary was half of what I was making, you know. But I went out there and visited it, and, and they had, the location was good, you know, it’s a really big philanthropic community. The, the staff was good. They just was totally underfunded. And they, and they had the wrong people in some positions. So I took the job under the condition with the, the parks director and the mayor that I, I didn’t use the word privatization. I said, can I form a task force to, to evaluate the zoo where it is now, and what’s the best, you know, best strategy for growing it in the future. And, and to make, and so that city isn’t, doesn’t have to foot the bill for the entire zoo, which was doing at that point, but it, it was, it was not that much money.

So they, they let me form a task force. They said, you have to lead the task force. I had advice from another board member saying, Rick, don’t lead the task force. You’re new to this community. You gotta have somebody that’s born on the plantation, is what he said. But he meant, what he meant is you need, I mean, you, you’d be the vice chair, but you, if you’re gonna, if it’s gonna, because they tried priva times to do, like, two or three times before. And it always fell apart because this group wanted to run it. This group wanted they all, they they did, everybody was fighting.

So it never happened. So I got, I got a man named Bill Barnett who was, he was the managing partner of Baker bots of biggest law firm in Houston at the time, but also the chairman of the Rice University board. Bill was unbelievable. People couldn’t believe, first of all, that I got a man of this stature. But he was, he was so, he was so admired and respected in the community. And he led the task force. And he said, I’ll do it for four, four months. ’cause I told him it was just four months. He, he became the chair of the board.

He did it for, he, he just passed away. And he was, he was my mentor. He was a good man. Mm, sorry. That’s okay. Did he give you some good sage advice that, that stayed with You Always take the high road no matter what the audience is. I am Italian, you know, I get emotional. We’ve talked about Zeus, you’ve been around the world.

Are there any that say to that, you go, these are good zeuss, but why do you say that?

And, and where are they?

When I analyze a zoo, I analyze leadership, the quality of the keeper staff and the behind the scenes. I don’t analyze it by attendance and budget and, and, and marketing campaigns, you know, totally different. And when I do it that way, it changes because the zoos change. But some of the, in, in, if you go outside the United States, I think Singapore Reserves does a fairly good job. I, the, the two Australians, who’s the major, the major ones, Taronga and Sydney and Zeus Victoria in Melbourne are really where, really well done. Jenny Gray runs the one down in Melbourne Zoos Victoria, and Cam Cameron forgot it ki he runs the one in Toronto. They’re really good. They’re really good zoo directors. They, they were at the WASA committee in Columbia this last week when I was there.

They’re dynamic. They’re, they’re innovative. They, they’re always pushing the envelope. And then in South America, they’re, they’re not, they’re not a Singapore, but the Ali Zoo that we were at, there’s a zoo outside of Bo, not the Buenos Air Zoo, but outside of Buenos Air Time Aiken, these are zoos I’ve visited that I’m really impressed with what they’re doing. And they’re a model now for some of the other zoos in the areas in Europe. Europe, there’s a, there, there’s two zoos in particular that are Boval in France. It’s an amazing zoo. It’s, it’s like Disney. It’s got all hotels and, and, and it’s more of a, a theme park. But the, the exhibits of first race and then even bigger is the one in the Netherlands called Za and Belgium.

It’s a Belgian zoo. And, and it’s a, it’s a private owner and he just put all his money into it. It’s, it’s, it’s a enormous put, we stayed in a room that the window was looking into the bear exhibit, and the bears was sleeping right outside our, our win, you know, outside your window. And, and so there, there’s, there’s some really good models out there. And then of course, you know, I I, I can get into my Teton zoos in the, in the us but it’ll change, you know, in five years that those zoos could change. A lot of it has to do with the directors and the board and, and, and, and that, that relationship. ’cause it starts from the top and then comes down and, but you know, the, the, the, the, the Nashville Zoo is one of the most beautiful zoos in the country right now. And the director there is really good. And it does a lot for conservation.

The Minnesota Zoo is really a good zoo. Chicago has two good zoos. And, and there are different structures. Totally. Which is, which is interesting. I don’t have to lecture you about the zoos in Chicago, but I think the Brookfield Zoo now, now they, they got a good director and he is, he was a veterinarian, which is usually not, isn’t a good formula for, for, for zoo directors. But this guy, he asks questions. He’s out there, he’s, he’s hands on. So I think that’s important.

And then there’s, you know, there, there’s some small, a lot of good small zoos too. But again, the mentality is you should always be, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re never the number one, you always want to be better. You know, like that rental car thing, you always, that Hertz or Avis we’re number two. But again, I think these zoos have good leadership. They have quality, they have quality exhibits or habitats for the animals. And they have very good, they, they may, they ha they, they ha they have an impact in what they do. That trans that, that goes all the way into the wild. They have huge conservation programs compared to years ago.

I don’t know what the number is now with a ZA, but it’s, it’s, you know, hundreds of million dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars a year now to conservation just from the 240 zoos and aquariums. And the aquariums is, you got shed and you got the Georgia Aquarium and the Monterey, they, they’re, they’re incredible. We talked about elephants.

In your opinion, your professional opinion, what’s your view regarding zoos, maintaining elephants, and how should it be done correctly?

Well, you know, we talked about animals earning their keep. Ideally, elephants don’t belong in zoos, but if we didn’t have ’em in zoos, I don’t think people would have the same compassion for saving them in the wild. So there are good exhibits much. And that, that’s where space is important. Not just quality, but you need a lot of space.

You know, I think you would, they would they rather be in the wild?

Well then that, that, that, that’s like trying to mind read for, it’d be a fortune tell for elephants. I I think that having elephants in the history is abominable what happens in, in this country, the way elephants were treated. And it’s just, you know, in the last 20 years where it’s starting to get better, it’s important to have them in order to draw attention to what’s going on in the wild. ’cause when you, when you’re dealing with an animal that intelligent, that powerful, it, it just requires so many resources to, to, to do, to, to kind of somewhat duplicate what goes on in the wild. It’s a very expensive animal. But then again, it’s also an iconic animal that people love. It’s, you know, it’s one of the top five, you know, species probably that people, you know, want to see in a zoo. So it, it’s a complicated issue.

But I, I think the elephants in good facilities in this country, especially the bigger ones that, you know, that Omaha and Cedgwick County, and d and Dallas brought some elephants in that was very controversial. But all those elephants are thriving in captive situations, in big exhibits. San Diego does a really good job with elephants too. So those elephants, you know, I think they’re, I I I, I think they’re well cared for. And I, and I, and psychologically I think that they’re, you know, who knows, you know, that you, you got all these armchair biologists trying to evaluate, you know, if an elephant’s happy or not. But keeping an animal by an animal by itself, there’s one called happy too that needs to be moved, but we’ll get into that. But they just need to be in social situations. That’s so important for ’em.

But again, in a perfect world, elephants are difficult, just like killer whales. You know, we should, we shouldn’t have ’em in captivity, but we have to have ’em in order to draw our attention to, to, so, so if we have ’em do it right. I think you may have alluded to it, but there may be more.

What was the most important piece of advice you received that has stayed with you throughout your career?

I didn’t, I didn’t have one, one piece of advice. I think, you know, my, my, my people like Bill Barnett or Conway that were mentors didn’t give me advice. They, they, they, it was by example. You just watch what they did. And, and you can’t be somebody else. You gotta do it your way. So I guess I, I get more advice from my wife, Diane, I breast probably, you know, like you, you talked, you, you said too much, or you didn’t have to say that Rick, or you didn’t have to be that honest, you know, you didn’t have to be that direct, you know, sometimes you talk before you think, you know, so I’ve learned. But I, I’m, the best advice I get at this age is for myself.

I question myself all the time.

How I can be better and say, should I bring that up?

You know, you would’ve brought that, you know, and listen, Rick, don’t jump into that conversation. Let the guy finish first. You know, make sure you’re be a much better listener. Because, you know, I can be a, it’s funny, I can be a talker, but I’m an only child and I like being by myself and with my dogs. And Diane knows that, that’s why, you know, I got this place here in, and we we’re in Sarasota. But it’s just, it’s, it’s that almost different split personality that I can be perfectly happy, just, but I know that, you know, in order to get more people engaged in conservation, you have to be more outspoken. You have to read, you have to read your audience really well. And I, I, I see so many people that don’t read the audience.

I, I, I can tell if I’m giving a talk, if I’m gonna, when I’m gonna shut it down, or I’m going, or I’m gonna pivot and do something else, you just look at how they’re reading their cell phones, you know, something like that. There, there’s so ma there’s so many things that I notice now. Th this is just an aside. I know a little girl a couple of months ago was at an aquarium in Sarasota. She went up to the fish tank and she’s watching a little fish, and she went like this at the glass to make it bigger. I, i, that that’s, it was amusing, but I guess that’s scary. Would you recommend the zoo and aquarium field to a young person with the sincere interest in wildlife and the conservation today? Yeah. Why, why de Definitely because now zoos are doing more than just exhibiting animals for public enjoyment.

They’re doing so much more. And I think it’s a really good avenue for people to get to. But they have to realize that the first few years this is gonna be shoveling shit. Okay. They’re you. Yeah. I, I had a master’s degree and I’m still throwing elephant shit into a, into a, into a, into a, a, a pickup truck. My father went around that, that with my mother when they came out there. This is after I had my, my, my Bs and my Ms. And, and he came up just, we paid for all this education.

First of all, I paid for most of it. He said, we paid for all this education, and you’re still shoveling shit into a dump truck.

What, what are you doing here, kid?

You could still run my business. But you know, you, you have to, you have to stay the course. And, and that commitment, it’s so much more difficult now to stay, to do one thing when there’s so many other temptations out there. And you wanna be promoted now right away, you know, you, you, you didn’t expect that back then. You just did your job. Shut up. Hopefully you had a good enough boss that recognized it. And in a few years you got a raise or you got promoted. You don’t, you don’t demand it after one year because you think you, you’re an expert.

But you know, that, that, that entitlement thing that we have nowadays is, is also more of a, you know, a challenge than it is a problem. More than it is a benefit. Everybody thinks they can run everything now. They can. They know everything. And I, I’ve had keepers like that too. And that I transitioned out of the place I work now. ’cause I want a team. I don’t, I don’t want a lone ranger. No matter how good you are, you’re not gonna survive if you can’t work without, and, and you don’t respect your, your teammates.

How do you think zoos should be dealing with surplus animals?

Well, I wouldn’t call ’em surplus, first of all. You know, they’re animals that, that, that they don’t have space for. So, you know, they’re, they’re gonna have to go someplace else. It’s, I mean, that’s just a terminology thing. But I don’t like the way they, if, if they’re, if their way of dealing with it is to stop breeding, that’s not always ideal for certain certain species. Again, I think if we, if we contribute, ideally had huge ranches that specialized in, in different, different mammals, it’s, it is mammals. We’re mostly talking about, you know, you, you don’t have that problem as much with, you know, with other classes of, of, of vertebrates as you do with mammals. I don’t have an answer for that other than how just build when you’re building and when you build an exhibit and, and, and a holding area, build it for the future and not for what you have now.

Because as soon as it’s built, it’s overcrowded and you can’t build, you can’t. If you’re gonna do it, build build into it. I have a draft barn that can hold 12 giraffes. I got five. Now when I get to 12, then I’ll have that problem of, of, of, of putting animals in other places. But only, but, but, but I can choose where they go because I’m not, I’m not interested in, I don’t want money for the animal. So I, I I, I have a, a much, a much more responsible way of dealing with the animal. But surplus animals or animals that you don’t have room for, you make room for some of them, especially if they’re geriatric. You do not ship a geriatric animal out.

That’s just not right. You, you have to, but you have to build that into your budget to begin with. Because when it comes to that point, you didn’t budget for it. You said, well, I, well, yeah, that’s your own damn fault because you, you knew this was gonna happen, but you never, you didn’t anticipate it. You didn’t have, you didn’t talk about that when you’re building the exhibit. Build it for 10, 20 years down the road, not for today.

Does euthanizing of endangered species still pose a political problem for zoos and aquariums?

You bet your ass. It does, but it depends on the, it, you know, we all have a different level of tolerance. Some it’s okay to euthanize fish and insects. Okay, others, you know, you go a little higher. But when you get to a giraffe or an elephant or a great ape, oh boy, you’re not gonna be doing that in the future. Obviously in, in Denmark, you know, Mario is the giraffe, is, it’s a, it’s still, it still comes up all the time as, as some kind of learning experience. And I don’t know what we learned from, because in Denmark they thought it was the right thing to do and they fed it to the lions and they let the kids look at it. That culture was totally accepted of that. But my board was horrified.

You know, how could they, how, how could they do it?

There’s plenty of places they could have sent that giraffe and they could have, but they wanted to make a point. But I know, I think that point backfired on them.

So again, you know, at what level do you draw?

Does everybody draw the line on when you can euthanize an animal just for management?

Re a perfectly healthy animal. I remember at Disney we had a, a, we, we, we would not at that point in it euthanize an any animal. If it was, it was just for convenience. So Ray Mendez sends us these hissing cockroaches. He sends us all males.

Turns out there was, or there was one female in the group. You heard this story?

No. So they call Ray, you know, I was, I was at that point, I was, I wasn’t involved in the decision too much. I I didn’t have the decision, or it might’ve been different. And Ray said, just flush it down the toilet. It’s a hissing cockroach. We can’t do that. That’s our policy. They mailed it back to Ray so he could flush it down the toilet. Now that gets a little ridiculous, but now we’re talk. But when you talk about giraffes, no, they’re sacred.

You know, if you are gonna say that we’re our standards, optimal standards of animal wellbeing, and we care about every animal at the zoo, and you turn around and shoot it in the head when it’s two years old, that’s a double standard that I don’t, I don’t think you can you, how do you justify that?

It was a mistake, but it was a mistake. I’m glad that Denmark made it there. There was a zoo years ago in the United States, remember the director shot the CTO Honda ORs. Do you you remember that one? I think it was Detroit. And he got in a lot of trouble. He was trying to make a point you don’t make, that’s not how you make the point. We talked about conservation in the, Sorry, Ron Kagan. It was not you, you would roll over in your grave if you were dead.

That I just said. Detroit. We talked about conservation breeding.

What do you think is the role of conservation breeding in zoo relative to other conservation activities?

I don’t know what conservation breeding is. I don’t know what, what that term is. I don’t use that, that breeding for conservation sounds like, well, we’re breeding so we can put them back in the wild. What, what is, you know, I, I just don’t use the term, so I don’t know how to address it. I mean, we, we have zoos to support conservation. We’re not breeding animals so much to support conservation. We’re breeding animals so that we don’t have to go back to the wild all the time and get more animals. We’re, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re breeding animals like the safe program, saving animals from extinction so that our, our our animals are, can have a longer existence without having to get new genes.

But that, that to me, it, to me, it’s not conservation breeding. It’s, it’s breeding So that other zoos that we have animals to, that we have animals in the future, because we’re probably not gonna be taking them out of the wild unless we, unless we can take the, the, the ova and the, and and, and the, and the sperm. Collect it out from the animal, you know, mobilize the animal, take it, and then bring that back. You know, maybe we can do stuff like that, but you’re not gonna be not taking animals out. So that was the next question.

Is there times when it justified to bring animals out of the wild for zoological institutions?

I think there’s definitely cases that warrant taking animals from the wild, especially rescue cases. I remember c we’re all trying to rescue walruses that had been abandoned, that were gonna die. But they have to go through so much approval process and permits the animal’s dead or, or, or, or too far gone to rescue it. So I don’t think, I don’t, I think there’s a trust issue there sometimes. But, and, and then I think there’s other animals. We’re dealing with oppi right now in, in ulu where there’s all the, it’s ulu is, is a small town or village in, in the Oppi reserve. There’s op all around and they occasionally bring some into the, the, the, the station, which is a conservation center. And, and that’s really not, they’re, they’re, they’re moving the animal to another facility, but within their habitat.

And I think that would work better. And then those animals could go back after they have a couple, maybe they, maybe they give birth, you breed them there. And then the generation born inside the habitat, you could send those to other zoos. ’cause they’re probably better off than going back to the wild. But then, but at a certain point, then you release the, the breeders back and you get more in. I think that’s, that’s a much better way to bring animals in from the wild is, is have these capture area, I don’t like the word capture, but have these, you know, in, in, in, in the range country facilities, not really zoos that you bring animals in. You, you, you acclimate them, you breathe them, you send them back. And then those offspring can come to, to zoos.

I’m talking, you know, hoofstock, mostly in large mammals, I think, I think that can work for certain things, other animals. It’s just not gonna work. Killer whales, you know, orcas, that, that whole SeaWorld thing and blackfish it, it, it, it’s, it was not handled right. I think there was the, there was two sides to that story, and only one side got taken.

But that said, how do you keep a orca in a tank?

I mean, what, is there a tank big enough to have a killer whale?

You know, that, that, that’s, that’s even a tougher argument than an elephant, you know, having an orca. But if we didn’t bring orcas into captivity and SeaWorld years ago, nobody would have the respect for them that we have now. And the love for them. You know, so, so those animals were sacrificed in a sense, you know, to, to, to get people to appreciate others more. But that argument doesn’t always fly.

You can’t, why sacrifice?

Do you sacrifice an animal so that the species can be saved?

Yeah, in some cases you do. But we’ve, we’ve, we’ve educated the public in a way that we care about each individual animal and they’re special. And yet we wanna manage as a, you know, as a group. And so an individual’s not that important. It’s, it’s a conundrum that we have to struggle with all the time. We we’re, we’re victims of our own verbiage. Now, people within the zoo and aquarium community, younger people, it would appear that they don’t know who Heine Heger was. They don’t know some of the things that have built Conway from the Bronx Wildlife Conservation Society has written about.

How important is it for people within the profession to be what I would call students of the game, to understand where these people are writing seminal papers?

Well, you’re talking about history. And I think, I like the phrase, I don’t know who said it. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it has the same rhyme. If we look back in human history, we make the same mistakes over and over again. Just different players. And so it’s so important to learn from some of these trailblazer. Yeah. They don’t know HeNe, Heer is, unless you read his books. He, he was, he really changed the way we thought about the psychology of zoo animals. And then, and, and Conway, Conway took, you know, the Conway was the, was the, the guy that put the word conservation into zoos in, in, in, in, in a way that really worked.

I, I’m a firm believer that you need to appreciate these people. Instead, we, we question them and we judge them by today’s standards. And that’s a big mistake. Like Thomas Jefferson had slaves, so he’s a bad guy.

Well, back then, everybody was a bad guy then. You know?

I mean, you can’t, it’s difficult to, to judge. And, and Conway today would have a lot more trouble with HR stuff and stuff. ’cause the way he, he, it was Conway’s way or the highway. And you can’t do that today. Now. Oh, well, you know, now you’re gonna have these group therapy sessions because you traumatized somebody mentally. ’cause you said something wrong to them that they screwed up. You know? So, but those guys really, I mean, to me, not so much heger, I knew who he was, you know, but Conrad Lorenz was, was, was more, ethology was more the guy that fascinated me. ’cause he worked with these, with the gray Legg geese, you know, and they followed him around and the imprint that stuff that, that fascinated me.

And, and then Carl Hagenbeck, you know, and 1907 opened up this incredible zoo, no bars, you know, you could just see animals that, that set the state. These guys were pioneers. And, and now, now we said, well, we do things so much better now. No, but he did it when nobody could even think, comprehend it. Now you need to do something now.

What are you gonna do in today’s world?

You know, to, to break down some of these barriers and stereotypes or, or, or new exhibits. It’s, it, I think they inspire us, but in, but other people are critical because they judge ’em in their, they judge ’em by in, in our time when they should be judged what they did in their time. And you talked about inspire us. You think there are any ma and you’ve been involved.

Do you think there are any more charismatic, committed heroes to help shift public opinion for conservation?

Obviously the example of Jane Goodall Jacque au.

Are there any people that are now in that vein that can help us?

Well, there’ll never be another Jane Goodall.

Will there be somebody like her in the future?

I think it’s, I hope so, but I think it’s unlikely. But I don’t think people commit to all the dedication and, and sacrifice that you have to make early on. I think people get too tempted with other things. And it was, it was a different world back then. And Jane had a personality that was very unique and very strong. But, but also she could, she was very different than, let’s say her gorilla counterpart, Diane Forey. Diane Forey just wanted to be with her gorillas, which, which didn’t do the gorillas a lot of good because she could, she wasn’t out there promoting them. Jane was naming, they were both naming their animals.

But Jane, Jane was out. Jane could transition from the forest to civilization. Diane Fossey could not do it. Diane Forsey did great things for gorillas, but Jane was so much more effective. Jane and I would, would talk about Diane Forey quite a bit, you know, ’cause she, she was, she was close to her and she said she just did it wrong, Rick. You know, she just got so involved with her. She was just so selfish. She says, Rick, I would rather be in the forest for the rest of my life. I’m only traveling 300 days a year because I’m doing it for the chimps.

I want to preserve what, what they did for me. I’m giving back to them. And that that’s a unique, and, and Jane walked the talk, you know, you could disagree with her, but nobody, she could have taken money for herself. She never did anything like that. She, she was just always totally dedicated. And you knew she was just gonna go until she couldn’t. And that, and that’s what happened. But I, I think it’s gonna be more difficult for those type of people now. And, and there’s so many smoke and mirrors now.

You know, people become, you know, famous after a couple of years from just, you know, they go viral on TikTok or something and they become, you know, these like stu stupid.

You, you know, you know, there’s names p that people are famous going, what are they famous for, for being stupid on tv?

You know, it’s, it’s, we judged, we judge fame differently, reward things differently. But for some reason, Jane said the test of time and, and we’re finding that out more in that she passed, how many people she impacted. But she, she traveled all the time. She, and she lived to be 91. So she, she had a big impact. So it’s gonna be tough to line up all those, you know, traits that she had. And, and, and I’ve another Jane Goodall like type person. I, I like to call her like the Mother Teresa of nature. I don’t think people liked that because her religion.

But, but Jane, Jane was, Jane was very spiritual, you know, I, I asked her one time if she believed in God, and she said, I believe in God, but religion gets in the way. Now one other person, She doesn’t like me to quote, Well, no, no one other person who has been in, who has, who is not necessarily active again. And was either Jack Hannah and it’s a name.

Did he do things in, in your opinion, for betterment of the zoo community?

Yes. Again, the end justifies the mean means. Jack Hannah was a clown on TV with David Letterman. But people liked him and he brought attention to stuff. And he really was committed to conservation. He, that’s the only way he could do it. That Jack was Jack, you know, he had to, he had to, and he didn’t enjoy sometimes playing that game with Letterman. But he, but that’s what got him it. And like you said, it, it, when there was a, a crisis or some something, a, a unique development in a zoo, an animal escape.

They called Jack Hannon. They didn’t call Bill Conway. They didn’t call the experts. They called Jack. So Jack, Jack was a figurehead for us. But some of the real scientific people think he made, he, he, he kind of degraded our profession by clowning around on tv. It’s a double again, it’s a, there’s, there was bene I think the benefits outweighed, you know, the, the, the, you know, the, the humor and the, and the ridicule sometimes that people placed on Jack or that he, that he attracted to himself. But he was, I had him out to Houston to speak at a gala, and he was a big draw. We raised over a million dollars that night, you know, for conservation. So that’s what Jack in the end, Jack, that’s what that Jack wanted to do.

That, you know, he, he was glad that he made that impact. But, but I, nobody’s perfect. He did a lot of things that were, were, were questionable. We all, we all have to some degree.

But you have to think about, you know, what, what’s the end result gonna be for this?

Is it worth, is it worth, is it worth this kind of double standard sometimes that we put ourselves in?

Now talked about you raised a million dollars when a zoo spends multimillion dollars on a gorilla or an elephant or a tiger exhibit, and critics ask why this money is not used to help animals in the wild. You say what?

There are two different pots of money. It, the, the person that’s gonna give you millions of dollars for a gorilla exhibit is not necessarily gonna give you millions of dollars to save them in the wild. They’re different type of people. ’cause you are at a zoo with 2 million people and they want their name on the exhibit and you know, it’s their community and they want to give back to the community. They, they don’t get that recognition if they give a million dollars to save ’em in the wild when they’re gonna put a sign up for the pygmies to read in the wild. You know? So it’s not, it’s not the same impact. So to me it’s a diff I mean, I can understand the question and they, you know what, you know, this would be great.

You’re spending all this millions of dollars and what, how’s it saving gorillas?

Well, it’s hard to prove, but after many, many years, people going through those exhibits and seeing those gorillas, some of them are gonna help save them in the wild in some way. And, and it should. You spend millions of dollars just on making rock, you know, incredible rock work to, so it looks so natural. I mean, you gotta draw the line someplace. It needs to be, it needs to look good, but I don’t think the gorilla cares.

You’re doing that for the public, right?

The gorilla doesn’t care if it’s a straight wall or it’s got contours and it’s colored. I don’t think they care about that as long as they got other vegetation and stuff in the exhibit.

So, so you have to say, am I doing it?

Who am I doing this for?

And is it, is it worth, is it worth that money?

And, and I, I, I think the big zoos have these mega exhibits and they’re, they’re, they’re amazingly powerful immersive exhibits. We call it immersive naturalistic habitats. They have their place if you can afford it. But to say, well, you know, well just give that money to the wild, then you, and, and, and then you don’t have that exhibit at all then, then the awareness for that species is not there. So it’s, again, it’s a balance and you have to do both.

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

What direction would you think will help keep them relevant?

Well, I’m not, I don’t want to see zoos survive in the next 25 years. If they’re not doing the right things that we talked about, conservation animal care, I think there’ll be less zoos in the future. I think they’ll have less species, but bigger quality habitats and, and less, and I think there’ll be less desire to just, the focus will be equally on the, the animals, the keepers that take care of them and, and, and the, and the public. So they’re definitely gonna be less facilities because I don’t think they’re gonna all be able to adhere to the higher standards that we are setting for animals, whether we’re doing it internally or governments. I’m talking about the United States too, because it’s, it could be different in other, in other countries. So I, I, I think the future will depend on, again, how, how we prepare for the future. How we be, we, we we design habitats that are always better and, and we continue to improve. And our messages need to be clear, concise, and, and, and we need to back it up with facts that, that, you know, we’re not, we’re not just saying that, oh, conserv conservation is, is not, you’re, you’re animal at your zoo is not the conservation budget.

Your conservation budget is what you’re doing with animals, you know, in, in outside of the zoo and other habitats. So I think there’ll be zoos, but I think there’ll be, there’ll be more like the, the zoos I mentioned earlier. I think there’ll be bigger zoos. I, I don’t, I, there may be some small zoos, may, maybe the model I’m doing will, will, will, will, will work for small zoo because it’s much more intimate. But you gotta charge a hell of a lot more money to do what I’m doing. So you give ’em a, you give a much more concierge level v IP experience than they can, than than zoos can usually do. So I, I just, it will depend on the people that get hired. I, I see the evolu, I see it going in the right direction, but I, I can see a lot of zoos falling by the wayside.

They’re not gonna be able to walk the talk. You’ve been in the profession over half a century.

What do you know about that profession you’ve devoted your entire life to, what do you know about it?

It’s changed quite a bit, obviously for the better. It’s got a long way to go. I may not be right. I mean this is Rick Ji’s opinion, but again, we have to take a much more active role in, in saving habitats in the wild. And sometimes I think we get so caught up in the science that we lose the art of, of, of working with animals. You’ve gotta, you can look at figures and data, but you’ve got to look at the animals, you know, as objectively as possible. So that what you’re, the zoo is the model home pretty much for conservation. If, if, if you’re gonna preach conservation, saving animals in the wild is my definition of conserva habitats and animals in the wild. You, you better have a good model home.

You can’t come into a zoo that’s got substandard or small exhibits or animals that are sleeping and not doing anything and look miserable all the time and say, yeah, but we’re giving millions of dollars to conservation. It doesn’t work that way. The first thing you have to look at is, is, is your zoo. It’s just like when pe when boards are hiring, when they’re hiring for zoo directors. The first thing I say, and I talked to search firms, I said, have them when you get to the finalists, have them the subset of search committee go to that zoo. Don’t tell the zoo director, walk around that zoo and see, see what they could interview really well, but see how they run their zoo, you know, and, and see how that is. I also think they should spend more time with the spouse because when you’re in a zoo, you’re, it is your whole life. This is, this is, this is a 24 hour job. Yeah. Again, you need balance and all that crap. Yeah. It’s, yeah.

But, but you, but you, but it is, it’s, it’s a super commitment. Animals are not gonna go on your timetable. You have to be on their timetable.

Tell me what, how, how would you like to be remembered?

What your legacy, Dogmatic, arrogant little Italian guy I guess. But that, that’s what I came across with. I think on that last question. I think I like to be remembered as somebody that always had the time to talk to people. I, I made a lot of time, ’cause I have quite a few people that come up to me over the, when you live long enough and you go to conferences, you know, you don’t remember me. Right? But you took the time and you talk to me. Not that I gave good advice, I just listened. But, you know, it makes a difference.

Even when you’re a, a zoo director, you know, you’re talking to somebody that’s just coming into the field. I think that’s important. But I don’t know if people, they’re gonna remember me, if anything, probably for long neck matter. ’cause it’s the last thing I did and it’s, it was the riskiest thing I did. And I wanna be remembered for that. That it, it’s a different, it’s a smaller model for conservation to prove that even a small zoo can do really significant conservation work or support conservation. I want to be re remembered for that. I, that I also am a quality guy. I keep saying quality over quantity.

Don’t do it unless you can do it right and, you know, and, and, and spend the money you got. You gotta be able to spend the money. I always had, you know, even when I went to Houston from Disney, they said, you’re the Disney guy. We don’t have the kind of money Disney has. So, well, you know, first you need a commitment. We’ll figure out the rest later. But I guess hopefully I’ll get remembered for being somebody that I have a lot, you know, we, we have a lot of friends, but we also have people that, you know, for, for one reason or another aren’t, aren’t really singing your praises. You gotta make tough decisions.

But, but I hope people realize that, you know, we made, i I made the decisions for the good of the organization, not for myself. I was unselfish in terms of, well, we’re all selfish, but I was less unselfish than most in terms of doing what was right for the zoo or the organization rather than my future. I, I knew I could always Yeah, you know, and hire and, and, and always hiring people that make you look good. Because when I read resumes and say, well, I was at, when I was at that zoo, we, we went from this number to this number and we did this and this. You didn’t do that all by yourself. You just happened to be there and you, maybe you put a good team together, but be careful how much credit you take. You know, I I I’m a big one for giving other people a lot of credit. I mean, a lot of the stuff I said today is based on just, you know, what people, you know, I made more mistakes by far than I had successes in my career.

We talked about successes, but you learn way more from your mistakes. If you make big mistakes than you have several times, then you deserve to die. But, but, but if, but, but if you can. But if you, if, if, if you try something and it doesn’t work, I, I got in trouble sometimes.

I was too close with my animals, you know?

’cause I, I work with them, you know, I love rhinos. I, I’ve been known to go in with my rhinos sometimes, but I can’t do that now that I’m a ZA. So I don’t, but I know I could if I in an emergency, you know, something like that. But a ZA don’t listen to what I’m just saying. I guess you gotta be careful with, with the rapport you have with animals. But I, I’m, I’m just, I’m just kind of meandering now. I hope I’m remembered as he, he was a good guy that tried to do it right. He worked hard and he did his best.

Thank you Rick Ry. I’m tired.