Steve Taylor

I am Steve Taylor. I was born in Inglewood, California on March 18th, 1947.

Who were your parents? What did they do?

My father Raymond M. Taylor. I have an older brother, Raymond M. Taylor Jr. And my mother was Ardath Taylor. And my father very, actually he was a very smart man, but grew up in Philadelphia, as did my mother. My father, never grad, never went to high school and graduated from eighth grade. But he was a very intelligent man and he was, he was too young for the first World War and too old in the sense for the Second World War. But he was also in defense. So he worked for North American Aviation in Los Angeles, became, he was a tool and die guy, but he became supervisor and worked there until he retired.

He was like 6 62 years old. He retired and did very well. And the interesting story about my mother and father in the sense of working is they somehow, I don’t remember why, but some in the thirties came from Philadelphia to Los Angeles and somehow he, my father got this job at North American Aviation and was pretty good at it. And in, in 41 when Pearl Harbor occurred, north American aviation moved all their operation, including my two sisters and brother who was born in 40 to Kansas City on the train because the Japanese were gonna attack California. They didn’t want to be making the airplanes in in there. My brother still re sort of remembers the plane, the the train ride coming home and, but they were all in Kansas City at that time. My mother was a wonderful lady, kinda like Gracie Allen, a little scatterbrained. And she was a typical housewife.

She, my father was pretty domineering. He gave her $40 probably for her entire, their entire life to buy groceries every week. And she actually saved some of that money. I remember the groceries then. And she remember you had your milkman, you had your, your ve Tommy, the vegetable man came by our house and stuff, and then she’d buy groceries at the store and she saved up some money. And my father never actually drove until say, 1950 or something. He didn’t have a car and maybe the early forties. And my mother, obviously she, I don’t think he wanted her to drive.

But anyway, she secretly, she secretly took driving lessons, which got the neighbors gossiping because they thought she was having an affair with somebody. But she took her stop, did, took driving lessons. Then in 1956 she went by herself to Ira Escobar Ford dealer and bought her own car. Only thing it had on it didn’t have a radio, didn’t have heaters, it had automatic transmission ’cause that’s the only way she could drive. She bought that car without my father knowing it and put a note in his pocket and said, Ray, I just bought my own car. There’s nothing you can do about it. And then, and my sisters told me that they didn’t talk for two months. I don’t remember that. But that’s the kind of thing she was, she was a remarkable lady in her own right.

And you know, but she did the typical thing. She made dinner every night and, and it was a typical housewife. And we lived in Inglewood, California in a nice little house and basically leave it to Beaver neighborhood, you know, and paid hide and seek with the kids and a lot of kids in the neighborhood and stuff like that. So. Well, tell us about your childhood then, growing up.

Who were animals part of your life?

Yes. From the very, I don’t know what got me interested in animals. My father was sort of like an engineer. My brother was an engineer. My two sisters did, did some work, but were basically housewives and, but I always had an interest in animals. We had a cat and, but I would go to the oil fields and Baldwin Hills or some other fields and collect frogs and toads and had little in the backyard. I was able, my, my, my parents didn’t want me to have a dog ’cause they didn’t think I was responsible enough. But I had all these animals behind the garage. Toads and lizards. Lizards in various cages and stuff.

Had a horn towed that I got on one rare visit to the dentist, to the desert as well as a myrtle la turtle, a desert tortoise in there. So I had these, these animals. And in the house I had a hamster and parakeet, a fish, fish bowl, you know, a fish aqua area, small fish aquarium. So it was always part of my life. And I remember one time I had to feed all these animals.

So my friend Alan Smith and I were looking through the fields through stuff and this policeman came up and said, are you kids looking for trouble?

And we held up our bags, no, just insects. And he just laughed and ran away. So, so animals had always been part of my life. Yeah.

And what zoos did you see when you were growing up?

Did, what impressions did they have on you?

A lot. I think now we only had Griffith Park Zoo. It wasn’t in the new location, you know, it was in a different location and I think I, I know I went there once with my two sisters, treated me like their child. They took me everywhere with their family. So I, I know I went to the Griffith Park Zoo with my older sister, Edith once. And then I went with my friend Alan Smith and I think it took two buses and a street car to get to the Griffith Park Zoo. But we went there. I don’t remember much about the zoo. I do remember they basically had outdoor reptile exhibits ’cause it was Los Angeles, you know, so they had these tanks in a big circle and, but that was my first zoo. And sometime maybe in high school I went to the San Diego Zoo when somebody would take me or whatever. So Make an impression on you.

Yes, I really, I started reading about zoos probably in junior high. And I started read, the first one was a zoo in my luggage by Gerald Durrell. And, but that, and then I read all his books, you know, and that got me very much interested in zoos. So, but I didn’t know much about Zeus. But I remember in the sixth grade too, you, you know, when you had to do a talk about what profession you wanted and you could go get mineo graph copies about being a lawyer or accountant or whatever. But there was nothing on being a zoologist. But somehow I wrote a paper about being a zoologist in the sixth grade and that got me interested. But then I, I didn’t have any mentor or anybody that knew anything about zoos.

So I know I probably in high school, probably in high school, I thought, well, I’ll be a biology teacher. And then I realized I really didn’t wanna do that. And so from then on in college, I really felt that I’d, I could be a, I’d wanted to work in a zoo.

What kind of schooling did you have then?

I had degree, I went to, I went to uc, Irvine for a couple of reasons. We always took our vacations in Newport Beach Balboa. And so that area I knew well and I liked it. And the new university, university of California, Irvine was gonna be open in 65. And at that time, the University of California, the nine campuses you could put in one application and you list it.

Which ones first?

So I think I listed Irvine first, Santa Barbara, and then maybe UCLA, I don’t know. But anyway, I got into uc, Irvine and it was the first four year class. There were 13, there was, yeah, 1300 of us, 500 lived in the dorm. And it was a brand new area. Well, there were road runners running around. I mean it was a pretty rural area then. And there were 13 500 in the dorm and almost a thousand commuters. They actually had base basketball team and stuff because they got junior college graduates to come to uc, Irvine at the same time to finish their last two years.

And so I went there and now it’s 35,000 or 40,000. It’s a beautiful campus and it was the sixties, so it was a weird time. But sometime we got to do some things like we got to find a mascot. And again, it was the sixties so we had to be very different. So we chose the anti RSRs, the Irvine ANRs and this stay, they still have it, if you wanna see a funny Viet video, find a video. It’s called Peter the Anti Eater. It’s done by the, by the soundtrack of of Hamilton. It’s hysterical. But anyway, our campaign, we had to vote our campaign vote for anti eaters and an a mascot for real men.

And it would, the wolves were the other choice. And there was, this guy had this great sense of humor and we chose the anteaters. And it was, and it still is a mascot to this day. And so it was fun. It was fun to be there The first four years they were turbulent times, you know, Vietnam was going on and stuff. But it was a great time. And those fields around, I did some papers on metal vols in the parking lot and they’re 1500 acres. So there was a lot of chaparral.

I saw bald eagle, I saw golden eagles, I saw bobcat right in the property. So, and the cross was a, was a big marsh a while, waterfowl area. So it was a lot of, a lot of things to do there.

So during this time, did any teacher have an effect on your life?

Yeah. How? One they passed me, yes, there were a couple. One was James Murdoch and he taught probably the only course I got an A in, he taught animal behavior, which was one of the last courses that I took. And he was an interesting guy and that was a really good course. And, and there was another teacher, Arthur Bowie was his name. And he had something to do with agriculture or forest in Zimbabwe and he taught plant ecology. And I took that course. So those were two interest. Other than that it was biology, you know, I barely made it. ’cause the last course was biochemistry or something.

It was really difficult. And so somehow I made it through and I had a good, good education I that, that I did some graduate school work in Long Beach State, but was a little easier.

When did you decide that you wanted to work at a zoo?

And were you thinking at the time?

I want to be a zoo director. Probably more of a curator, but pretty early on a zoo director. But yeah, no, I pretty much decided in college that I’d like to work in a zoo. And one of the things that that helped is I got a part-time job and then a full-time job at caring for the animals in the medical school. Uc, Irvine actually bought another medical school. And so now they have a uc. Irvine medical facilities are top notch. And so there was, they, they created a vivarium and they built a medical school on campus on my last year.

And I worked part-time taking care of the mice and the rats. But we had primates and even had some turtles for some reason. I can’t remember why. And so I took care of those and later, you know, I managed a couple of employees at the medical school at the vivarium.

Was was this your first job, your first full-time job?

Yeah, first full-time. I had a lot of jobs during college. I worked in a hardware store, I worked in a Kenny’s shoe store. I did a bunch of things as part-time in the summer. I actually had a job part-time too in, with the city of Newport Beach measuring all the red curbs and signs around the city. So they had ’em all on one map. So that was kind of fun too. Had a lot of interesting part-time jobs. And afterwards in 1972, you now take a job as an animal keeper.

Is this what you wanted your career path and how did this, how’d you get this job?

I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Yeah, I took a test. I applied, I think I applied to other jobs too. San Diego. I applied to whatever jobs were around that time. You didn’t have the network that we have in a ZA now. There was no, you know, job opening, things like that. So I, I tried to talk to people at those zoos and, and, but I remember very clearly that they, somehow I knew about the job opening for animal keepers at Los Angeles and I went to Hollywood High School, 1300 people took the test for animal keepers or something like that. It was, maybe it was 500, but it was a log number.

And because I had been studying animals all my life, basically, I think I got the seventh best score, might have got the best score. But in, when, when in the city jobs, people got 10 extra points if they had been in the military. But, so I was seventh and I know a couple of them that were ahead of me had served Mike d included, you know, had had military credit. So I did not. So I passed the test. I interviewed with Bill Turner, who was assistant director at that time and got the job and really, I was so happy, I couldn’t believe it, but I was still living in Newport Beach, so it was a long commute, but I still did it until I had to give up the lease. And then I moved closer to the zoo.

And what type of zoo did you find when you got to Los Angeles?

Well, let’s see, the zoo would’ve been about five or six years old. And it was a brand new zoo as you might remember. It was really, it wasn’t, we didn’t have zoo architects back then, you know, like we do now. So this was just a fairly famous architect and he built three for any animal. There was like three types of exhibits. That’s it. You have what we called Roundhouses, which you go, the public would go in and there’d be cage three or four cages on the outside. And one exhibit we had paddocks, we were chain link and decompose gran in the middle for Huck. And then we had cement grottos and oh, and then they had a reptile house and a aviary.

So all the exhibits were kind of the same. It didn’t matter if you were a badger or a serval or a be whatever, they were all kind of the same. And so it was kind of a boring type of extra architecture. But it was a good zoo. And because it was new, it had a pretty good collection. Became a lot better when, when Warren Thomas came. But they had an amazing collection of animals. I was first put in the children’s zoo, which was fine and got me some experience and a lot of interesting things happened there.

But I, I really moved around wherever they wanted me because I, again, I tried to stay in graduate school so I could have Tuesday and Thursday off so I could take classes, so, And who was the Jew director when you started?

Chester Hogan. Chester Hogan took the job because he didn’t get, he really wanted the job at the convention bureau, but he got the job as zoo director and a nice enough guy. But he wasn’t a zoo director. And I don’t remember why, I don’t know if he wasn’t, I don’t think he was forced to leave. But they eventually hired after him. Warren Thomas, actually, between Chester Hogan and Warren Thomas. I think Charlie Schroeder came up for six months to fill in until they could hire somebody new. So that was it.

And did you, in your position there, did you interact with the director or curators?

Yeah, yeah, the curator, they were very open and you know, again, I had all the interest in the world. And so I think they appreciated that. There were still a few keepers there that weren’t, in a sense, professional keepers. They might have done a great job of cleaning things, but they didn’t really have interest in animals. And I remember when the children’s zoo, I’m just fascinated, you know, they had a typical rubber, rubber tub of food and it was sweet potatoes in it and I don’t know, dog biscuits or monkey chow, whatever was in it.

And I, I said to the keeper, I said, Don, what are you feeding?

He says, I don’t know what you call it, I just know what it eats. It was a pack, Rana. I mean there was a kind of a rare road in from others. So that’s kind of the level of some, and, but there were also some really smart, there’s again, there wasn’t a lot of co college graduates since Bob Barnes. And a few of us had degrees, but some of ’em really knew how to care for animals. There was a guy named Jack Badal that ended up having his own gorilla Raymar. And Jack was extraordinarily good animal keeper. I mean, thank God I never made any mistakes around him because he kept his place just immaculate and that kind of thing.

And so there was, there was a very, very variety of keepers, curators were very open to, to talk to us. And you know, I knew I wanted to move up. I always, you know, I knew that I’d like to move up, but I was from California and I was from Southern California. So by that time I had had a son. I was divorced by that time, but I had a son, so I needed to stay sort of in the area. But I really did wanna move up. And I studied at Long Beach State and I tried to work in all kinds of areas at the zoo, you know. And so if there was a job in the reptile curator Toledo, I could say, well, I’m a, I’ve worked in the reptile house at Los Angeles, or if it was a other type of management job, I said, oh, I’ve done that before.

So it was, but Los Angeles was a good experience. The collection was phenomenal.

Now you were doing many things at the zoo, You Had many responsibilities or what were your primary responsibilities?

Well, as an animal keeper, I was a relief keeper. And so I, I, I kind of learned as I went around and as I might have mentioned earlier, and maybe not, but Warren Thomas, when he became director, created this position of curator trainee and for six months. And Bob Barnes, who had been there quite a long time at the zoo, he got the first one. But I was able to get the second position and that was really good ’cause it gave me some background in curatorial work. And, and he gave me a lot of responsibilities. You know, one day he just said to me, we have all these Arabian Steven, they’re valuable.

Nobody really has ’em but us in Phoenix and why don’t you see if you can trade some of those for a copy?

So I got on the phone and I didn’t, I wasn’t successful, but I got on the phone and tried to do things like that. But he had me do odd, odd jobs or all research, find out who had this with that and, and that kind of thing. So it was a, it was a great, I’m sure my next job it helped that I had that experience.

Was it a difficult job or in your opinion, was it a job of a lifetime?

You mean being a curator or being a keeper, Being in the zoo, being a keeper with this curatorial experience?

Oh, I think the curatorial, I don’t think it was difficult. I mean, I knew enough about it. I, I just had a lot of fun and I didn’t mind being a keeper. I like hard work and I like working directly with animals. So no, I, I liked all of it and I, I suppose it was a little busy time for me trying to go to school and having a young son that was so many miles away and, and that, but I don’t remember not liking it or having any issues with it.

So Did the, here you are, young guy, did the older keepers resent you that you were an educated?

I think some did. I, I, I don’t know for a fact. Some may have some accepted me. I, I pretty, I get along with most people and and obviously a lot of ’em were older than me, but I, I got along with them, we joked around and stuff. I, I remember one guy got got mad at me ’cause I, I guess I took apart his resting spot. So I went to the, we called them bunkers ’cause that’s what they really were under these round houses. They were maybe five by four foot high by 10 feet long. And that was sort of where you locked them up, where you went in and, and did the cleaning. And I, I’m looking at this place and it was just full of hay, just on the ground, you know, like six inches of hay and all that.

And been there, looked like I’d been there a while. So I just cleaned it all out and chlorine it and everything. Well, the keeper, the, the regular keeper was a little pissed ’cause that’s where he slept. And so, so I, I, I probably ruffled a few feathers there. But no, I actually became a lot of good friends with the older, the younger keeper. And there was a, there was a place that we all had the 10 o’clock coffee break if we were in that area. And we’d go sit and talk to each other and we all made, made, had a, had a lot of fun. I remember there was a guy, Dick, I can’t remember, he is kind of a crusty old, old guy.

But we were sitting there and this nice young lady family comes up and looks at Dick and says, how do we get out of here?

And he looks at her and says, run. So there was a little, I don’t know that they, the keepers were really trained in guest services at that time. But God, it was a great job.

And being, being picked as an associate curator, was this promotion or was it a potential step up to management at Los Angeles?

I don’t know what, you know, I don’t know what Warren Thomas felt about it. I guess he felt try, that’s a way to mentor some of the, the keepers that had that potential. And you know, all of ’em that did it after me, I think it was Russ Smith who worked with reptiles. So all of ’em that did it had maybe had some potential to, to move on and be curators or maybe, maybe just so our appreciation of management would be better. I’m not actually sure why he did it, but he did it. And I was very grateful.

Was when you were promoted to the acting associate curator, was this promotion a step up in the management of Los Angeles that you might go further within the zoo management?

Well, I suppose if there would’ve been openings, I mean, traditionally we had the three curators, birds, mammals, and reptiles. And, you know, none of those people were really gonna leave that quickly. But I think, I think you just wanted to give people a cha chance. And if there was a promotion, I, I’m not sure that anybody went through that program, became curators. Russ Smith may have, I couldn’t remember when Harvey left, but that would’ve been after my time. So I’m not sure he was preparing people for positions in this zoo. Maybe he was, you know, in LA or he was just, he thought it’d be good to have additional training and maybe some background.

So during this period, were you forming your philosophy about Zoom management or did you already have a vision or you had no vision?

You know, I had a vision, but I was actually, somebody sent me the newspaper articles before Warren came. As I said, there’s this guy, Chester Hogan, I think he was a nice guy. I don’t really remember that much, but the zoo, I was so smart. I knew everything that was to know, even been there, you know, being a college graduate and stuff. So there were some issues and some of us, the more educated keepers, but maybe some of the more vocal were really kind of upset about the zoo. And it got into the press and they actually brought in, I can’t remember who it was, but they brought in some, some other zoo directors to look at the zoo. But we were upset, for instance, I I, the one example I remember was there was these dirt hillsides, I mean, they were ODed, they weren’t really a good exhibit. And they had a taper in there that only had a water bucket.

There was no pool. And we had, and I, the other thing in the children’s zoo, we had like six or seven three by two by two foot cages. And each one had a civet or a, or either a civet or a some sort of carnivore. And they, and, and another cage that was about as big as this table, we had a marble cat and they were just in there full time. There was no exhibits for ’em. And so some of us, and there were other issues. So some of us really came out, we actually went to a park commission meeting and raised hell. And so, and I think Axer Hogan invited me to his office and I explained to him what I felt, and I think he told his secretary, pass it on to me. He says, these, these guys aren’t really bad people.

They, they just have some complaints. So it did some good. And anyway, I think, I don’t think he left because of that, but he did leave and then Warren came in a lot of that, that those kind of issues were resolved. But, but it was just my background growing up in the sixties, we’re gonna fix things. We know what’s right.

So did you have, were you forming a philosophy about zoo management then?

Or did you already have a vision?

Well, I think then that helped me. I mean, working in a zoo, I saw, you know, you saw the animals, you saw good and the bad. So, you know, if the space was too small or they were keeping animals behind the scenes for no reason, you know, that kind of was kind of silly. So, so I, I did, and I guess I formed some ideas about how you could make exhibits better and, and that kind of thing. So in 1976 you go and move to the San Francisco Zoo to take a full-time job.

And how does this come about San Francisco When You’re in la Can I go back to, to my idea of forming zoos for a second?

Because it happened when I was at la. So in LA I had saved enough vacation and, and I actually through Warren Thomas, I got names. So I took a Greyhound bus and went to 19 zoos in 30 days on a Greyhound bus. And that’s where I met when we were talking the other day about Lincoln Park and Pat Sass and all that. So, so that maybe gave me an idea what other zoos, ’cause I had all also gone with Mike d to see the zoos in Arizona, but you know, and I’d seen San Francisco, but I wanted to see more. So once I saw 20 zoos or whatever, that gave me some ideas about what, what a good zoo was. So that really, I think those that, and from then on, I’ve been a zoo visitor extraordinaire forever. I’ve seen a lot of zoos and that always has helped me.

And you go to San Francisco in 1976, right?

And you take a test, you talk to pe. How does it happen?

Well, that’s when I met you. I went to a conference when we used to have regional conferences in Sylmar. And when my master’s thesis, which I never really turned in, but I, I didn’t think it was on mother infant behavior of Ur Horn orx. And they accepted me to give that paper in Ilmar. So I gave this paper in Ilmar at my first conference. It was a regional conference by the way, I’ve been a member of a ZA, which was az you know, pa, the ZBA, I’ve been since 1972. So I, then I started seeing ads of other jobs and stuff. So I went to Ella Lamar and I gave the talk and I think there, I interviewed for the children’s zoo manager, my name Landis Bell had left.

It was leaving and going to a deer park in, in southern California. So the opening to the children’s zoo manager job in San Francisco. So I saw that and I was interviewed and I came up to San Francisco at one time and, and interviewed for the job there and, and got it. So then that was in management as Children’s Zoo in San Francisco, was a separate zoo in a sense. Took its own admission and it was run by the Zoo society. The Zoo Society ran education concessions in the children’s zoo. And the, the main zoo was a part of the city of San Francisco, which our friends saw Kitchener by then was the director of that zoo. And I lived in the zoo in an apartment because there was a baby animal nursery.

And Saul lived on the other side in a, in a house.

And what were your, what kind of zoo did you find when you got to San Francisco?

The zoo itself? Well, it had some older exhibits too. Now my part was just the children’s zoo, but, but of course at night I walked around the zoo. I had a great time. In fact, I jogged, I used to do my running route around the zoo. So it was, it was fun. But the zoo had some older exhibits. I i, I always remember thinking about when I think of San Francisco, one exhibit was Monkey Island, I think about that because it was a backdrop for, for a scene from the graduate. And they had a lot of spider monkeys on there. They had bar grottos in one area and hoofstock. And when I, when I was there, they eventually got koalas.

They built a wolf wilderness exhibit. They eventually built a big gorilla exhibit. So there was some changes on its way, even the years that I spent there. Now, I wasn’t responsible for any of those, I was responsible for the children’s zoo. However, I was responsible for two other things. The carousel ride, because the society ran that and also the seal pool because the society ran the seal pool because we sold fish to feed the animals. So I had those, those responsibilities also. And then the children’s zoo, I think we had a staff of three or four full-time keepers that were not part of the main zoo, but they were paid for by the society, but they were in the same union and they got the same salaries as, as the keepers in the main zoo.

Had a good group of people that i, I got to work with. I was really glad to do that.

And you mentioned you physically lived in the zoo?

I did because there was a nursery. And one of the things that I did, I guess it’s one of the things I’m most proud at about, so I’d inherited this children’s zoo that had goats and things. And then they had a few cages, like of a raccoon. We had a snowy owl and another cage. We had a Guinea pig exhibit. We had a small coyote exhibit. Eventually they created an insect zoo associated with it and also a, a nature trail that the education run where they would sit out with turtles and, and kind of thing. So, and it had a, it originally had a fairytale down theme, but everything was taken out except the castle, which you walk through. But I had a unique responsibility, this fell on my lap.

So we were set up to raise baby animals if needed to in an animal nursery. And I don’t know, soon after I arrived and I had all that experience from the children’s zoo in San Francisco where I worked, I’m sorry, in Los Angeles where I worked most of the time. So I knew about raising baby animals a little bit anyway. And so somehow after I arrived, we, we got a, a baby orangutan was born in the zoo that had to be hand raised. So all of a sudden I had orangutan that I had to hand raise. So I’m going, well, I don’t, I don’t wanna spend seven days a week, 24 hours a day taking. So I created a volunteer program, which was very easy to do. I would say they were mostly women, but it wasn’t all women.

So I had three shifts of people that would come in to the children’s zoo from, from the start of my start until, until I left. You know, one was like from eight o’clock to 11, one was from noon to four and one was from five to nine at night. And they came in and helped take care of the baby animals. In the case of the orangutans, it was a lot of work. But right after that orangutan came, there was one born in Sacramento that had to be hand raised. So Bill Meer brought it down to San Francisco. So all of a sudden we had two orangutans. And over my career there, we had a servo, we had a spider monkey, we had a taper, we had a number of baby animals that had to be raised.

But setting up that program was sure gen A genius on my part. ’cause I wasn’t, now, occasionally I would do it myself, you know, at Christmas time or something when somebody can, but I had no, those women, mostly women were very good. If they were on vacation or something, they’d get somebody else and they all, I trained them all, you know, so they were all so, but they would take care of them themselves. And it was a, it was a great program and all the staff could take care of ’em too if somehow volunteered didn’t show up or something. But it was a, it was a good program for at that. Are you thinking this is a stepping stone to ultimately what I want to do, which was, I think at that time I thought I wanted to be a zoo director, you know, and so I, but I applied for a lot of different jobs, I think, can’t remember back then, but I, I, I applied for other jobs, but I don’t think I got any until I, the Sacramento one. But San Francisco certainly prepared, prepared me for a lot. And it was, it was a good experience.

And again, working, being in the management team of the zoo society, you had the development people, you had the concessions people, XO yang, he was, you know what he chow taught me one thing, how to count money. You always, you always take your money and you put it in orders, you know, the face up, you have to keep ’em all in order and all the way like that. He was very meticulous about that. I’ve always done that on my wallet. And, and then we had the Laura LaMarca, it was the education person. So we were the, might have been some, there might have been another person involved, but that was the management team of the zoo society. And so those were important functions. And so, and so I, we were at staff meetings all the time and it also gave me the opportunity to go on my first safari.

So I can’t say enough good things about. And I worked a lot. I mean, Saul and I were friends in the sense, I mean, he was a director. I, he was a great guy and it was nice to have to, he’d invite me to the house for dinner once in a while and stuff. And it was, it was really nice to have him there too.

So now from San Francisco, you make a bigger move in 1981 to a director position, what prompts you to leave San Francisco?

Is this part of a plan?

I don’t know if it was a plan, but it was a great opportunity. I did a lot with San Francisco. I think that gave me some notoriety. Your former boss, Les Les Fisher and, and people in a ZA wanted to create an infant diet notebook. And I always made the editor of that. And what I did, it wasn’t before computers and everything, I just had people that had raised a baby animal write a one page report.

It was a form, you know, what did you feed it?

How often did you, it was very simple. And if you had any references that way people, if they had a taper, they could go to that and say, oh, mark Rosenthal always a taper. I could call him and find out more. So it was good. So I was the editor of that sort of notebook. I think that gave me some a ZA notoriety. So the job in Sacramento came up. I knew a little bit about the job and I applied, I guess I applied, obviously did some interviewing and stuff.

But I also think Steve Graham, where was Steve Graham at the time?

I don’t know if he was in Detroit, but he was somewhere and he actually, I think he was in Detroit and he thought California would be great. And so he looked into the job. The, the city manager was named Walter Sle. And he had interviewed the job and he decided, no, it’s too small of a zoo. I don’t wanna leave Detroit for the small zoo in Sacramento. But, and Walter asked him about if he knew anybody else. I said, I think you should hire Steve Taylor. And so I went and interviewed and then got the job, which was, I, now, now I really felt I dod me.

I had my own zoo and I was a zoo director and at 34 years old or whatever. And I, that was pretty cool.

What kind of, who did you find? Sacramento?

12 acres small. Had a nice little administration building and had pretty good animal collection, pretty good animal. It had giraffes, it had elephants, wallaroos Eland with ostrich. Had a nice primate collection. It had chimps in the world’s office. Awful world’s most awful chain link exhibit you could see. Had orangutans and gorillas. Had an, had a fairly new reptile house.

It was fairly modern, a very good collection of reptiles, including a lot of venomous reptiles and then some mishy mhy cages around, had cheetah, had a cheetah yard too. So I mean for a small 12 acre zoo to have cheetah, have, you know, various endangered cats, had great horn bills, actually bred great horn bills. So it had, and, and at the entrance, like elza zoos, it had a really nice flock of flamingos. So it was exhibit wise, it was very nice. It had no education, had great veterinary services because they had the service of one of the most famous exotic animal veterinarians of all. Murray Fowler, who was quite a gentleman. I learned a lot from Murray Fowler on how to be a person as well as how to take care of animals. And so it was good. We had no curator.

We had a staff of 10 or 11 animal keepers. We had a staff of two maintenance people. And that was it, I think.

And the director you replaced, did you interact with them?

Yeah, bill Meer. Bill Meer was president of a ZA and he’s the one that gave me the assignment to do the infant diet notebook. And Bill went on to, on to a private place up in the foothills of the Sierras. And, but he had been in the zoo business for a long time and so I, it was good.

What were your priorities in the new position To make it better?

It had a lot of small cages, but it also had some single animals, single gorilla. So, and it had some exhibits that just weren’t acceptable. I think they had two penguins in a pit and had some maybe one seal left in a, a pool. So those things, first of all, we got the gorilla sent to San Diego. So we, we emptied out that, and about the same time they were also, it was almost three quarters built, was a new, I shouldn’t say a new, but a renovated tiger and lion exhibit. It had a nice wooden trellis in front of it and it was expanded a little bit. They basically filled in the moat so the exhibit would be bigger and put up wire. And so they were much nicer exhibits.

And that was finished when I was there. And then they had already started the design of an outdoor ranu, a better orangutan exhibit. So when we got rid of the gorillas, we could put the rings in this, well we could, didn’t matter about the gorillas, but we could build bit the, or orangutans outside. We had to value engineering. And it was a big cage at one time, but we couldn’t afford that. So we did a motor exhibit for orangutans and, and that was pretty good. And so we did that. And again, getting, getting, improving the collection but also simplifying and get rid of single animals was, was kind of important.

But yet your tenure at the zoo as director is relatively short.

Why did you decide to leave?

Well, let me go back a little bit and talk a little bit more about Sacramento and what I was most proud of. The city of Sacramento, like any city, the money was difficult. But again, I had a very supportive boss, Bob Thomas and act actually a supportive city council and county council. So we raised money to build these exhibits. So when I was there, we finished the lion and tiger exhibit, we built an orangutan exhibit. We took the old grotto for gorillas and orangutans and made a big cage for chimps. So we did all that While I was there. We also got Jane Goodall to come and give a talk and raise some money for, for chimps.

So, and we did a lot of smaller things too. We took the, the chain link fence around the flamingos. I know you and I were talking at lunch about little moats they do for, for camels in Europe. But we took down this fence. I just made a mound of African daisies around and with a couple of railroad ties. So it was all very open. So we did a lot of nice things. But the big thing we were able to do, again with the support of Bob Thomas and some engineers. And we grew the society from a volunteer organization of it might have had a thousand members to one that had like five or 6,000 members.

When I, when I left, we also went from 300,000 to 600,000 guests. We, and then I’ll tell you why I moved in a minute. But when we were doing a master plan and all this, what we were able to do, we were able to go to city council and said if we re, if we increase our fees from $3 to $6 for adult, I’m just giving an example, it might have not been like that.

Could we use half the money to expand the staff?

We did that about three times. And so that’s when we got a curator. So we were able to add a curator to the staff. So we then had to keepers report to a curator and, and then we were able to, then the society kept growing. ’cause we grew, our membership grew. So on the society side, we were able to create an education department. We took over the concessions from a private concessionaire by the way, when we, when we went into his concession stand, we found money stashed in freezers and all kinds of places. It was hysterical. And, and we were able to create an education department and then run our own concessions and then hire a marketing person.

So it was quite an expansion of the staff and we were able to do much more. That’s why the attendance screws and everything else. But then we did a master plan and we probably should have had more of the neighborhood involved around the park and I’m not sure it would’ve changed anything. But anyway, they formed a group save land park. It was sort of anti zoo expansion and they eventually won out. So the zoo was never, never able to expand. And as you know, just this year or last year, they’ve tried to move it to Elk Grove and that’s fine. They came to an end. So they’ve, since I’ve left many times, they tried to make the zoo larger and were unsuccessful.

So it’s still a 12 right now. It’s still a 12 acre zoo. But your tenure is shorter. Yeah. And you make that decision to leave because, Well, we weren’t gonna have I, well it was almost a no brainer I’d said, other than the fact that I was a Californian and going to Cleveland, Ohio. I knew, I knew Cleveland was in Ohio. I didn’t know it was on a lake and until I flew over. So it was a big move. As I said, I had a son and who was just finishing high school. And, but it was a, it was a big zoo and it was a chance to be in the big time and the zoo wasn’t gonna expand.

And I did what I could do really. And I loved it. I loved Sacramento. I would’ve, if we could have done a little bit more expansion, I would’ve probably stayed there forever. I loved the city, I loved who I worked for. And, but it was just a small zoo. And they came, I got recruited a guy named Dave Lauder back from corn. It was Korn Ferry at the time was a recruiting. And he interviewed me at the mill. They interviewed me at the Milwaukee conference and then invited me out to come interview in in Cleveland, which I did.

And then they came a group of ’em, the Sioux Society president, the the Metro Parks director, the commissioner they came to, to Sacramento and interviewed me there and walked around the zoo and saw me interact with staff and stuff. And somehow they decided I was the guy. So they hired me and I moved 19 81, 19 88. I started in January 2nd, 1989. 89. I didn’t start on the first ’cause they didn’t wanna pay me for the holiday. But I, I got there, I have to tell you one other parts of the story and one of the reasons I stayed in Cleveland. So I’m going home to Sacramento after my interview there in the zoo. And I get on this plane, I’m going, my god, what do I’m going to, I mean, it’s a big zoo, it’s really kind of screwed up, but maybe I could do some good there.

This young lady came and sit next to me. So I started a conversation with her and I’m yaking away.

What’s it like? How bad is the snow?

I mean, what kind of clothes do you wear?

Is there restaurants? So what do you do?

And three and a half years later we were married. So, and she’s from Ohio. And so that, that’s one of the reasons I stayed. And so I got there and, and yeah, there was a lot of, they had started this thing called the rainforest. It looked like it was this geodesic dome on top of an old factory with a bunch of glass out front, strangest looking building ever built in a zoo. And I thought, well, maybe we could put some palm trees in front of it. I didn’t know how to do anything in the snow, but, but obviously we couldn’t do that. But, so it was up not complete.

You know, the roofs were mostly on it. Long as story short, it took three and a half years to finish. But we made it really an acceptable exhibit. It went from $10 million to like 35 million or something at the time we finished.

And so the, so you’ve seen an old time zoo when you come there?

Yeah, quite a bit. The rainforest was gonna change it. I don’t know if I knew that at first. The rainforest changed the whole thing. ’cause it was the first, I shouldn’t say totally, they had some okay exhibit. It was this first modern exhibit. It really had a tight theme, lot of endangered species. But it really turned a zoo around. It went from, we went from 800,000 guests to 1.3 million the first year.

So really turned the zoo around. We did a lot of other things to turn the zoo around in that time too. But that was a, that was a biggie. And again, had, it wasn’t just me either. We had complete support from the park commission and from my boss, the executive director of Metro Parks, they were all involved in doing it. Right. The, even actually just before I got there, Don Zer was there and he recommended a guy named Tony Shiley who worked for Larson, the rock construction guy. And he came in and redesigned the whole thing, retook it from, I mean it was all up. But he made us, instead of going in the bottom, you took stairs and went upstairs first, took three primate cages and made ’em into one.

Took the crocodile exhibit instead of looking down into a pool, we went down and put glass in front. So you see the things underwater and I mean, so many changes we had in a restaurant to it. There was no elevator. We had an el public elevator to it. I mean it was, it was the most ill-conceived. They had no zoo architect at the beginning. And don tried to do good things to it, but it was just him. And so finally it’s, it’s completely changed it.

So was this by virtue of this building your first priority?

Yeah. Or or Oh absolutely. Are You thinking of other things?

Well, thinking of staff, I have to add, the reason I got the job in Vern Hardenberg, my boss got the job, nine people lost their job in scandal. If you wanna go to a new organization and be successful, have the people before you be crooks and be a scandal. ’cause you could do nothing wrong. And we were all very honest people. So, but these guys, five, nine people lost their job. Stupid little things like the director of parks had his, had the, the parks visual communication or graphics people do invitations for his daughter’s wedding, those kind of little things, you know, or they, different little things like that. The, the, the zoo director had a employee Coke machines and candy machines and without any accounting, he just took the money. I don’t think he spent it on himself.

But then he said he used it for pizza parties, for the staff and stuff, but there was no accounting of it. He just took the money and then went in. So a lot of people lost their jobs. And so it was all new metro parks, not so much the zoo, but Metro Parks had a whole new staff by the time I got there.

Now when you come in, you have already started to think about philosophies of management or were you forming them as you were looking?

Oh, I, I, from the time I was probably in San Francisco, I read a lot of management books all, all my life. And again, as I mentioned, one time Pa Peggy Burkes at the San Francisco got us trained in management by objectives. So I, I knew about planning and how to organize your day and all that. So I had some basics, but I kept learning more and more things. Like there was, there’s just times I wasn’t the best. But I, you know, I, I tried and I tried to learn things too. I was, I was somewhat, my management style has probably changed a little bit, but not enough in a sense. If you take any of the Myers-Briggs tests, if I took ’em 20 years ago too, I took ’em now.

I still had some of the same negatives and some of the same positives. You know, I, I’ve never been a good listener and my wife can tell you that, but, so I, at least I knew my faults and tried to deal with them as I could.

Well, just because you bring it up, how would you describe your management style?

Well, I think I was pretty good at communicating, but I, and I was decisive, but some people could say that I was somewhat cool. I wasn’t always open to all kinds of suggestions. I was judgemental maybe. And you know, I brought something, I am gonna fucking find it here a minute, I’m gonna read you this. So I retired and Kristen Lucas, who I love was our conservation director and she wrote this about, about what she learned from Steve Taylor Kristen’s note, be distinct. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Pick up trash, care about individual people. Be an understanding boss.

Arrive early, travel to Africa as much as you can. Have fun with your friends. Show emotion, conserve with the big C that we’ll talk about later, love your spouse, et cetera. So I thought that was a pretty good description maybe of my man. I think she was being way too kind. She probably could have said a couple other things too. But you know, that was pretty much my management management’s about, yeah, I think they would say probably not a really good listener. I don’t know about showing emotion.

I’m not sure I showed emotion. I don’t think I had enough empathy. I wished I would’ve been a better mentor, although a lot of the people that worked with me have been promoted to other jobs and stuff. So I guess I was, if I didn’t go right out and say I’m mentoring you, do this and that. I guess I did it by example maybe. ’cause a lot of ’em had been including Chris Kuhar who took over my position. He worked there for a number of years and obviously became director and some, some keepers and stuff have gone to other zoos and become curators. So I guess I was successful at that.

Did, at the zoo, were there vol, we say docent, but volunteer programs?

Yeah. When you came there, were they important to you to maintain?

Why I, I just think it added to our education program primarily. During my, when I was first hired, I came a couple times moving in and stuff. And I remember my, my boss at the time said, Hey, the, the volunteers are having their Christmas party go to it. So that was kind of fun. I got to meet a lot of the volunteers at that time. And again, they were all docents at that time. A trained, you know, they had a 12 week training program like AOT Zoos had. So no, I thought they were very important.

And since I’m one now and roving ambassador, I think they’re really important. They had a lot as, as when I go around and walk around and I do my four mile walk, I, I talk to maybe 200 people at times if it’s a nice day. And they always really seem to appreciate that extra information. Whether it’s knowing the name of the animal or, or some, something about the animal that they, they have or they ask a question, whatever. I think it’s really adds to the education program and adds to a friendly face. I walk through the zoo, I say hello to everybody. I pass, hello, I hope you’re having a good day.

Can I give ’em directions?

And I think that really adds to the experience that people have.

Do they know your former director?

No. Well some do. A couple do I should say, but most don’t, no. Now if I get in a long conversation, I might talk to ’em about it just for fun to see what the reaction is. But for the most part, no. And I don’t need him to know.

When you’re talking to him about exhibits and so forth, do you believe or should all newly constructed exhibits incorporate a conservation conclusion?

Well, not all probably, but most I think in different ways. Again, they could talk about some of the issues with human wildlife conflict or lack of loss of space, or whatever the particular issue is with that species or, or climate change or whatever that have, that might have an effect on the overall population. Now, I, I would hope most, most would have some sort of conservation message. The relationship of the Jews and aquariums with animal dealers has changed dramatically during your career.

What do you see as the cause of this change, and how has the role of individual dealers and companies changed with respect to the development of zoos?

I don’t know if there is any dealers anymore. I’m not aware of ’em. There might be. I, we don’t need dealers. We, we talk amongst ourselves. Occasionally we can import from Europe or outside. So I don’t think dealers are necessary except there. There also is, and I can forget what the, the company is while animal transport or something, the veterinarian at Akron Zoo runs a transport company. So we do need people that can move animals around. Now, if it’s a short distance, the zoos has trucks and stuff, or we put things on airlines.

But it is really helpful to have really trained professionals that can move animals. I think that’s really important. But as far as dealers are concerned, I don’t see a need for ’em at all. And It was different In the old days, we didn’t have computers and we didn’t have the way to get ahold of people as quick. We didn’t have the, the inventory systems. Now that the curators, you know, the curators now know where the animals are and where the SSPs and who has ’em and who’s the expert in them. And can usually find that out himself. By the way, I, one of the other questions we talked about, I think the curators today have the most difficult jobs in the zoo. They gotta be everything. You gotta be scientists.

They have to understand where to get animals. They have to be, have good soft skills. They have to understand pr, they have to work with unions. There’s just so much that a curator has to do now. Plus, in a sense, they got the worst job in the world because you’re middle management.

What could be worse than middle management?

You get it from the top, you get it from the bottom. So I think the curator job is, is really, really a difficult job, particularly nowadays. When we asked so much more of them wasn’t just when you and I started, you know, they were just responsible for getting animals and stuff and yeah, they had keepers, but it, it wasn’t really a problem. Now, now the keepers are primarily smarter and better trained than a lot of curators. So it’s a different kind of soft skill. You need to work with a really educated staff that I think you agree to. It’s a very difficult job.

Can you talk about your philosophy of mixed exhibits?

Oh, I think they’re, they’re great when they work. Warren Thomas was a champion. He put you a lot of baboons in with chimps and you know, a lot of people have put Spectacle Bear or Andy and Bears with arctic foxes, not Arctic Fox with other, with Tates or something. So when they work, they’re really good and they work, especially in an African setting, giraffe and ostrich and that kind of thing. It really, I think it add, you’re talking about the wildness, you know, I think that can add to the wildness. Now again, sometimes they don’t work. One of the best ones I got rid of, it was the best mixed animal exhibited ever. We had white rhinos and cheetah together.

It was, it worked wonderful. It was great. They both, you know, they ignored each other. It was, no rhino wasn’t gonna attack a cheetah. She had no interest in the rhino. It was wonderful. Only reason we got rid of it. It wasn’t a good exhibit for white rhino. We couldn’t have the numbers or the space. So we went to black rhinos and I just was a little wary of putting black rhinos with cheetahs.

I thought they might wanna play with them a little too much. So we never did it. Well, let’s see. Animal shows as I, well, we had a, when I was there, we had several, we had at least two all every day in the summer, we had a show in an amphitheater. Free flying Birds always had a theme to it. It was called, at one time it was called Dr. Zoo Little, but I think San Diego had that title and they didn’t want us to use it. So then it was called Professor Zoo or something. And so they came out with a chalkboard and then they did all the flying birds and we had some animals that one of the best things was to take out a big snake, have the kids come up as a tree and do that kind of thing.

So it was pretty simple, but it was, it was always a message, always a conservation message. But it was done with good humor. Plus we had a guy that was trained in SeaWorld. He was very good. He’s now the animal ambassador person at the Natural History Museum. So that was good. And then in Australia we had a small stage. We did some of the same things with some of the Australian animals. So I like animal shows. And if you take care of the ambassador animals well in an A ZA, we have standards.

They’re never gonna have the same experience, the animal that they would in an exhibit. But you can make it not the same, but you could make it equal, in other words, ’cause they get interactions with people, they get outside, they do other types of activities other than just being exhibits. So I don’t have any problem with ambassador animals that say, I don’t think you, you’re gonna have super exotics or things. I think some zeuss still use cheetahs. It’s okay. I know cheetahs can be used very well as long as they don’t, that particular cheetah isn’t needed for the breeding program or something. So I like that. I, I like ambassador animals. Again, I, the, the zoos that I’ve seen recently are taking really good care of their ambassador animals have nice, spacious rooms and, and appropriate settings for ’em.

And what was the other part of the question?

Animal counters. Yeah, we, you know, giraffe feeding anytime you can, if you can get, a lot of that happens behind the scenes with special donors and stuff. You can’t have, you can’t have the whole zoo go behind the scenes and have an animal encounters. But we can take donors in the Rhino Barn, for instance, and they stay back and, and that’s a wonderful thing to do with donors. You can’t take the general public back. There’s just not the room and the, the time to do all that. But you can certainly do those kind of things with donors and it really does it, it, it’s a great lesson. It’s a great experience. And then you get to meet the keeper and find out how good the keeper knows the animals and all that.

It’s a very positive experience.

Ask the director, how well did you embrace the role of development?

What you mean fundraise? Fundraising?

Fundraising. Well, I was involved a lot in both Sacramento and Cleveland. We always had professional development staff, but they used to, I was part of the show and tell and talked to ’em more about the animals and the new exhibits or the new programs. We were trying to raise money for. Some of them, a lot of them, their donors went to Africa with me. So I knew a lot of the people. I was involved in the community in Leadership Cleveland and Positively Cleveland, which is a visitor’s bureau. So I knew a lot of the movers and shakers in town and they sort of knew me. So if they wanted a tour, I was usually involved.

Not always, sometimes the Ze Society would go take ’em on their own, but I try, I was available to them when they needed me and, and I had no problem with it and learned to be really good. And some of the larger donations from the Spillman who had matrix hair care products and the bigger Dona and, and Billy Steffy who passed away. But her, she donated the money to start the hospital and we became very close and she and I liked each other. And I think those relationships helped and helped the zoo raise money. And now I have to say they’re raising a lot of money in Cleveland and they’ve taken Chris, who are the director and they’ve appointed a COO. So he has a COO now that does a lot of things that I used to do because they need Chris to raise money, you know, that has to be more of his job than it was in the, in, in my past. So, but because they’re trying to raise a hundred million dollars and that 20 or whatever. So it’s a, it’s a bigger part of a zoo director’s job. Now.

Did you ever have any surprise donations?

I wouldn’t say total surprises, but, you know, we met these people and they said, okay, yeah, that sounds great. And then give us a million dollars type or $2 million maybe. It was a big gift back then. So the, the amount was a surprise. I don’t, didn’t have anybody that just came in and said here. I think Billy Stuffy might have been a surprise owner in a sense that said she might have talked to Dr. Lewandowski or something, but came up and said, I’d like you to build a hospital. It wasn’t our next project in line, but it soon became our next project in line.

’cause we needed a hospital. It just wasn’t one that was the next one in our mind. But when she said that and gave a nice lead donation, we went with it and it turned out to be very successful.

What were some of your strategies to get the community to embrace the zoo?

Well just not do stupid things and get in trouble, but we were all, one of the strategies we had is we never, if something bad happened, an animal died or whatever. We, we were right out in, we got in front of the story, not behind it. We, when I got to the zoo, they had a very bad press relations. One was over the rainforest that nobody could understand this building and why it was delayed and why it was gonna cost $10 million. And a couple animals that we got on a tray from China had died. And I, and there was a re an investigative reporter, Ted Whaling, I think his name was, and he was really trying to catch the zoo doing stupid things. And, but the zoo was, I think, hiding things. I think the zoo in Metro Parks was not open with the press.

And we basically invited the press in and tried to include him on everything. And we particularly, again, I mentioned it shortly after, maybe a year or two after I was there, we got this outstanding marketing director, Sue Allen. And she was, she knew by first name, every TV station person, every cameraman. She knew everybody. And we were very open with that. Now Sue would do most of the PR and most of the things, but if there was an issue, say a kangaroo got hurt by the train or something, she’d always bring me and I would, you know, if it was a big issue, I would always be the one to talk, but she’d tell me what to say. So I think it’s just important to be open and honest with the present. Don’t, don’t tell them, find out anything. You get in front of the story and at the same time tell the park commission and, and your governing authority, tell the zoo society ahead of time before you get out with any story.

And your relationship with the Zoo Society, they were big help to the zoo. Oh yeah. And both Sacramento and Cleveland, and they both grew tremendously. When I was there. I wasn’t the main person, but I certainly was pushing it. And the Zeus Society in Cleveland, for example, was two and a half people. The head of it was called as executive secretary. And now the head is the CEO President of the Zoo Society. And they have like 24 people and they’re raising a lot of money. And so it grew at the time and, and we were very encouraged.

Now there’s always the zoos, when we talk about LA or Lincoln Park and it’s old days, there’s always some tension between the two groups. PR primarily over sponsorships or something because Metro Parks as a park district sometimes had a sponsorship that, you know, maybe did their hiking trails or something in the Zeus Society. So we tried never to ask the same company for the same, come at ’em from two different ways. So we tried to coordinate that and I think we were pretty successful and we were able to do that without lot of harm. First of all, it’s hard to explain Metro Parks as a, you know, as this independent park agency in the Zoo society. It’s, it’s always a hard relationship to explain to the general public. And so that took some doing at times too and race relation to fundraising. You know, most people knew the zoo because it was Cleveland Metro Park Zoo.

Not everybody, but people knew that it was part of Metro Parks. But so why do you, I’m paying my taxes.

Why do I need to donate to the zoo?

That’s always an issue when you have a public zoo with a nonprofit support group. But we were, we were able to answer that question, well, we make, makes a good zoo better if you give us money, you know, type thing. So I think we were pretty successful at that.

Has zoo education, in your opinion, make any headway in educating the public and the differences between the wellbeing of a creature and the survival of a species?

Yeah. Yeah. I, I’m not sure. I mean, I, I would like to think people, well I would like to think people come to the zoo and start to understand a little bit more about conservation of species and conservation of wildlife and wild places. Not everybody, but some people. And I think it makes a difference, as we talked about, as people are with our quarters for conservation program, some of their emission goes to conservation and they get to choose, they get a little green coin, plastic coin, and they can come and right at the, as they’re walking through, they’ve paid for a ticket, they’ve shown their ticket, they can, they can choose one of six projects, giraffe, rhino turtles. And, and I think that gives them a way, oh, this is actually giving money to, to help species in the wild. So I think they get the idea of that On different preparation. You talked about details and stuff.

How does the zoo, how did you have the zoo prepare for natural weather disasters?

Did you have to deal with any Oh yeah, yeah. Well, a ZA has mandatory yearly drills. It can’t be tabletop drills of the areas and weather, animal escape, et cetera, et cetera. The weather one that we had was flooding. We have a stream that comes right through the zoo. It actually, it goes underground in the zoo and comes out. So it comes in one end of the zoo and goes in a culvert out by the rainforest in a culvert. And if, if the water we, we’ve controlled it better now, but if the wa if it really rains hard, those culverts can fill up and back up.

And once the water backs up, a lot of times, because logs and stuff come to the culvert. But once it backs up on those culvert, then the water comes over the top and actually goes right down between monkey island and Africa and goes out a gate. Now if the gates close, it just knocks the gate down as it done in the last 20 years, probably six times. So, and the hospital and all the animal exhibits are up a little bit so that they don’t flood, but the water comes down and takes out landscaping and that kind of thing. So that’s the thing we had to prepare for the most. The first one for me was in May of 89. And I get a call at four in the morning from Don Zer. He says, well, every zoo director has had a flood and this is yours.

I get out there starting to get light at six in the morning. Di the flood water had gone down a lot. And then the back step of the rainforest, which is about as high as this loading dock was about like this table, there was a tart carp about this long on the back going, you know, make, trying to breathe and stuff. So the water came up quite high, but it didn’t get into the rainforest, but it came up. But, and one of the controversies and kinda silly, the rainforest was built in the floodplain or was, it was a building there already, but it was renovated in there. And so we had to put a big flood wall completely around the rainforest, which was another couple million dollars. So it had gates on, flood gates on it and everything. So, yeah.

Now you mentioned also animal escapes. How did you prepare for animal escapes and did you have any We never had a dangerous animal out that I can remember. I think we had a a a a throws deer out once, but it jumped back in the, in the mode exhibit. We had a gorilla that got out in the hallway in the basement of the, the rain, the cat and primate building. And, but we were able to get down through the cage and we were able to dart it. The interesting thing about that, that I didn’t think about, and we changed it right after that, was the back door of that area was, was like a fire, a door. You just push it and it goes out. And that gorilla could have done that somehow.

Our park ranger knew to park his truck in front of that door. He just pulled it up to the door so the door couldn’t be shut out. So, but as far as a, a dangerous animal escape or any other animal escape, I, I don’t remember any. We were very lucky. But you had to prepare for that emergence. We did. We, we did the drills. They do a lot of drills and always in, remember we’re a big zoo, so you’ve gotta move the drill around. Sometimes it’s in wilderness tracks, sometimes it’s grillers, sometimes it’s lions, you know, you gotta, but everybody’s involved and it, and it’s the A ZA requires, it’s a written report on how you did it and who participated and stuff.

And even the volunteers are all trained. I get a volunteer newsletter that says this month they’re doing an escape drill for cheetahs. Be aware. And they tell us what we’re supposed to do all the time. You’re supposed to make sure you’re safe and get the public to safety if you can, but don’t participate, you know, so, so it’s very good. It’s done very well. It’s all handled on radios. And so the zoo is very prepared. But you know, the zoos have been prepared in the past and still had problems. Dallas had gorillas and chimps out, you know, and they had a great ex, Dallas Zoo had this great video about animal escapes and how, what the police department was supposed to do.

And, and you know, they trained the police, they had the police department come in and all that. And lo and behold, they had a gorilla get out and the police came in and shot it. They didn’t do anything that was on the drill. And so you best plans sometimes don’t always work. But I was fortunate. I, I always say I was very fortunate and two things that I wanted to do in my career, not get anybody seriously hurt. I was damn lucky I did. That didn’t happen and never get fired.

And I was really damn lucky that didn’t happen. So I feel I had a successful career. We talked about conservation.

Have any of your conservation programs that you wanted to do had difficulties in getting off the ground and why?

Well, I don’t know that any of ’em did have difficulty that we, we really got involved with. I mean, it’s easy to give people money. So I, I don’t know that we did the zoo’s really, really involved now in, in gorillas. And they’re doing very well with funding a lot of gorilla projects, including the Diane Fosse Visitor Center. And I think Kristen Lucas is there at least four times a year. So along with colleagues from around the country, I would say this, if we had difficulty with a project, we’d go to another project. There’s plenty of projects to choose from. I mean, it’s a big collection.

We had a lot of endangered species, a lot of species that could use money. So if we ever any problem, we would just go to another project. But most of ’em are very successful. I love supporting Charles Foley’s Elephant research in Tara and Gary. One ’cause I love Africa. And two, because he did such a great job over 30 years of documenting the lives of elephants, finding out that there was a drought in somewhere like 93. And when there was another drought, the, the, the herds with young females died, a lot of them died. The, the ones with older females lived because they knew where the water was from the last drought.

He probably, I mean you can’t prove that, but that apparently statistically that worked out well. So he found out a lot about following certain elephants for 20 years. He learned a lot about elephants in their societies. He could, he could not by, he had little cards with pictures of elephants. I think he identified two or 300 elephants that he could follow and what babies they had and stuff. It was a great, and we supported his project for for years. Yeah.

Now when you were doing the exhibits and putting them together, what staff did you include in the development of these exhibits?

Well, we had everybody including our park commission and my boss. But we had keepers involved and, and veterinarians involved at some level. I don’t know if they came to every meeting, but certainly everybody was. And you know, we put, we put the plans out there and let anybody look at ’em as we were going on. Obviously, you know, a big project has five construction steps from conception to design development to the actual thing. It doesn’t mean we didn’t make any mistakes even along the way, but we tried to let everybody look at it. We had a basic concept and everybody kind of bought off, okay, our next exhibit’s gonna be elephants. We wanted as big as we could, we, we needed to protect.

We had, we were converting an old building, we needed to protect the ceiling. So there’s a lot of things that, a lot of details. We had great architects were very helpful and in that case we had a good contractor too. I love design, I hate construction. Construction is gets nasty. Everybody, architects blame kinda contractor. Contractor or blames the zoo. So it can be, it can be somewhat argumentative.

But we, we worked through everything and there were some shouting matches between groups, but we, from the staff level, we included everybody including the Zeus society that was part of the funders. So at least you know, the land management of the Zeus society and in some cases even the board of directors of the Zoo Society, we shared all the plans with them and having them deeply involved.

Did you sometimes find yourself, you call value engineering?

Maybe it’s a different word building, designing the Cadillac. But building the Chevrolet, I wouldn’t go that far. I think we designed somewhere between a Cadillac and a Chevrolet and kind of maybe did, did a really nice Chevrolet. I don’t know. You know, i I, I don’t know what a Cadillac would be of an exhibit. I mean there’s nothing that’s perfect, you know, or nothing that’s so ma so great that it’s sticks out. But yeah, I think we built good exhibits. We did certainly cut pieces out, but they, you know, if you had, as I was talking I think at lunch, but so on the original elephant we had hippos, which is a whole great story I should share ’cause we had this hippo that was like 50 years old, but we just took the hippo exhibit out.

So did that make it less of an exhibit?

Maybe, but it just wasn’t necessary. So when we took the hippo out of the old elephant exhibit, we, we built him a hippo condominium in the giraffe barn. We were expanding the giraffe barn anyway, so we just built with a pool where he retired for three years. He went right into it. So he was in retirement because nobody was gonna take a 50-year-old hippo. So we had to find a place for him and it worked out okay. The funny part of the story was Alan Cerone, who was a great curator of mammals, but he was very detailed. I’m not a detailed person.

So he had this crate for rhinos or something and Alan thought it was like a foot too short. So we spent a week with like two welders adding onto it. So it was perfect and it worked perfectly. We got the crate c crane it in, took it to the, to the draft bar and opened the door to the hippo. Right, right. In a week later, Alan told me, wow, I saw a zoo transferred her hippo in a dumpster. We should have done that. So anyway, yeah, it was fun. You talked about exhibits. Tell me about some of the exhibits you championed, such as the African elephant crossing.

Was that a high point for you?

Very much so. I wanted to do an elephant exhibit from the moment I got to Cleveland, but we kept putting it off ’cause of cost and stuff. So we started, had to finish the rainforest and we did that and then I, I don’t know if the commission of society was ready, so I knew it would be popular with the public ’cause if we had a wolf exhibit and we had a perfect location for it. And I think we had the best wolf exhibit in the country. And so we built a log cabin and it’s a probably an acre exhibit. It’s all trees, it looks really nice. And then, I dunno what got us in the direction of a Australian area, but we had a mixture of displays with kos and Australian animals and a children’s zoo. So we made, we made an Australian exhibit out of it with a, with a children’s zoo component to it. But it had an Australian theme, children’s zoo.

So we did that. And then as I said, a donor came along and said, you need a new hospital?

So we did the hospital and then I finally, oh yeah, then we were, during the hospital, we were having all these meetings with the commission. And I’ll never forget this because it was what I previously told you. So we had some choices of what exhibits to, to do and present it to the commission. And the one commission or that had been with us so long and was usually right, but sometimes we didn’t agree. But he sat back in his chair, he said, I think we should do an elephant exhibit. And I’m going, that’s great. We’re gonna do an elephant exhibit. So I took us about three or four years to design and build it.

So it was a long process.

And were you, and you included everybody in putting this elephant exhibit together?

Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah. We’d already gone to protective contact and we had an elephant restraining device even in the old one. And, but everybody thought, yeah, it’d be a good idea. The issue is, and God bless the keepers, at least two or three of them and Jerry Bourne in Columbus, we had to send our elephants somewhere while we did it. So we sent our three elephants or did we have two at the time to Columbus. And they held them for us, but we had to have our staff. So I went down and rented an apartment in Columbus and two or three of our keepers went down there and lived and then came home on weekends or whatever and it worked out. So for like two and a half years, these keepers took care of our elephants in Columbus and then came back and we were all very happy to see ’em come back and opened a new exhibit.

Speaking about your staff, how important to you was professional growth for your staff?

Very important. Very important. And, and I have to say both the commission and, and, and our executive director of Metro Parks always let us put a lot of money in there. And we might have used some society money at times, certainly during research times. But no, I went to every a ZA conference. I, they never doubted me going to WASA conferences. We all, we always sent two or three keepers to A-Z-A-A-C-K. We sent our veterinarians to the veterinary con. We, we registers conference, you name a conference we were at, we also had a lot of in-house training on HR and diversity and, and sexual harassment in the workplace.

We had a lot of in-house training as well as we could send people anywhere. We sent people to Africa times. So it all worked. Yeah, we had all, we were very good about training.

We had talked about making rounds, but how involved were you in the day-to-day activities and hands-on when you became director?

Well, I picked up paper as Kristen said, you know, I walked around the zoo and I, I looked, you know, talked to people, what they were doing and, and did I give education classes?

No. Did I clean up animal stuff? No. But I, I was there when people were doing things and I, you know, I just stayed aware of stuff. I believe that you, again, goes back to one of my strengths planning. We had a mission. We had 10 goals or eight goals at different times and as long as you were working. And then at the end, beginning of the year, the managers all had a work program of what they were gonna achieve. It was, it was well spelled out in writing and I let him do it. And then once a month with my direct reports, we came in, we took open, I learned this from Bob Thomas in, in Sacramento. We opened a folder, we looked at their work program and we, our notes last time where they were and we review ’em so everybody knew what the direct reports.

And I think they handled people pretty much the same way. They all knew what was expected of ’em, what we expected them to get done in the month. And if they didn’t, there was no problem. There was reasons for it. So I think that’s how we worked out so well.

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

About five minutes. Well, when you put the ink on it, it’s already outta date. But I still like ’em. I, I, I like the process more than actually happening. I think the thought process of thinking about what we’re gonna do, even if you don’t do it all is really good. And so, you know, I think the thought process is good. And again, we never complete them, but, and then come back and try, kind of do another one when, when things change and be willing to change, that’s the thing that circumstances change. You know, a flood could wipe out something and you’re not gonna do something different. As I said, a donor came forward probably from hearing a lecture by Dr.

Lewandowski or something that we needed a hospital. Well, we did, wasn’t the next thing we were doing, but came forward with enough money to change our mind. So that, that was fine.

When you retired, did you give the new zoo director any advice? Did they ask?

No, no. I mean, he worked for me for three or four years. So, and we, we, we, when I first retired, we’d have lunch every once in a while. We see each other all the time now. I mean, I see him a lot because I’m there and we, and I’m also, my wife’s on, my wife’s on the board, so we go to parties and so we talk a lot and we go to all the high end fundraising events and we talk. He’s just a great guy, but he doesn’t need me. And, and so no, I didn’t give him any advice. I, you know, he, he did talk to me once, which I think almost in any organization like Cleveland Metro Parks, a government run zoo and a society support group, I think we talked a little bit, you know, how do I, how do I get along with the, the metro parks, you know, what did you do to, you know, because there could be differences of opinion and with your boss, I think we talked a little bit about that and, but he’s, he’s very good at it, so I didn’t really need to give him any advice or how do you get along with the Zoo society even he is there. And plus we have a new, we’ve had a new zoo society executive director who’s wonderful and very easy to work with and very smart.

And so it’s, it’s worked out better.

How did you nurture your relationship with the press?

Being honest, being out front, you know, being out front with anything that happened. Going to them, not just sending out press, we press releases, but, you know, having them again, maybe it happened 10 times, maybe six times. If it were bad news, tell them fir you know, get, get in front of ’em first if they want to come out and see things. We treated them like, like great people. As I said, Sue Allen, who every cameraman, every newspaper reporter by first name, they’d come out, she’d show ’em around or have one of her staff show ’em around, see, see whatever they wanted. We didn’t hide anything from ’em. We were always very much zoo. And see that’s the thing about zoos, we can’t hide anything.

Don’t try to hide anything. Somebody’s gonna see it. A keeper’s gonna see it and report it to, you know, go around you and report it so you can’t hide anything in it. So you might as well show ’em, show ’em what it’s all about first. So we did that and Sue was a master masterful about it. And she’s, she’s been retired from the zoo for a while, but she keeps getting jobs people hired to consult with. She’s worked for the Natural history museum, the science museum, the library, kind of his part-time jobs after he is retired ’cause she’s so no well known in town as being the marketing guru. So we were lucky to work together. And obviously a zoo has animals.

One of the animal stories you have shared at times was in orangutan, you knew a long time ago. And then you reunited with the orangutan Name with Jonathan. When I got to Los Angeles as a keeper, I was assigned to the nursery and we had a gorilla, a chimp and an orangutan. I think Jonathan might have been the second orangutan we had. And they were young orangutans. And during my time there at Los Angeles, Jonathan grew up of course, but you could still go in with him. In fact, I have a picture of the keepers walking him through the zoo, taking him up to quote the main zoo. So I knew Jonathan A. Little bit ’cause I worked with him in the nursery and a little bit, I worked with him in, in the main zoo.

So I left Los Angeles and went to San Francisco, Sacramento, Cleveland, Jonathan went from Los Angeles, Topeka to Buffalo, to Cleveland. When we opened the rainforest, Jonathan was our male. Well, I don’t know, I I, I looked at him, he looked at me. I wouldn’t say he recognized me, but I like to think he did. I mean, who knows. They’re certainly smart enough to me. I don’t know that, I reckon ’em all orangutans look alike, but maybe he, he did recognize me. I don’t know. But it, it was nice to be reunited with Jonathan.

So did you have a great Favorite?

Did you have favorite animals in the zoo?

I have favorite animals everywhere, but, well now it has to be these gorillas with these babies. But gorillas are always special. You know, ’em by name and you know, to watch them as a family, it’s amazing. The elephants, same reason ’cause it’s a family. Their interactions are special for beautiful animals, you know, bongo or whatever. But there’s a lot of animals. I’ve always liked New technology available today.

How can this new technology assist in promoting zoos, Twitter, Facebook, remote cameras?

How does that help promote or how do you think it helps promote the zoo?

I guess it does. Well I’m sort of on the marketing advisory committee for Akron and they, they talk all these terms. I don’t understand that, what you just mentioned. And it’s just important because all, some people that’s all they know is the, is the social media and all those things. So it’s important and, and you, the the nice tools we have that I under, I don’t understand ’em but I know we can track all that. So you can find out how many people are looking at things and how what they’re interested in. You find out a lot of information about your, your visitors and your non visitors by using technology.

So I think they’re very important. Do I understand them?

No, but when the marketing people tell me what they’re doing with them, I’m very impressed. ’cause we get so much information from that. What they like, what, what they dislike and where they’re coming from. You certainly wanna know where people are coming from. You want to know where your marketing is. ’cause nobody has enough marketing dollars to market everywhere. So you need to know where the vast majority of people come. And you also wanna know their demographics.

I know we used to do it in the old day with mailers, you know, and so we would buy a list of parent magazine, you know, or something that would relate to, to, to zoos and that would be the list we would use. So they do the same thing with social media now and they can tell what will make the best hits and stuff. And then everybody does their ticketing online Now in some zoos you can’t even walk up to and pay. You have to, you can either use a kiosk or do it and you can always get a discount if you buy it online too. So there’s so many ways that technology can help. And since I left the zoo 12 years ago, it’s even greatly expanded way beyond my understanding.

When you were at the zoo, did you hire anybody for technology?

No, because you remember we were part of Metro Park, so I had no administrative staff. So hr, it, finance, they were all a part of Metro parks, which is good and bad, but you know, and so I didn’t, I didn’t have any of those responsibilities, but obviously they had it people and I didn’t even, I got, I didn’t have a computer when I came to Cleveland in 89. Marsha, my assistant sec or called secretary back then she had a Wang Word processor and that was the only thing in 89 in the zoo, only computer. It wasn’t long before I got a computer and then laptop. And now I don’t go anywhere. I don’t go anywhere without my laptop anymore.

And but when I was working I could say, Marsha, how does this work?

How does this work? So now I’m at home, Sarah. So my wife has to take me with technology. Fortunately the Apple store is 10 minutes from my house, unfortunately, they know me by name. But anyway, technology’s difficult and it changes so much I can’t every day they seem to, as you know, they seem to change something on your phone. It makes it harder to use. It’s supposed to make it easier, but you gotta keep up with it. There’s no question.

What exhibit considerations did you have to take into account for visitors viewing space, species in a large space?

How did you achieve that?

Well, again, through, through volunteers and, and graphics explaining where the animals are. You know, some people will appreciate the fact that our Bonner book have a couple of acres and they can be anywhere under trees or whatever. Other people say, I came to your zoo, I didn’t see anything. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a good and a bad thing. I, I don’t know how other than to say it’s a good and a bad thing that the animals are sometimes difficult to see in these big beautiful exhibits. And I, I said the majority of people appreciate it, particularly if they’re doing something but not, the animals aren’t always doing something particularly on a hot day. You’ve talked about three parts for exhibit design, animals, guests, and keepers.

Sure. Can you elaborate?

Well, you need to build for both or all three. For instance, as, as I was talking to you earlier, maybe at lunch, the old bear grottos had nowhere and the keepers had to crawl through the animal doors. That’s just not, not sustainable. So that’s the keeper end. So new exhibits build doors that keepers can take wheelbarrows out and not have to duck and do yoga to get through. That’s sort of the keeper. And the animals, you need to build the animal, the exhibits big enough so that animals not hide necessarily, but at least can get back away from either other animals or away from the public if they desire. So, and you need to, if, if you have a climbing animal, you wanna build climbing apparatuses.

So, so those are the kind of things you think about with animals. With the elephants, we wanted to have for instance elevated feeders that gives the elephants a chance with their trunks and to lift up and get on their back feet and that kind of thing. And places. So if you move things around where they can move, they gotta have water. So they could have pools. Our African elephants, by the way, we built this great water and and they never use it but it looks good. I think Asian elephants go in the water more than some African elephants and the public, you know, the public you build for the animals, you build for the keepers, you build for the public. So public can see animals and appreciate ’em and somewhat of a natural surrounding. It doesn’t, by that I just mean there’s some something nice. There’s lawns or something.

It’s not all concrete and bars, which we don’t do anymore. So I think for all three you, you definitely have to build for all three the best you can.

What is distance learning in how you approach education?

Our education setup, we had a program that we could, you know, get on TVs with, with, I can’t remember some other country, I think it was in Africa actually South Africa, we, I don’t know how we did it time-wise, but we could bring a class into our distance learning lab and they could have a class in South Africa and we could have TV and they could interact with each other and talk about how their lives were different than our lives. Or it could just be a local school too. So we could do some things through distance learning. It was, it was somewhat effective. I don’t know if they still do it or not, but we set up a whole distance learning lab and it, it allowed us to, to do those kind of things. And sometimes we could actually take the cameras say out to the trumpeter swan exhibit. ’cause we were involved in trumpeter swan releases in Ohio raising trumpeter swans and stuff. So we could actually take them out to the site of our exhibit and talk about it that, that way.

So it brought the zoo sort of out to people in a classroom, but they could see the zoo, the zoo on the tv.

Are there different considerations in exhibit design for a winter in a summer zoo?

Oh my god, yes. And I knew nothing about it when I moved from Sacramento to Cleveland.

The first thing I ask is how do you operate a zoo in the winter?

You don’t get the visitation in the winter, but it’s wonderful experience. I mean I see people all the time in the winter when I’m there that say I love coming to the zoo in the winter. They don’t have the crowds. And we had enough, we had enough winter hardy exhibits that people could still have a good experience. For instance, they can see they, they could see the bears, they could see the wolves. And then what really changed in 1993 was a rainforest. ’cause it was a 90,000 square foot indoor space. And so in the winter, I mean we had stroller bombs that would just come to the rainforest in the winter and that’d be their whole a day hour or hour and a half experience.

And so that changed. We didn’t go to 200,000 guests in January, but it went from 30 to 60,000 or something, you know. And so that, that’s kind of that. And then you, then you have to have some indoor spaces. So for instance, our giraffe and our rhino barn, you can look through windows and see the animals if they’re not out. But a lot of times if it’s not too bad they’ll be, the elephants can go out in the snow sometimes. So we could do that as long as they, and a lot of the animals that that could go out in the cold, we’d just leave the barn open. But they’d be outside in the cold. They could go in and get warm if they wanted to.

So we tried to have enough stuff in the winter, but it’s not the same experience we used to have. And I don’t think they do it anymore. We used to have a discount at rate too, but I don’t think they do that anymore. So those are some of the things you do. But you wanna have good, good facility. Elephant barn is wonderful for elephants in a bad day. I mean it’s, it’s a nice way to see ’em. They’ve got stalls and they can move around.

You see ’em eat and you see the keepers work with them and stuff. So it’s, it’s, it’s okay.

Here’s an interesting, what does one need to think about in designing signage for animal exhibits?

It seems like there’s no magic bullet. No, there is no magic bullet. I think there’s some good strategies. First of all, I, you gotta have the name and the scientific name. I know that nobody looks at it, but you gotta at least have a label that gives the name. ’cause there’s enough of us that wanna know that I, you know, I think actually maps that show where the animal came from, if nothing else, it teaches people geography.

And then I think about what Cleveland’s done that I really like is they’re very simple labels, but they ask a question for instance, can you see something about this animal that you could observe?

Is this animal laying down or does this animals whatever?

And I think that’s, do you see this?

Does this animal look like there’s something that would climb a tree or something?

But if you remember one of my, some of my favorite labels, and you’ll know this is the Bronx Sues bird house. Conway did those labels years ago and they were very humorous at a stork with a, with a baby and then, you know, cartoon drawings. And I thought those probably got people’s attention. So there’s a lot of ways to do things now. I mean people like those little zuki sometimes. So you can have a audio too, so there’s lots of ways to do it, but what is it, 90% of the people don’t read the graphic. So I don’t know what the statistic is, but a lot of people just look at the handle. But I think you certainly need to have the basics and if you can have some things and you certainly don’t wanna, we’ve all seen really bad graphics where it’s just a bunch of narratives that doesn’t work at all.

You have to have pictures and a few facts. Did you have ideas about it at Cleveland that you were trying to Well I, I think our education department did it all. Again, I think with the idea of asking a question or can you see this or something was a, was a good idea engine, just the real basics. And we had other graphics that, you know, our elephant exhibit, we had some, they did really nice graphics for that. The newer things they’ve done really nice graphics we’ve done also, like in some of the exhibits, they’ve done videos now interviewing Chris Kuhar about snow leopards or whatever. So they’ve done some live, live things and in the elephant house we had a scale that you put a whole family on and if it was, you know, you weighed as much as a female elephant or a baby elephant. And so there’s some interactives that can work. So there’s just different things, different ways to, to do things.

I didn’t have any magic, magic things but there any, anyway, there are some stories you just don’t want to do long narratives, that’s for sure. And people now can take their phone out and put in seminar horned ORs if they really wanna know a lot of information.

So do you really need a lot of graphics, you Know?

And speaking of graphics, you had indicated, you know, people have a Zoom app on their phone and stuff and theres are more Zoom apps and you kind of lamented, I thought a bit about that.

Do you feel that zoo guide books and and the zoom maps and things are just a thing of the past?

Probably. Probably. I like ’em. We did one, we did one, we had one that our gift shops have, but we only did one guide book and then it was out of date as soon as we did it ’cause we didn’t have those animals or whatever. So yeah, those are probably out of date again, because of technology, I like a map ’cause I just think they’re fun to keep, you know, historically and everything too. You have said that you have visited many zoos over 400.

How has this helped to shape your philosophy in any way?

Well certainly with Exhibitry seeing the good exhibits that tell, again, I’m a big believer in telling a story, not just having a wolf exhibit. These are wolfs. So our wolf exhibit, you go through a log cabin and we have a story about how trappers had it and turned it into a research cabin that’s a little too much for people, but at least it was a log cabin and it was a wolf exhibit, you know, and, and trees. So it looked like it couldn’t have been more natural. So I saw that in a couple of places. I’ve seen a lot of people copy ours too. So again, just to see the best of the best and, and also maybe see some bad things and said, oh God, I’m glad that’s not being done anymore. And see how people integrate the guest services and the concessions and the gift shops in. You know, I and I, this might be another mistake I made, but you know, when I looked at Disney or SeaWorld, I saw they had a gift shop every five feet.

I thought, well why not do that if it makes money?

So I put a gift shop in the wolf wilderness. I put one up in the cat and primate building and put one in Australia and they’re all gone now. I think it’s just the cost of staff. So they have a gift shop at the entrance and I think they have one more back in the wilderness trek area. So maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. I learned. But so any any, you know, we were talking earlier at lunch about the night zoo. It was such exciting to see, not that we could copy it, but it was just something to see. And reason that I go to zoos too, just ’cause I like ’em.

So, you know, I like to go to zoos. I like to see different things. So not just to get ideas from my zoo, although I do, you know, I’ve done all these accreditation inspections and I always say that I get more, particularly when it’s working, not now, but I get more out of accredit going on inspection than they get from me. ’cause I always learn, oh wow, they, that’s a good policy for this or this. The way they do escape drills is really good or something. So I would always learn something from those two. Now, after you retired, just because it seems like a bit of an anomaly, I have to ask you, you gave lectures on a cruise ship.

How did that happen?

I just, I, I knew people that had did it, so I just applied. I found out there was a company that provides lectures to a couple of cruise lines and I just applied for them. And there was one that fit my expertise went from Costa Rica to San Diego, so through Central America and stuff. And so I just gave lectures, had to make funny titles ’cause it had to be, so I talked about when I did it about primates, which I also talked about anything that lived in the tree. ’cause I wanted to have more things talk about. So I called that monkey business and I had one on reptiles and I called the good, the bad and that just damn near nasty or something like that. So I had clever titles and people seemed to like ’em, you know, so it was fun to do. Got to see, I, I probably never would’ve gone to El Salvador or Nicaragua if I wasn’t on that cruise.

So I got a couple more countries. So that was kind of fun too. And it was a small cruise, I mean small by, by standards now it was like 400 or 500 people. So it was a huge, huge cruise ship.

You’ve said that there are many good zoos, but what makes a good zoo, in your opinion, a great zoo?

Hmm. Now that’s a very good question. I would just look at the a CA criteria. So a great zoo would have all, would be very good at all that great animal care, good veterinary department. When I rate zoos, I’m not doing it for life for a magazine or anything, which is really the visitor perspective. That’s not what I call a great zoo. So the zoo has to have good animal care, good veterinary care, yes, good guest services. It has to have a good research program, a good conservation program. The facilities have to be top notch.

They have to have good safety. You don’t really see the safety procedure. But all those things make great zoo, a great zoo that doesn’t have a really high end conservation program. I mean, field conservation program, I’m not interested in as, as a great zoo. So it’s not just the, the size of the zoo or the diversity of the zoo. It’s what they do is great for the animals, the people and the guests. The guests and the staff. So, and, and they contribute to conservation, particularly field conservation.

But again, resource management have great education programs. So you gotta have all those things to, for me to be a great zoo. So when I see these lists, nobody has the same list, by the way I said a lot of people have the, some of the same zoos in the list, but nobody has the same list. I’m sure my list would be different than others, but I think you have to have all those criteria.

So in your long career, what prompted you to write a book about your life in the zoo? Profession?

My ego, I guess. I don’t know. You know, I, I actually said, I wrote it for my grandkids just so they would not, and by the way, they have absolutely no interest in it. But, so I wrote it and I sell, it was a self-published book. It’s not been a big seller, but it was fun to write and I also did it during the pandemic, gave me something to do since 1988, I have always kept a daily journal, so I had plenty of material and I actually had some other hit and miss journals from earlier years and photographs. So I was able to put together the, the zoo and it was a, it was my life in several different chapters. It talked about early life, it talked about zoo management, talked about travel, talked about conservation. So it was just fun to do. I, I think the cover is the nicest part of the book, the rest of the book, there was a few typos, a few things I then, but it was fun to write, actually. Thank God my wife proofed it, but, so it turned out better.

What do you think made you a good zoo director?

Hmm. It’s an interesting question. I, I don’t know that I was a good zoo director, but I, you know, I, I would guess that one is my passion for saving wildlife and wild places and doing that through work, the work in the zoo. I also think I was an incredible, I liked the plan, so I always had a plan. I, we always knew what the mission was. We reviewed it at every meeting and everybody knew what we were trying to do. So communicating that mission and that plan, not that we didn’t make changes with the plan, ’cause we made a lot of changes with plan, but we had an overall all plan. So I suppose a few things like that. You know, the passion for the job, the plan mo, and moving the plan forward, everybody understanding the plan.

Everybody understood their role in the plan because everybody had a job, not in a job description, but a yearly plan that fit that mission and those goals of our plan. And I think, and then that of course with maybe a good sense of humor and tenacity to get it done probably made me an okay zoo director. Yeah.

Did people lower than your senior staff understand the mission, the keepers and even the concession people?

Or, or was it just the senior staff that knew what the mission was?

I, I think everybody had some sense of it. I wouldn’t say a hundred percent, you know, because maybe they didn’t really care. It was just a job, particularly as you said, when you get to concession workers and stuff. But no, I think most people do. It was posted everywhere. We talked about it at every meeting. And I don’t just mean the high end meetings, but we had what we call gym meetings, general employee meetings every month where we had to have two of ’em. ’cause people had days off. We always brought up not just the mission, but you know, what our plans were and why we were doing the rainforest or what we were, what was the update on the rainforest and why was it taking so long or whatever. So, so I think everybody did that.

And, and, and certainly anybody with any management ability had a, say a yearly work program and their staff had to know that this is what they were supposed to do at this time. And I, I think that worked out well.

What skillset do you think a zoo director needs today as compared to when you started?

Yeah. Well, you know, that was a long time ago. And so, you know, I, as you know, mark and, and others, most of the zoo directors, 50 years ago, we were animal people. And, and their basic job was, you know, getting animals for the zoo and, and keeping the animals in the zoo. But that’s shifted into management and, and, and really running a, running the whole zoo a lot. Of course most zoos were part of a city, so the city took care of HR and a lot of that kind of stuff. So as zoos transitioned into nonprofits, you know, they had to be more like any CEO in any business. And what’s changed, they, you know, we still have animals in the zoo, so that’s sort of stayed the same. But now obviously marketing, fundraising as, and as we all understand, technology has changed so much.

I mean, even when I started in, in Cleveland 35 years ago or whatever, you know, the records were on three by five cards, you know, and then we started having ISIS where we had those little computer cards. You stick in a machine and stuff. And of course now it’s all done through zims and, and those kind of things. And you know, every day is some technology develops that improves the zoo. So technology is something that’s really changed. Laws have changed, you know, the endangered species that came in in the seventies. So zoo directors had to be aware of that and how that worked. The difficulties of working through the bureaucracy of the federal government to bring in animals.

That’s, that’s part of the job. But I think maybe the bigger change is, and, and I think why zoo directors are asked to do so much more than they used to be asked is, you know, the fundraising efforts. ’cause the cost of running a zoos is so much, you know, when I started, zoos were two or $3 or free, you know, and now any zoo, any zoo charges 25, 30, $40 to get in the zoo. I think San Diego’s probably a hundred dollars. So the economics of running a zoo cha has changed a lot over the years. And by almost all zoos today, maybe 90%, 80 to 90% get some government funding. They don’t get as much as they used to. And, and in the past, zoos are almost entirely government funded.

And now, now they have to raise money. And we’ve had missions and you know, certainly, certainly in our zoos have changed a lot too. And you don’t just sell hot dogs and popcorn and stuff. We have really nice restaurants and, and, and snack bars and facilities like that. So there’s quite a few changes that have occurred over the years and, and zoo directors have had to be adapt to that. The one question I’m gonna ask you, and then I want you to talk about one other thing quickly. You mentioned ISIS and Zim.

Would you explain what the Ackerman acronyms mean?

Zoo, okay. I, what is isis? What is zims?

Okay. ISIS was, I think now we can’t use that term obviously for reasons. It was the International Species Inventory System. I think ZIMS is zoo information, something or other. I don’t even know what it stands for, but it is, and, and there are, that’s not the only one. There’s a couple now that you, and they work together of inventory. So the system is so that you can, you can find out how many sable antelope are in, in the world by going into Zims and looking at that or whatever. So it’s an international system that keeps records of things and it helps tremendously with having reproduction of animals and getting animals. You talked about zoo directors in the past.

In your opinion, is it better to have a business person in charge of the zoo or someone who might be called a zoo man or woman who is knowledgeable about the animals?

Doesn’t matter. I mean, as you know, we’ve had great businessmen or business women come into the zoo. You, you know, Doug Myers at San Diego, Ron Foreman in, in New Orleans. You could go on and on. Eric Stevens in Miami. We’ve had some great people that came from outside. What they did is make sure they had good animal people. I always get a, like a kick out of a, particularly a new person that comes out of the business community. They immediately want to have their picture taken with an animal. You know, I don’t object to that, but I, I certainly think they shouldn’t be the one.

If, if you have an issue with a humane organization, they shouldn’t be the one that goes and defends the zoo. They should bring their curator or their veterinarian there. Not that it, that they’re not, because that’s not their particular expertise. So if you have a businessman running the zoo, they need good animal people. If you have an animal pea and you need good business people.

So, but I, yeah. What do you think now?

I think Mark’s probably half and half, you know, people who came like me through the ranks or were animal people and probably half business people. We’ve also, as you know, know in Lincoln Park in New York, we actually had in San Diego Partica, we’ve had some real failures that didn’t last very long as business people that came into the zoo world and, and they didn’t get the culture right away. You have to understand the culture. You have to go to a ZA meetings, you know, they, they might not wanna do that though. I’ll let the animal people go. But they really have to be part of that organization, I think to be successful because you have to understand the culture of zoos. It’s not like any other business, you know. So unless you understand that it would be the same if you were a natural history museum director or a botanical garden director, you, you gotta understand what that is and, and, and, and, and have some, at least some interest in the mission and the goals of the zoo.

Can’t just be a businessman, I’m just running this. So it will run smoothly. You have, you have to have some interest in it. I would think. There are big zoos. There are small zoos.

What do you feel, how do you, how can a small or a medium sized municipal zoo, what can they do today to be involved in wildlife conservation, either nationally or even internationally?

Oh, there’s just so much they can do. I mean it’s, it’s incredible what some of the small zoos are doing. I know the little zoo in Central Florida’s involved in indigo snakes, they raise indigo snakes to release in the wild, the zoos. A couple zoos in Texas are doing some kind of pine snake release. You know, your little zoo outside of Chicago here is working with Blanding Turtles, you know, so, and then you’ve got all these other national programs like Monarch Watch, frog Watch, they’re sort of citizen science projects and a lot of zoos can be involved in those. If I go around and and doing accreditation in a small zoo and maybe they’re lacking a little bit of research, you know, it’s like just somehow get involved in the college, bring the college kids in here to, to help you do these things. You can’t just say, no, I don’t have research programs or, you know. So I think there’s just so many things that zoos can do.

They all should, you know, they all can be raise money for some of, like the Snow Leopard Trust or the Giraffe Conservation International or whatever. They can, they can be involved in that. But I think they can do a lot of hands-on things too that, but I think if they have animals they should be involved in, in, in some of those, those type of programs.

But can they send people to Africa?

Maybe not, but they can, they can certainly do a, a number of things, again, in locally or internationally too. So I think they, and even even God, there’s one little zoo in Eureka, California, a very small zoo, but they still do a quarters for conservation programs. So they put couple tens of thousands of dollars into conservation.

And before we go any longer, can I talk a little bit about conservation?

Because conservation to me is what the zoo does and it does five things. And so I always divide them. So when you ask me a question about conservation, we need to be more specific because I think everything zoos do is conservation. So if you look at the five things they do education. So they teach conservation education.

They may talk to you about frogs or elephant, but what is that?

And relay, what kind of conservation is involved, you know, habitat destruction in case of elephants, et cetera. They need aside national parks and the cent of wolves or whatever. So you got education, then you got scientific research and a lot of that research in zoos can be applied to animals in the wild. We learned a lot from zoos, from keeping animals in, in captivity. I think we learned a lot about cheetahs when we first started having them in zoos because we didn’t know you have to separate the mail and different kind of things to, to breed cheetahs. So research, and then you have resource management and the zoo has to talk the talk. So we need to talk about recycling, we need to talk about, you know, saving electricity and water and all that kind of thing. And I think a lot of zoos do a good job of that.

And then we’ve got to have our animals, our SSP animals, we have to breed animals in, in captivity, so are in our zoos. And we have structured programs to do that because we might release ’em into the wild, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later. But just to have ’em again, ’cause we learn from ’em. They provide a source of education is important. And then the, the fifth component is what I call field conservation. And so that’s sending money or doing, working on programs outside the walls. So to me I call it the, the five little Cs in the big C. That’s how I define zoos and conservation.

And you define then research and field conservation is separate?

Well, I, they’re, they’re, they’re very much all connected. But yeah, there’s, they’re separate. So somebody talks about conservation and just think it’s, we field conservation. It isn’t, ’cause it’s all those other things too that we do to help help animals in the wild. And, and again, we’ll may mention later, but then you have been involved with bringing people to various parts of the world to see Africa and other places.

Is that conservation?

Yeah, I think it’s a, i for a while I wanted to put our ecotourism program into education, but I don’t know if it belongs in education or fundraising anymore because it, it helps for both. But yeah, I think it’s important that, as you know, you’ve taken people to Africa many times too. Changes their lives, makes ’em really connected to animals, makes ’em understand why we’re trying to save wildlife and wild places. It really just opens their eyes. Not just the animals but the people, et cetera. So, so the, our ecotourism program’s a little bit of all that, I guess it’s education and it’s awareness and, and all those kind of things.

And you were talking about resources and considering the financial resources available to some of the small or medium sized zoos, should they be focusing, do you believe on specific things in their collection like North America or maybe endangered species or maybe holding species surplus that other zoos are looking for places to house their animals?

Should they be thinking in that way or just in what I call a general zoo atmosphere?

You know, I don’t think it matters so much. I mean, look at the living desert in Palm Springs or the Arizona or Desert Museum. They’re that are focused on a certain biome such as desert or local deserts. And there are certainly some zoos that are restricted to north or nature centers restricted to North America. So I think you can do, either you, you’re really telling a story and any one of those stories can have a conservation method. And then most of the larger zoos have a little bit of everything. But I think the story is really important. I I, when I got to Cleveland, it was truly a mishmash of animals and I didn’t like that.

I, I, I’m big on the storyline. So we’ve, we switched and we had a rainforest. We had a a, an area we called Northern Trek, which now they call Wilderness Trek. So they, where they had northern animals, we had an African section. So it, so big zoos have different, but when I got to there, they had tortoises and kos and all kinds of things in one exhibit. And I thought that was very confusing. ’cause they weren’t geographically and they had nothing to do with each other. The message wasn’t there.

So I think as long as you have a good story, and it can be individual exhibits are a whole zoo or a whole part of the zoo, as long as you have a good story to tell, I I think it works for people. But it gets confusing if you mix up things and don’t tell that story correctly. So I think there’s room for, for, for any kind of kind of zoos. It could be a South American zoo, it could be a North American zoo, it could be a primate zoo for that matter. As long as you can tell the story how things are related. And there are many people who like and, and don’t like zoos. And it seems today in many cases, zoos are afraid to confront animal welfare or rights groups that are against zoos. We even sometimes have people in top positions in the field who seem to be in line with the non biologists what they have to say.

Could you give us your thoughts on how best to deal with these type of groups?

I sure can. And I, I, let me start with, and if I get off track a little bit, get me get back to the general. So I had two, Cleveland was not a hotbed of animal rights groups, you know, animal rights group. We really liked Chicago and New York and the big markets where they can make a big splash. So Cleveland wasn’t a hotbed. The first issue I had was when I got there and we had a gorilla named Timmy. He was by himself. So I, I used my connections and we got him a female. He was supposed to be a mean gorilla that didn’t get along with females. Somehow he got along with this animal named Kirby Kate.

And so for three years at least, we didn’t have a single gorilla, you know, it was, he, there was two of ’em. I think people felt better about that. And then the friends of SSP said, oh, here’s a ve old gorilla that’s never important for the gene pool. Let’s, let’s move him where he can really breed. And I said, makes a lot of sense, we’ll do that. So we made plans to send Timmy to New York, to Bronx Zoo where he’d be with a lot of females. We’d think he would, he would be okay there. Well, all hell broke loose.

I wish I had the letter that they, somebody sent me. It was quite humorous. But you know, they had signs sent to me, not Taylor, they called me all kinds of names. You know, I want a terrible person. I was for doing it. It became quite a big story. It was a great story. So this animal one, right, it wasn’t a mainstream animal rights group, but it was a, they had a local attorney in town, which later became somewhat of a friend of mine. I mean, we would talk, but he took us to court and our attorneys were really smart. They, they got shifted right to the federal court, which is much more no nonsense than a local court. Local court would’ve made publicity out of it.

And, and judge batch leather, who became a great friend of the zoo, she listened for about 15 minutes. By the way, Les Fisher and Bob Wagner came to town and we had it all planned what we were gonna say.

So they, we talked for about 15 minutes and she said, can I come back to my chamber?

So she took the attorneys back to the chamber and for about a half an hour, and we just sat there and the judge came out and says, look, if it was me, I might not wanna send Timmy to New York, but under the Endangered Species Act, the zoo has a right to do it. So that morning, that morning with two trucks, with two mechanics, with a veterinarian keepers, Timmy was on his way to New York. He got to New York and Earl and, and did very well there, Sied leave Offspring. And it was quite a success story. And, and I never heard from those people again about Timmy, Timmy the grill and that piece of legislation. I think they’re still using, they might have used it in the Los Angeles Elephant case, they might have used it elsewhere, that we have the right to send our animals where we want. So that was one group. Then like a lot of zoos we were doing in brand new elephant exhibit.

So we had a few protestors come, you know, they didn’t want us to keep elephants in the zoo, but it was a small group and we went out and gave them water and talked to ’em. Sue Allen, my marketing person was really good with people like that. And so we were nice to ’em and then they left and we really didn’t have a problem. So I didn’t really have a problem with animal rights people in, in Cleveland. But of course throughout the United States, it’s not always the case. And we are seeing that now. And I don’t know if the, I don’t know how you feel, but I don’t know if the number’s growing or it’s just social media now that makes it sound bigger. And there certainly is 5% of the people, 10% of the people in the world that don’t like zoos.

And some of ’em are very vocal about it. But I, you know, and I don’t know if it’s growing or not, but the problem we have with the subject of animal welfare and animal rights is particularly animal rights. People can use soundbites like no other zoos or jails. We don’t have a soundbite. We have about a paragraph or two paragraphs of scientific evidence et our animals are well cared for. And so it’s not as easy to fight that. The other thing the animal extremists do is they outwardly lie. They say things that just aren’t true will say, well these animals die prematurely in zoos.

You know, elephants should live 80, 80 years. Well, the oldest elephant in the world might have lived 80 or 70 years, but the average lifespan might be 40. So they don’t use a median. They use, you know, the records like saying we, we all should live to a hundred. They, they also talk about animals are dangerous and they kill people in zoos. Well, true people have been killed in zoos, you know, maybe 20 people in the last 30 years. But if you consider all that wild animals worldwide, that’s not a lot of people. And most of those people were killed.

I mean, we’re most familiar with the case in San Francisco where some people came in the zoo late and taunted the animal, and the animal got out and killed somebody. So a lot of the people that are killed in zoos, you know, half of ’em are visitors that did stupid things. The other half are been some staff that have been killed by animals. Again, mostly their fault. There’s elephant that killed somebody in Pittsburgh, you know, but then they were walking elephants through the zoos. But we’ve changed the way we keep elephants. And by the way, I think actually the humane groups helped us with elephants. They pushed zoos to do a much better job with elephants.

What we were doing with elephants 30 years ago wasn’t the best. What we’re doing with elephants now is beautiful. You look at the four elephants, older elephants in Cleveland, I would never say this but I’m gonna say it, they’re happy. They like each other. They move around each other. They get, they, they have different areas where they’re fed. They love the keepers. They, you know, they respect the keepers. They, the keepers don’t go in with them.

The keepers ask them politely, will you do this?

And then of course give ’em a food reward. But I mean, they seem very happy. So the animal extremists you lose, you know that they have a lot of things they say that just really aren’t true. That, oh, they say, look, we should release ’em all back in the wild. Well, that’s not gonna happen. Most of these animals couldn’t go back in the wild. Some could, but not all of ’em could go back in the wild and that they’re bored. Well again, if you’ve seen, again, over your lifetime, in my lifetime, what we’ve done to make animals more active and act more natural and have bigger exhibits, a lot of, a lot has changed.

So I don’t know if that’s gonna turn around, it won’t turn around the people that really hate zoos. But you gotta understand, even a ZA 190 million people come to our 240 zoos. That’s more than all the rational sports combined. So there are a lot of people that like zoos, they’re not as vocal. And again, they don’t use the sound bites like our adversaries do. But there’s still a lot of people that love zoos. I mean, you go and talk to the volunteers at zoos, anytime they’re just elated with the zoos. They know every animal and, and they’re so excited about each animal.

And when a baby happens, they’re, they’re ecstatic. So there’s a lot of people that love zoos. So I think they greatly outnumber the, the animal welfare, animal rights people.

Did I answer that pretty completely or was there other things you wanted me to say?

No, I, I I think that was very good. And, and you mentioned one thing about behavior with the elephants and enrichment.

What’s your feelings about enrichment programs and what they do or don’t do or how they might be shaped?

What they do is provide animals, something to think about and something to do so they’re not just standing around. It could be giraffe feeders, it could be, you know, I, I love to watch our rhinos in Cleveland. And as I said to your colleague over here, I still say our zoo, it’s Cleveland Metro Parks. It’s not my zoo anymore, but I’d still say my zoo or our zoo. But I love to watch the rhinos. They have this 55 gallon plastic bucket in a sense, it has holes in it and the rhinos hit it and the foo fo thumbs out and they’ll work on it until they don’t hear any rattle anymore. So there’s those kind of things I think, well I think some of it is not aesthetically as pleasing as I’d like to see. It seems like they just throw junk in exhibits and, and that kind of bothers me.

You build these 10, 1500 million dollar exhibits and you put serial boxes out and I, I think it’s somewhat distracting, but the, if you go do an accreditation inspection, you look in almost any exhibit and they have a chart, they chart enrichment, so they’re not doing the same thing all the time. You know, it used to be when we started this enrichment program, people would buy these boomer balls, which are semi, you can’t destroy, although lions and tigers can these plastic balls. And, and they’d put that in a, in a say a tiger exhibit and leave it there for a month. And after a day they’re already done with it, you know, but, but so sometimes you gotta be, you gotta make sure you change the enrichment. Most zoos use different, get donated perfumes for instance, and put things around the cats. The animals really use olfactory senses and, and they like to do that. And obviously food rewards are, are some things that are good. You know, I, I remember a zoo that’s non-accredited now.

It was accredited at that time. I saw one of the simplest things I ever saw, I don’t know if this is as much as enrichment, but in the elephant barn, they had a chain across the, the stall, two feet off the ground. And they just trained the elephant to go up, lift its legs and go over the chain and go back and forth. It’s just like if we went to the gym, you know, so there are kind of interesting things that don’t necessarily cost a lot, but are good for the animals. So, you know, they, i i, it probably gets a little crazy when they’re trying to do enrichment for reptiles or insects or, or things. But there are, there are certainly things they can do. So I think zoos are becoming more creative. I think when it becomes more of a distraction or if they don’t, don’t change up the enrichment enough.

It’s, it’s not very successful. But I think it’s important. And You talked about good animal person, good business person, how they might work together, a complaint sometimes from the new directors. There are too few good curators in the community today.

Do you think that’s an issue?

And how should curators be trained today to do what’s expected of them in running a collection?

And what would you include in a training program for curious?

So you just asked me a five part collect question, so if I don’t get it all right, remind me and I’ll go back and answer. But I thought about this a lot. I had a great opportunity and I don’t know that zoos do this anymore. There are probably a couple that do. So Warren Thomas, when I was a keeper in Los Angeles, created a curator for six, took a keeper and trained him for, let him be a curator for six months. Bob Barnes was the first one. And who was be went on to be a registrar at, at the, at the zoo. And I was the second one. And that really helped me.

And he, I mean he, he gave me things to do that, that even the best curators, he says, look, we have had all these Arabian ORs, people gotta want them.

Could you see if somebody would take some Arabian ORs and gimme an old copy?

I mean he told this guy to, you know, 24-year-old curator to try to do that. So I was calling people like Georgia RAP or whatever they thought I was crazy. And, but you know, it was, it was great training and I’m sure that had a lot to do with me going up to San Francisco and getting a management job after that. Secondly, I wanna say Cleveland Metro Park Zoo had no problem getting curators. One, we paid people well and, and two, we had a lot of people that wanted to come back. We, we, we were able to hire people and particularly even keepers because we were a Kester Union Zoo. We paid very well, had great benefits. So staffing at the Cleveland Metro Park Zoo may have been a little different and not as difficult as other zoos.

We always, obviously a lot of people can have a lot of applicants for keepers. But we got keepers with five years experience and, and great keepers and some, some we promote it within. And then of course when I was there we just had like three curators and they’ve changed that now and have two full curators and six or three, three full curators and six assistant curators now. And those, most of those came from other zoos. One of the full-time cur, well two of the curators have been there a long time now. And Tad Schaffner was there when I was there. He’s had like 45 years in the Cleveland Zoo and he stayed, well be and and then another one came when I was there. And then the third full curator now is has, is a PhD.

And she went through our, our research program and through case Western University and came back as a curator. The other curator, some of assistant curators, we’ve all come from other zoos. One was a keeper, went and had a family and her husband’s actually the curator in Akron and, and she came back as an assistant curator. So Cleveland hasn’t had a dis, I know other zoos do have problems finding the right curators.

I know a Z is actually trying to do what now?

A curator training program. You know, they had what I’ll call management school. They had zoo biology have a whole, I don’t even know all the schools a ZA has now re a registrar our school. But I think they’re, they’re, they’re developing a curator school. And I, back to your question, I think it’s probably necessary ’cause people do, I kind of tell people, young people too, that they wanna move on. You know, you might that are keepers. Well remember a lot of keepers don’t want to be curators. They like what they’re doing.

They, they feel, they lose their hands-on experience with animals. So they don’t want to. But those that want to say if they were in Cleveland, I’d say, you know, you might wanna go, I’m not gonna put down Little Rock or a smaller zoo, but you might want to go somewhere that’s not as, doesn’t pay as well or whatever as Cleveland and get that first and then try to come back. ’cause that’s always the best thing. Now training curators as you mentioned is interest, but depends, depends on their skillset. You know, again, going back to your, one of our first questions about the history of zoo as curators are all just animal people. The soft, they didn’t have the soft skills. They were there to mostly just do the animal things and yeah, they supervised the staff the best they can. So if you have a curator that’s, as I said as the PhD they just hired in Cleveland, they, you wanna make sure that that person then has, understands the moving of animals in a zoo.

’cause you don’t necessarily learn that as a zoologist, but he also may not learn the management skills. So, you know, it’s important that those people maybe take those a ZA courses or get an MBA for god’s sakes or whatever, or at least have some training in, in some of the soft skills of managing people. As you know, mark, you did it for years. Managing animal people is a lot different than managing restaurant staff. One, the a the people you’re managing for the most part, not when we started, but are very, very knowledgeable. A lot of ’em have college degrees. They know a lot about animals and they’re passionate about animals. So if you’re a curator and come in and tell that keeper, you need to do this with the animal, you better make sure you have grounds because they know a lot more about that animal maybe than the curator does.

So learning to deal with passionate people is different than learning to deal with lazy people. That they’re just there. ’cause it’s a job. I, I don’t know how you feel, I don’t think many people keepers are there ’cause it’s just a job anymore. They’re there because they love the zoos and they love animals and a lot of them get an interest in a particular group. You know, we, we were not like a Lincoln Park or other zoos that really had reptiles and birds and we had some of that, but a lot of our keepers had to take care of different kind of animals. So it was harder for them to be a reptile specialist or we had a few, or an elephant specialist. But I mean the elephant keepers had to take care of some other animals too. So they had to be more generalists.

So back to the original question. So whatever, when you hire a curator, no, nobody’s perfect. And so you, whatever skills they may not have, you may learn that soon or you may ask them, what do you think you need help with and make sure they get that kind of education. I said there was, that was a five part question. I don’t know if I need all five parts or not, but, but yeah. Got it. Yeah. Biggest part of the zoo at, at one level is visitors.

And, and what changes have you seen during your years in the field regarding visitor attitudes?

Oh, visitor attitudes. Well, I, I, they probably expect more. I mean, again, maybe the animal welfare community has something to do with that. They don’t expect to come to a zoo to see cages. If you ever watch the, the zoo, I love Jim Hanney and his zoo program from wrong zoo. He starts it, if you had a, if you ask a child to draw a picture of a zoo, they’ll show bars. And so I think that’s still some of the perceptives. But once they get there, I think they don’t expect to see that.

At least adults don’t expect that to see that anymore. So they, they wanna, they want, they wanna feel that the animals are well taken, taken care of. Now some people will just see, no matter how big the exhibit is or whatever, they’ll overreact. Oh, they don’t have, you know, elephants don’t have thousands of acres to walk through. So they’ll never be satisfied. But as long as the exhibits look good and they’re clean and, and there’s plenty for them to do. And that’s where enrichment comes in. And that’s why it’s important for volunteers or who ever out in front of exhibits to explain, look at that, that’s, see what they’re doing there.

And they’re, they’re doing things. So I think they really expect the animals to be well taken care of and, and, and, and have enough space to run around. And then they’re not in cages. They, they wanna feel good about their animals. And remember most of the people they come to a zoo maybe only have gone to one or two zoos and it’s mostly their own zoo and they wanna be proud of their own zoo. So they like it in the paper when they see baby animals are born and they, they know something’s good has happened at the zoo. So they wanna feel good about their zoo. They wanna feel that their zoo is in a leading edge of animal welfare and that they, the animals are healthy.

And I think in, in, in, depending on how you market the zoo, if, if it’s a big zoo in it’s market, they will, they wanna see a lot of different animals. They might have their favorites, you know, where are the polar bears or whatever. So, you know, but they may expect a little too much. They may expect, you know, I said for Cleveland that has polar bears because 20 years ago we had polar bears.

So where are the polar bears?

But you, you have to explain, you can’t have everything. So I don’t think they have much more expectations around that. That’s the general public. There are people that are great zoo people. So when they come they wanna see specific things or they’ve heard about your zoo because you have a good wolf exhibit or, or you know, they, they wanna see quas ’cause they’ve not seen quas in another zoo. So there are those kind of people that come to zoos too. But most of them come as we still know as family outings. They wanna have a nice family outing and they wanna feel good about it.

They, some people don’t. A big zoo has two problems or what has a a, it’s a good thing and a bad thing. A big zoo has a lot of space for animals. But some people don’t like to walk a lot. So sometimes you have to have public transportation to get people around and, and that’s helpful. So, so they, they just expect the animals to be well taken care of. And obviously they want comforts too and they wanna make sure you have good restaurants and, and restrooms are clean and all that kind of thing. It’s probably things they didn’t really res expect in the past.

When I got to Cleveland Metro Park Zoo, we had two carnies that ran. One ran the gifts and one ran the food. One was a, a very decent man and he, he would give, you know, inner city kids would kind of come in his shop and he’d give some tchotchkes to ’em. But he only had tchotchkes. He and, and the food guy was just a mean guy. He would yell at the customers and had some, his name was Tom, he had Tom Ka burgers and some people thought that that’s probably what they were. But you know, so we’ve changed the way that we do food service now too. And I think people appreciate that.

That’s maybe a little extra for your question, but that’s some of it. Okay. You were talking about visitors and and attitudes.

Do you think there’s a higher attitude for amenities with visitors that they’re demanding more?

Oh, I most certainly, you know, probably Disney and other places that, that did it well for way before zoos did it will probably effect that. Yeah, I think when they come to any quote attraction, which is zoo is an attraction, they expect better things and, and now we have better things. I think, I think we have better way finding most of it digital now. You know, you used to have a paper map and when you went to any zoo, I kind of miss that. But now it’s all digital, it’s on your phone. So people do that food service, you got a variety of food and some, you know, as you know, mark, a lot of the zoos in Europe have incredible restaurants and had ’em for years. I mean full service restaurants, zoos, there’s just a couple of zoos that have done that and a couple of zoos have tried it and it’s not worked that well. But, but you know, quality, I’ll call it fast food I think is very important.

Rest, obviously clean restrooms. One of my fame, claims of fame. I think one of the things I’m most proud of, I created six new restrooms in our zoo in Cleveland. So, you know, I can take some credit for guest services. But yeah, I think people see that and in gift shops it’s an added attraction. They can get something they want and it’s, it’s not necessarily a, you know, a blow up paper gorilla or something, you know, it can be a nice thing. And you talked about your long career.

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

The most concerns, huh?

Yeah, what, what caused you the most concern during your career?

I don’t know that there was something that caused me the most concern. Certainly, you know, you always have some issues with governance. You obviously have some instance for fundraising. You always have issues with construction. You know, I was involved in all the construction, but you know, we had construction managers. I wasn’t the only one. And you know, we, I don’t think we ever built anything on time and on budget. There’s always sort of change orders and things like that.

So those were always a concern and, and there’s a lot of people besides me that were involved. So, but you know, building zoo exhibits is not like building a home where you, you’ve got a lot of blueprints that are the same. Every zoo exhibit is different. So you always find things you have to deal with. You know, there was some concerns obviously with animal welfare and animal rights people. But as I said earlier, there wasn’t a major concern in Cleveland funding.

You know, we had stable funding. Did we have enough funding?

No. I always wished we could have had more funding. But over my years in Cleveland we increased that greatly and we increased admission fees. And even in, when I was in Sacramento, one of the ways we were able to increase the staff or get a better professional staff too, was if I went, if through the, through my boss at the head of Park and Rec, we would go to city council to say, probably in those days it was like, go from $3 to $5 or something for, and we could maybe use half that money that would help the general fund and half that money may be to hire a curator. So we found ways to get funding.

Was there ever enough funding?

Could we always use twice as much funding? Sure. But again, both the zoos where I was director, we were able to greatly expand the zoological society’s ability to raise funding. And that that was one of the ways we could get some of the things we we wanted to get done. So funding, you know, there was always just things, staffing issues. Eh, I, you know, we had some staffing issues. Those, those bothered me the most when we, we had somebody we had to terminate or something that was always bothersome to me. We had to obviously go through the teamsters Union. Teamsters Union wasn’t a lot of fun to work with.

You know, they kind of big guys and bad suits that would come in and be the big gorillas and, but I got along with them. Okay. Not because I was, I wasn’t really the head person. ’cause Metro Parks had their own labor attorneys that did a lot of it. And it was always with us if we, if we had an issue. But I got to learn about the Teamsters Union when, if we had a bad employee that we had to do something with, they wanted us to get rid of ’em. But they couldn’t say that because they would get sued, you know, so they had to kind of, you know, beat their chest and kind of wink at us. Yeah, we’ll let this one go, but we gotta fight for ’em. So once I learned that about the teamsters and, and again, because Metro Parks really took well, paid their people well and had great benefits.

The, the, the teamsters really didn’t have issues. But, you know, occasionally you had somebody, we had an alcoholic that wasn’t doing their job or whatever, we had to had to terminate ’em. So that employee issues are never easy. But I found out like anything, like any, I suppose good manager finds that if you have a problem employee or you have some problem like that, you don’t let it sit there. You just deal with it, deal with it the best you can. Sometimes you make mistakes sometimes and you move on, but mostly you try to deal with it as fairly and as quickly as possible In the future.

What do you feel are the issues you’d like to see zoos address?

Well, I think they gotta keep doing what they’re doing. We have to keep increasing our funding to field conservation. We will always have, you know, an issue with, with, I don’t like to use the word surplus, but I don’t know how, what other term is good for, if we have an animal that we don’t ha can’t find a home for right away. And so we always have those issues and how we can deal with those. You know, we, we we’ve, you know, we’ve talked about Bill Conway and his involvement in creating SSPs and how that program has grown and evolved over the years and how we can work together. Again, what, when we were talking about directors and one of the things that changed and, and we’re talking about business people versus animal people. What people have to, what people don’t, when they come into our profession from the outside, they don’t realize that we’re a cooperative group in order to achieve our goals in a ZA as accredited zoos, we have to work together. We have no choice. I mean, not anybody can have all the giraffes in the world or all the Virgin Island boas or whatever it happens to be.

We’re working with. So we’re a cooperative group. Sometimes we cooperate nicely and sometimes we have some issues, but we have to, we have to cooperate in order to get it done. And then I think everybody needs to understand that. So a funding continue funding and we’re obviously now more than ever, but there’s not as much government funding for zoo. So zoos have to be somewhat self-sufficient. Hopefully there’ll always be some government and Cleveland Metro Parks is a, gets property tax money. So does Akron, all the zoos in Ohio get some money from, from the government. And as I said, most zoos get some money and, but that’s lesser and lesser all the time.

So finding new ways to have funding. I think we’ve been actually very successful in that even since I’ve left Cleveland Metro Parks 12 years ago as director, they’ve done some incredible things. Built a nice party center, it provides the revenue, they have weddings there and everything and I probably wouldn’t have put it in that location, but now I see where they put it as perfect. They did a zip line, it’s called the Eagle soar. It’s actually a ski lift thing. It’s so popular. They charge eight or $9 for, you know, for each person. And it goes way up this hill. And you can see downtown Cleveland from, it takes about a minute.

And, and I don’t have any, we may get into this, I don’t have any objection to rides as long as they don’t distract some zoos that the, the rides distract from the animal experience. In other words, you look at this beautiful giraffe exhibit behind them, you see, you know, a rollercoaster or something. I don’t like that. But Cleveland’s done a great job of keeping rides associated with the exhibits or, and in one, in the central area of the zoo where there’s no animal exhibits. And so those are some of the, some of the issues I think we need to be concerned about. But we need to be able to manage animals. We can’t manage ’em all. We gotta, we gotta set priorities to see the, what we can do the best with. Well you had mentioned surplus animals and, and so just brings up the point, it’s always seemed that euthanasia was a very tricky subject.

How does a zoo deal with euthanasia with surplus animals? Management Euthanasia is controversial. I was able to do it in Sacramento, particularly with Hoofstock. You know, hoofstock are like cows, we eat cows. It was a little easier. I mean the keepers, maybe they didn’t like it but they went along with it. You’re not gonna euthanize an extra gorilla or an extra elephant. Probably don’t need to ’cause there’s probably room for ’em anyway. But I, I think of it in a way, when you talk about it mostly with ho stock if you have it, because animals, most hoofed animals live in herds with one male and so many females. So it makes sense. Makes absolutely scientific sense.

I think Europe does quite a bit of it still. I’m not quite sure. I didn’t even try it in Cleveland. I didn’t think I had the support of the curatorial staff and we didn’t have a big ho stock collection anyway, so I’m not against it from a scientific point of view. But we didn’t do it in Cleveland. ’cause I think we would’ve had some backlash. I also have no objection to scientific research with animals. But we, when I got to Cleveland, we had a huge monkey island with Reese’s monkeys. Huge, huge.

I, you know, at one time maybe there were 40, 50 Reese’s monkeys, number one, we didn’t need to be keeping Reese’s monkeys or a common animal. They were in our a near our African section. I didn’t like that. And so eventually we were able to not breed ’em and, and sold them to a dealer who probably sold them to research. But I’m sure over the 50 years they had Reese’s monkeys. They were just selling ’em to dealers who were selling ’em to research. Again, I didn’t have any problem with it, but from a, from a public standpoint, I didn’t wanna open that can of worms. It was, there’s some fights you make and some fights you don’t need to make. And that was a fight I didn’t think I needed to make.

So we, we phased out the, the Reese’s monkeys went eventually went to some mixed species exhibit with CBU and hi racks and clip Springers and that kind of thing and fit, fit better.

What do you think about the, the role private breeders can be as partners with ze?

Well there’s a what what do you mean by the partners?

There are different things in partners. Certainly we use a lot of private breeders with reptiles and birds. I don’t say a lot, but I think we do that more with, more with that than with mammals. But there’s certainly private breeders of mammals I think we work with. It’s easier paperwork wise and accreditation wise to acquire animals from private breeders becomes a little more difficult. But not impossible to deac acquisition animals to private reefs because of a couple of things. One, through accreditation. They need to have our ethics. They can’t use ’em for hunting.

And so that becomes a little, I think you can still give animals to the big ranches in Texas, but they can’t be, those particular animals can’t be hunted. I don’t know, particularly in a can we’ll call a canned hunt, which is, you know, you’ll come into a small exhibit and you shoot ’em. I don’t know why anybody would do that. I actually don’t know why anybody would shoot an animal at a Texas ranch, even though they’re as big as, some of ’em are as big as Africa. But it doesn’t seem to me that that’s real hunting. But some people like to do and they like to do it. I don’t have any objection. I just, again, it’s a, what I would say, it’s a can of worms that I wouldn’t want to open. I wouldn’t wanna think that any of our animals that were came from Cleveland, were in some kind of were hunted.

I, it just wouldn’t be be right.

But does that mean we can’t give it to one of the ranches that do a good job?

And they’re even are, they’re even some big private companies that are a ZA accredited, I can’t remember the one in California that’s good. But there’s a couple that are accredited and work with our, our ethics dealing with private people. You know, we have a form and they have to, they have to fill out and people either have to inspect them or know somebody that’s knows them to make sure that they’re, they’re cared for properly. So we have all these safeguards in a ZA that are, are followed that make sure that any extra animals from zoos go to somewhere that can really take ’em. And there are a lot of good private people that, that take care of animals. But, but again, the one thing we wanna make sure, particularly if they’re members of a ZA is they’re gonna be around for a while that, you know, the person doesn’t die and there’s nowhere for these animals to go. So there’s a lot of things to consider when dealing with private people that you don’t have when you’re dealing with an a ZA accredited zoo. Because those issues are all sort of taken care of.

I mean, one of the questions you have in accreditation is, you know, what happens if there’s a COVID break outbreak and you don’t have any visitors?

Can you sustain yourself for a while?

So all accredited zoos have an ability to sustain their collections and in emergencies where some private people, if the owner dies, might not. So that’s another concern.

So there are a lot of concerns dealing with private people, but I think zoos regularly work with ’em particularly, I think, wouldn’t you say with reptiles and, and birds?

’cause we just don’t have the capacity. So it’s a good thing in one way because it, it extends our ability to keep capacity, to keep the things we need to have a self-sustaining captive population, whether it’s rhinos or giraffes or there’s not many gorillas or clip springer or whatever it happens to be. So it can be private people can be very helpful. Now with that said, we work very hard along with a ZA and to change change laws in Ohio, and which many states have exotic animals, people can no longer keep dangerous bears in, in, in Ohio unless they, they have to have a permit or they have to be a member of a ZA or ZAA to have a private ownership or, or they have to be inspected and that kind of thing. So I think that’s a good thing. We had, we had too many lions and tigers and bears in Ohio that were, were not well taken care of. I don’t know if you remember that thing. Jack Hannah got really involved with the guy got crazy and let all his animals loose.

And, and that really helped change the laws as did Jack Hannah because he was good friends with the governor and they created this exotic animal ordinance. So that’s, that’s a good thing, not just every Joe public can have a lion or a tiger. There was a program adopt a national park. A concept seemed like a natural for Zeus to assist in the water.

Why do you feel Zeus have not picked up on the challenge in more numbers and and is this adopt a national park still viable?

I suppose it’s viable. I think more likely it’s to work with a national park. Akron is very close to Cuyahoga National Park, so they’ve done some coyote studies together and some other kinds of studies together. Or if you’re close to a national park like Yellowstone, like the Wolf Center in West Yellowstone probably works with Yellowstone National Park. I think it’s just not a priority. There are enough people that are working with national parks. With that said, there’s been some example, the one, the one that, there’s a couple I do know of, and one is historical, I’m sure, I’m sure WCS or the Bronx Zoo has worked with a lot of national parks, particularly in Patagonia and some other places. I, I can’t name ’em off Brent, but Frankfurt’s Zoological Society since the fifties has worked in the Serengeti. And if you go to the Serengeti as you’ve done, you see their Frankfurt trucks are still there.

And so they’re still part of that whole thing. And then when Steve Burns was in Idaho at Zoo Boise, he worked with the park. He had a, oh, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he’s a wealthy person, actually lives in Sun Valley. But he got them really interested in some parks in Mozambique and they, they did a lot of work there and Mo brought a lot of funding to re sort of rewild some of the parks in Mozambique. So it’s not that it doesn’t exist, but like you, I’m not aware of a lot of it. I think it’s zoos have other priorities that work with other work more directly with researchers or conservationists in those national parks rather than work with a government agency which might not need much help, you know, or, or if they did, it would be a specific project. Like for instance, the, the draft conservation group has worked in, in Uganda to move giraffes from one park to another where they didn’t have as many. So that in a sense is working with National Park, but it’s not necessarily work is working through a conservation organization that’s working with national parks.

You talked about conservation before.

What do you think is the most, one of the most difficult concepts for zoos to understand and implement regarding their relationship to conservation?

Hmm. Well I, I am not sure this is the answer, but the, to try to get people to understand that what zoos are doing for conservation and Ccle Cleveland has done a great job. When I left, they built this, it’s probably 40 by 40 feet kiosk in a sense. They have a quarters for conservation where 50 cents of every admission goes to a conservation project. But they built the kiosk. So when you come in the gate, you have your green coin and you go into the center and Chris Kuhar, the director, is giving a video and they show six programs and they talk about each of giraffes, turtles, rhinos, lions, and two others anyway. And so they have a video that talks about what the Cleveland Zoo has done in those areas. And then you can put your money, either the coin or you can actually put actual money into those.

So, so people, most people look at what’s this?

So they, from the moment they come in the zoo, they understand what the zoo is doing for field conservation. Remember I talked about field conservation versus other forms of conservation. So I think that’s very important that people understand what, what the zoo is about and if they, and if that can be reinforced, which it is in other ways. So when you go to the Rhino exhibit, then there’s maybe even a zoo key thing that sows about what the zoo’s doing for conservation for rhinos or whatever. So you’ve gotta make that well known in, in a simple way. I think that’s very important.

Did you start that?

So they buy a token? Yeah, they buy it. Yeah. No, they don’t buy it. So the mission’s $20, so 50. So as soon as you buy it, you get a token and that’s 50 cents. And then that token you put in, and that’s called quarter. It was started actually by Steve Burns and also in Colorado they started the quarters for, and a lot of zoos have that now. Some of ’em are just simple drop boxes, but a lot of ’em it is. And then a lot of zoos have expanded. But you know, the way they’ve expanded conservation field, again, let me gimme a term, field conservation in many ways.

So a lot of zoos have this quarters for conservation program where a part of your admission goes to field conservation outside the walls, it can go to the cheetah fund, it can go to any other bonafide conservation program. They also have ways that say 50% over a dollar of every membership goes to that fund. And it usually goes in a special fund. And at the end of the year, they decide how to divvy it up. And then most zoos now in their gift shops, maybe not as much in the food, but maybe in food, have a roundup program that you, you know, you can, if, if your bill’s $3 75 cents a quarter, then it goes to the, and you got the computers that can figure that out. So at the end of the day, this much goes to the conservation side. So isn’t that great? The zoos have found, even small zoos have found ways to actually fund their conservation as opposed to outright donations and, and from certain people. So it’s, it’s a good thing.

Did you find that the public in Cleveland putting in this token was favoring like one program way more than another?

At least from my very tell you. Yeah. Well, yeah. It’s interesting. And I know they’re working on this too. Yes. At least when I was there, and I think it’s still the same, the local conservation program got the most money saving turtles in Cleveland as opposed to lions and cheetahs and other thing people wanna give their money locally. So I thought that was kind of interesting to me. Wow. I love giraffes and gorillas and turtles are good too, but you know, I want to give something that’s really sexy. But that was not the case and people wanted to give to local conservation. I think zoos are finding that out. And I know in Cleveland they’re making a big effort.

They’re changing the whole rainforest to be forest now and to tie in how we need to conserve forest in Ohio with forest worldwide. So when people, people understand how we need forests in Ohio. So I, I think people are starting to understand that. But that’s a good question. It’s true that they, they really prefer some local conservation.

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

It always will be a problem, but I’m, I’m, I, I think, well the space is c caused by two things. One, we keep lesser animals, fewer animals in larger spaces, so we don’t have as many species et cetera. And two, we just don’t have enough space. You know what your friend Bill Conway talked about how all the zoo and row could fit into the city of bro, the area of Bronx or whatever. I am kind of interested in St. Louis and a couple of other zoos that are expanding their effort by building conservation centers outside of their zoo. So there’s a couple of those coming on. And I just did a, a project for the, what I’ll call the asir, but it’s not called the here anymore Conservation center of the New Orleans Zoo.

It’s very much underutilized. And if they had the right funding, they could do a lot more out there. They already have oppy and giraffes. They have like 20 or 30 whooping cranes, that’s a whooping cae breeding area. So there’s lots of, there is some spaces available, but again, funding would be an issue. So I, I’m kind of encouraged that more zoos will have facilities sort of outside the walls that might provide more space, particularly for larger animals like hoed animals and stuff. Some of ’em are open to the public, some of them are not. And they provide some resources. But yes, it is a problem.

We will never, zoos can’t save everything. We have to be very particular what we can work with and can’t work with and, and, and work together. I’ve, as you know, because you’ve been involved in these programs too, you know, the hoofstock people have to come together and say, look, we can’t have, we can’t manage in in North America, five desert antelope, African antelope species, the UR corridor addicts, the Arabian. Or you can’t, we, we have to choose one ’cause there are two. And I think when, when the SSPs make those decisions, they’re good decisions. ’cause we can’t manage ’em all. That’s one way to deal with it. ’cause we’re never gonna have that much more space.

So we have to be really restrictive to make sure we deal with the most vulnerable species, I think.

And speaking of space, do you feel it’s a luxury that some zoos have breeding centers?

Well, I wouldn’t call it a luxury. I think it’s really nice that, again, St. Louis is the one that’s just now doing that. But you know, San Diego and then fortunately we’re in, in Ohio, we have the wilds. When I got to Cleveland, the money, the, the land had already been donated and very soon after I got there, I think we had a good model. I say we, because at that time the five zoos in Ohio were very much involved in the wilds and were kind of on the board. But we had a funding strategy with a third of the money coming from the state, third of the money from admissions and a third of the money from donations. None of those worked. The state finally pulled out completely.

It’s in the middle of nowhere, so it’s hard to raise money and they’re not gonna come to Cleveland or Columbus and raise money because we’re raising money for our zoos there. And admissions was, was minimal because it’s a long way. Now with that said, Columbus Zoo saved it, Columbus, it was a big zoo, I think it may be at first cost ’em a million dollars a year, which they could easily afford. And so they took over the operation and now it’s a, an adjacent to and it’s a good thing. And then they’ve, they’ve published it more because it’s a very unique experience in Ohio. You go around in this bus or this truck and you can feed giraffes from the back of the truck. And, and so just a wonderful facility. So they’re on much better financial grounds down and do some wonderful work with cheetah, with, with wild dogs, with other endangered animals.

So it’s a great facility. And they’ve also found ways to make revenue. They have a campsite, they have a, they have a y yurts where PE people can stay and they actually have a very nice lodge that you can rent out, has five bedrooms. So they find ways to make money. We, for a while it was just a scientific endeavor and the directors they had there felt it was just a scientific endeavor and we don’t care about guests. And the guy a mile away was making a lot of money by having people come in and feed llamas. You were making more money than the wilds was just because he had something that people wanted to do. You know? But no, this is a scientific thing.

We know we, you know, guests are just a pain and you know, butt. So, but that changed and, and Columbus has done a great job of operating now and I think it’s, it’s just a wonderful facility, accredited zoo. Do you feel that you, you talk about people going out and feeding the animals.

What’s your opinion at two levels about feeding programs and does that mean that you think animals need to earn their keep In a sense?

Two different questions and I’ll answer the first about feeding. We’ve changed. One USD made us change USDA, you have to have somebody there all the time. So most zoos still have a barnyard feed and I like that. Maybe they don’t feed, maybe they just go in and pet. But you know, they can get, kids can get contact with farm animals, which I think is a wonderful thing kid. The little kids like it and you can be well supervised and the animals are domestic and it works well. And now we’ve come up with some incredible ways to, I think respectively feed animals with giraffe feeding and with Laura Keet and parakeet feeding and they’re both big money makers and with the giraffe feeding it’s mostly lettuce. You can, you can’t feed the giraffe too much lettuce.

So unfortunately some zoos like Cleveland right now has a couple giraffe that don’t really do it very well, but they’re slowly learning ’cause they have new drafts. So these kids, you should see smiles on their face when they give a, a piece of lettuce and see the 18 inch tongue and they, they actually keep an educated, they keep somebody there to talk about the giraffes and it’s a wonderful thing. Built a whole deck for it, like mo Zoo. So that’s a great way to get people involved. And I, I really encourage that. And the same with the Loro KET and the, the parakeet feeding. You have a seed stick for the parakeets or a cup of nectar for the, for the, and they eventually come over and take it. I noticed that one of the issues is, you know, if they, if they’re, if those aviators like in Cleveland are closed all winter, they have to sort of be retrained.

So when they first start opening, the birds don’t come over as readily as they used to. So you have to kind of wait till the birds come over. But I think those are two examples where you can get people close to animals and can appreciate animals. And I don’t think it adversely affects the animals at all. And again, with programs that keep people involved, some zoos have programs to be an animal keeper.

Positive, negative doesn’t, You mean like kids, Adults?

Oh, Be an animal keeper for a day. Oh yeah, I guess that, I don’t think I’ve had a zoo that we’ve done that. You mean we’ve certainly had donors come in and spend a day with an animal keeper I suppose. But yeah, that, that’s not a bad idea, obviously. Now some of the things that we don’t do that we used to take people, you were talking about behind the scenes of things. Now if you go behind the scenes in gorillas or any primate house, you almost have to ha a hazmat suit on. You know, you certainly have masks on and our keepers always wear masks when they’re hosing ’cause germs can go either way. So you have to be careful of that.

But I know we have a lot of keeper for the day programs where kids win a prize or something and spend with keepers and, and that kind of thing. And that’s a nice idea. A lot of, you know, it gets people excited about keepers.

Didn’t you have a second question with the feeding question that I didn’t answer or Well, do you feel that animals need to earn their Ke Oh, to earn their keep?

Yes and no. I mean, they’re there, they’re there to represent endangered species and a lot of times in, in, in conservation efforts. So if we’re saving animals by them, there is that county earning oria. I don’t, and I like to see zoos, I’m a little ambivalent now why some zoos keep their holding areas open so you don’t always see animals. So I, I think if people come to see animals and if you build a beautiful exhibit, I’m not sure animals need to be locked up during the, they’re only out there, you know, six, seven hours a day anyway. So I don’t think they have to be, have access to the back for animal welfare. But a lot of people do. So I’m, I’m, if they want to do that, fine. But it is, it is nice when people, when people, even if they’re far away, you gotta give them so they feel comfortable.

You know, like our wolves are usually in the, during the heat of the day or sort of in the back behind logs, but at least you can see them. And actually we have a TV screens with infrared cameras so you can see where they are in the exhibit. But I don’t think you need to keep the door open in that. So yeah, I think in that way animals need to earn their keep. It’s what people pay to come to see.

But I, I don’t think they need to earn their way or keep in a in a sense of sense of the strict terms of the, of that, Your opinion about animal rights?

Well, we talked about it a little bit again, I, I think the extremists are wrong in a lot of things. I think they, they exaggerate what zoos are doing.

I think most, most animals in modern a ZA zoos and in the case of good European zoos are well taken care of and, and, and are they happy?

We’ve got a lot of studies that show that, you know, they move around as much as they would in the wild if they had the choices. So I think animals are well, well cared for. But I, I do like, I do not like the animal extremists that, that for instance, that have attacked the Bronx Zoo for keeping happy the elephant, you know, it was an elderly elephant and been there all our life and I think’s ha better off there than going somewhere else. And I think the zoo people know better than the animal extremists. And again, thinking about how they exaggerate things like longevity by saying that elephants should all be living till they’re 70 years old, where the medium lifespan might be 40. Why they say that animals are dangerous and kill people. Yeah, people have been killed, but people have made silly mistakes and, and, but it’s rare where animals have been killed by keepers making a mistake. Yeah, that’s happened. Or a facility problem.

But it’s so rare if you consider the millions of animals that are kept worldwide. Again, I think it’s, it’s a misconception because of, of our new media, Facebook, everybody knows there’s an animal that, that if a poisonous snake attacks a keeper in Thailand, we know the next day on. It’s, it’s a, it’s a worldwide story where in the past we didn’t know all that. And, and it’s again, but it’s still very rare. But if you look at all the zoos worldwide, the accidents that have happened, either human caused accidents to animals or, or accidents to humans, it’s, it’s very rare considering the number of dangerous animals we have. But specifically like camel rides, pony rides, Yeah, there’s a good example. Good, bad. I like them. I, I think both those are good. Good.

Now, when we opened Australia, we had a camel ride. It was actually a camel sit ’cause the circle was pretty small and those, those camels were this there during season and then went back to the guy’s place in Missouri. I thought they were fine. They’re primarily drama dairy camels. And they were domesticated a long time ago and I thought they were fine. They discontinued that when I left. So for probably a number of reasons, but I thought they was a guy addition to Australia. I just read a big article about how camels are a problem in Australia now they’re destroying the country ’cause they’ve gone feral. So I thought it was kind of a neat addition.

People liked it, they’d pay for it and just for a quick ride ’cause it was unique and got pictures and photographs and stuff and pony rides mostly. You have to walk with the person now. I mean, you just can’t put a kid on a pony and let it go. But still again, it’s close. So I, I like, I think those are good things. If, if you want to have ’em, I don’t have any objection to either of those elephant rise no longer. We do, probably shouldn’t do. Pretty boring for an elephant.

It’s such an intelligent animal to go in a circle all day. And so I don’t, we used to do those, but we don’t do those anymore.

Do you feel there is still a wild out there?

Or have the majority of wild spaces been turned into managed wild zoos?

Yeah, no, i, I word it a different little different we’re we have to manage all animals. We have no choice. We screwed it up so bad that it doesn’t matter if it’s a Serengeti or Yellowstone or, or a small zoo in the United States. All animals have to be managed in some way. And sometimes it requires culling like our wolf. I think our wolf introduction in, in Yellowstone is a wonderful program, but when those wolfs go outside of the Yellowstone and kill somebody’s cattle, you’ve gotta take care of them. So we have to manage those kind of things and, and Rewilding is a really important thing right now and people are doing it. But again, it’s just part of the management. Serengeti has to be managed to some extent.

I can’t really, you know, they see, we track where elephants are when they, those elephants leave and destroy somebody’s crop. That’s a big problem. And all the lions in Africa, there’s a lot of people working on different ways to manage those. The lion group in, in Tanzania is providing chain link to all the, to the Messiah for their boma so that the lions are, or it can stay out of those bomas or at least kept out more readily and stuff. Or use dogs or whatever. Dogs with cheetahs too. They, in, in Namibia they’ve kept dogs with cheetahs so that the, the or have kept dogs with the livestock. So the cheetahs stay away and stuff like that. So there, I think animals, you know, human animal conflict is one of the biggest things that we have to be concerned about. And how we can mitigate that.

We’re not gonna keep the world that we knew a hundred years ago or maybe the world we knew 20 years ago, but let’s hope we can keep enough of it so that we can keep all the animals we have. We have enough space for the animals, but they’re all gonna be managed in some ways. And I think that’s why zoos are so important, is because we are, we, and I mean worldwide, we’re the experts in small population management and genetic management of animals keeping small populations healthy, maintaining we can use that knowledge for, for small populations in, in wild areas. So yeah, I, I think it’s important.

Why didn’t zoos ever implement a major elephant national breeding program?

I’m not exactly sure Mark what you mean by that?

I mean we have a breeding program for elephants. Fortunately there’s, there’s a few zoos that are doing well, Sedwick County and those that brought in in Omaha that brought in the new ones. So there is, I’m more familiar with African elephants, but there is some of that. They, we started, in fact, I was on the board before I left Cleveland of a elephant sanctuary in Florida that was gonna house elephants. And these people were really good about donating this orange grove to us. And it worked for a while, but then there was a death of a couple of ’em and so it just fell apart and it didn’t have the income that we thought it would have. And so I think it just fell apart and probably was not needed. ’cause there was enough space for elephants in the zoos that we had.

I mean Disney had a lot of space and almost what, what would you say the last 20 years, I’m guessing the zoos that wanted to keep elephants, including Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, have all expanded their elephant facilities. So I, I think it just wasn’t needed that we thought it might’ve been needed. We also thought it might have replaced the two elephant sanctuaries and now one of those sanctuaries, the one in Tennessee is actually an a CA member. So we work regularly with that quote sanctuary. So I think it just wasn’t needed. Talk again, conservation. How successful would you say zoos and crams have been in achieving the reintroduction of species back into the wild or rewilding as I would, I would have to say it’s been amazing on the one hand. On on the other hand, we’re not gonna save a lot of animals by reintroduction.

I mean, so let’s say there’s a hundred thousand species, you know, so the numbers that we can work with is probably, well less than a thousand, maybe just a few hundred.

But if you look at the, what we’ve done with a Arabian ORs, with hor ORs with California, California condor is this the most successful story around costs?

Millions and millions of dollars. But there’s condors all over California. I saw the first California condor I’ve seen was just a couple years ago in Utah at, at the National Park Zion. I said I saw my first California condor, so they’re everywhere. The black-footed fart almost gone, came back a few and several zoos have worked with it and saved the whooping cranes and then all the Houston towed and you talked, we talked a little bit about how small zoos, so there’s a lot of small animals the zoos are working with and particularly reptiles rewilding them also, I was just reading an article about the work with some zoos are doing with hell benders, you know, also an endangered amphibian important amphibian, the largest one in, in, in the United States. And so people are rewilding hell benders. So in many ways it’s oh, Guam rails. I mean, so you can go outside the thing.

And in, in New Zealand a lot of animals have been reintroduce reptiles and, and things have been re obviously they don’t have mammals but birds and have been re-introduced and reil. So I think zoos have been very successful in doing that. You know, obviously some we haven’t done. I don’t, we don’t need to. I know they’ve actually a kind of a cute story in Uganda. They wanted to bring back white rhinos, which are northern back rhinos are basically extinct. And so they decided to have southern black rhinos reintroduced in Uganda and they got one from Kenya and they got one from I think the San Diego Wild Animal Park. I think the male was from Kenya.

And the female was from the San Diego Wild Animal Park. And they put ’em together and, and and what, I can’t remember the whole story, but I guess they had a youngster and since the male was from Kenya and the female was from United States, they named the baby Obama. So kind of a cute story. But yeah, I think zoos have been, zoos have been very, and aquariums, aquariums are working a lot now with corals. And even some zoos are, ’cause you know, corals are dying, they’re being bleached and so they’re doing a lot with corals now where we, I know we did that in Cleveland. We, in fact, one of the donor programs we had that they, they could come up and they could plant a coral in the, in a, in one of our tanks. So they’re doing that in the wild now. So to bring back for corals from coral bleaching.

So I think it’s very successful, but it’s not gonna save the a hundred thousand animals that we have. Maybe we’ll do a thousand animals at the most.

On that same vein, just do you have an opinion on these new quote unquote breakthroughs of bringing back the mammoth?

Oh and Some of these extinct, You know, I really don’t know as much about it. The qa, they’ve talked about bringing it back and I suppose with technology it’s could happen. The gene technology. Yeah, it’s a little too out there for me. And I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but, so I don’t really have an opinion on it, but I I I do believe with science now it’s probably possible, you know, you mo mixed genes and stuff. So anything’s possible. I mean you talk about, look at what, look at the things that are being done now that when we were kids could, we never could think of. So I guess it’s possible.

Is it, I guess my question is, is it the, the, is it reality or is it really the right thing to do?

We, I, my wife and I went to my 50th or whatever college reunion and we went to the, we had a speaker from, from from the liberal arts side and he says, you know, the scientists will say we can clone a human being, but the liberal arts people will say, why do you wanna clone a human being?

So I think that’s the question, you know, science can do anything, but do we really wanna do that?

Is maybe the questions we also need to be asked at the same time. Now we’re talking about different animal species. In your opinion, does the selection that the American, the association, a CA association of Zeus and Aquariums decided for their species of surviv program, those species which they decided they want to do.

Has that met with what you envisioned in these?

I suppose so. I think it has to do with who they are. You know, I think it came from interest. I think the choice of the species, as I understand it probably came from the interest of the curators and at the, at the beginning directors, but mostly curators. Now if those curators had the interest in those species, and secondly, if they were endangered, oh, and thirdly, did we have enough of ’em to make it. So those three criteria decided what, what we could actually do there. I mean, some things we just didn’t have, so there’s not much we could do so on those species. So we just didn’t have the numbers and, but, and so that, and then just interest. ’cause if you don’t have anybody that’s interested in that species, you’re not gonna be able to get enough people to work on it.

What, what would you say is the greatest areas of development in the way zoos have interpreted their collections to visitors?

Well, I think the exhibits are better. Again, not everybody’s like me, but I like a story. You gotta tell a story about an animal and you do that through good exhibitory graphics is only a minor help, but you could have other types of hands-on type learning to, to see those animals like touching the furs or key boxes or whatever. And certainly it really helps to have individuals there to interpret it. So I think the visitor appreciates all that on that. That said, I’m so a purist, you know, I I I just like to walk through a zoo and look at the animals and the exhibit. I don’t need a lot of el that’s going on in gimmicks, if you will. I just, I like a park that’s just kind of quiet and you can walk through and enjoy it.

Like it’s a piece of nature. Realizing we don’t fool anybody with naturalistic exhibits. But I think it makes us feel better. I also think it has the animals feel better than in a concrete box. You remember from Lincoln Park to bathroom style cages we had that didn’t make anybody feel good about the animal. Certainly wasn’t helpful for the animals. So zoos have gotten out of that and I think it’s a, it’s a much better system now that we have spending a lot of money on it. But I think it’s helpful. Some people say we spend too much money on fake rocks and all that.

I, I don’t think so. I think you gotta have a nice looking thing. It it’s large enough and diverse enough for, for, for the animals. And we’ve come up with some interesting things. I know in the new bear exhibit in Cleveland, they have poles that the animals can shake and food comes down and they built these nice climbing structures. Some of it’s metal and stuff and then they got shade structures on the top. Well, the darn slough bears and spectacle bears just climb right up the poles and use the, the shade structure as a hammock. So that’s fine too. You know, they kind of develop their own use of the space.

So yeah, Getting in conservation regarding cons, what worries you, but what gives you hope?

And now what are you talking about?

Field conservation general. Let’s go general field conservation. Okay. I, I think the, the, the speed in which, no, not most so speed, but the amount of money we spend now, I think a ZA spends something like, what was it, it was over, I think it was close to $400 million a year now that that probably was 20 years ago. It was probably like 70 million and it was mostly the Bronx. But now zoo are spending more than probably any other conservation agency in the United States on field conservation. Yeah, some of that’s a little redundant the way we figure it out. ’cause we, we certainly count people’s time. They’re over there doing things and sometimes we double count because zoos maybe both counted or something.

But for the most part we spend a lot more money now and it’s for the last at least 10 years, it’s always been an important part of accreditation.

What are you doing for field conservation?

I think we owe it to the animals that we keep. I don’t think we keep animals and zoos just for entertainment. I think we keep it for, for to have a nice time if that’s entertainment. But we also keep animals, our zoo for education and conservation. So I think the growth in field conservation and the fact that so many people in zoos, the director, the curators, the veterinarians and even the keepers are so much involved. I mean the keepers in some zoos like in Ohio are very involved in in lights out, which is they go downtown and they collect injured birds that hit a window in, in a downtown area and bring those in. Bird inner those birds back and either can release ’em or at least humanely put ’em to sleep. So there’s all kinds of on the grounds and easy conservation projects at every level.

In fact, there was, I just read an article today about a, a group that’s coming together to get more keepers involved in field conservation by not just this group but by listing all the opportunities keepers could have. Because there’s a lot of agencies that’ll take volunteers to help with cheetah conservation or, or anything. So they’re kind of putting all that in a database so that keepers, either the zoos would give them time or they could maybe take their vacation time and do these important field conservation projects. So I think the growth in field conservation is one of the most important things that happen. And we talked a little bit about it in, in Cleveland, how we have this, this kiosk and that really and zoos are collecting money in various different ways. And then there’s some donors, I mean we’ve had some donors that felt really strongly about giraffes and gave hundreds and well tens of thousands of dollars towards, of giraffe conservation. And this one donor and that’s fine is always involved. He always goes, he and his wife always go to these places with the scientists and he really likes to be involved, but that’s okay.

He is not a, not causing any problem. And one of the keepers, one of our draft keeper in Cleveland went over there and she was really responsible for trying to keep the giraffe calm in the trucks because she’s a keeper so she knows giraffes and barns and stuff. So she was taking notes and making sure they stayed calm before the trucks took off and translated them to the northern part of Uganda. So I think zoos are starting to send to keep as a keepers in Akron Zoo. We have a new curator there, Bob, and he’s really active on borough Colorado Island. They, they knock primates down and checking out primate primates for c various things. And he always takes well animal health tech or a veterinarian and some of the keepers down to help ’em catch those animals and, and do things there. You talked about exhibitry.

How did you try and achieve a wow impact in exhibit design?

Hire a good architect, I guess, I don’t know, pretty creative when we could, our elephant exhibit is a good example. Again, the architects sort of came out. We have two elephant Cleveland has two elephant exhibits and in in between them is, we call it the afro, an elephant crossing. And in between them are gates and every day they move the el elephants from one area to the other. Now when you put the fence up between the public and the elephants, they can’t really see ’em. But there’s always an educator there that says, you can always tell this elephant because its shoulders are higher. And this is Marika and this is Moshi. She’s, she’s the smallest, but she’s the oldest.

So in a sense, an elephant, even if it’s behind a cable structure, 10 feet from you is a wow. And seeing the elephants in the barn is a wow because you can really see how big they are. You know, the old story we all tell about the little girl looking at elephants and the mother saying, okay, we’ve, we’ve seen the elephants, let’s move on. And the little girl won’t move. And you know the story and then, and it says, come on, we can see you can, we can go home, we can see elephants on TV in the book. She says, yeah, but they’re not this big.

And and that’s a wow, isn’t it?

And and it’s with any animal. So you one animal’s be close, but you don’t wanna be far. So when they’re far, at least they’re in a nice area, hopefully they’re doing things. A lot of times animals aren’t doing anything. And pe I think people understand that I, you know, I don’t have any problem. I think people, you know, I volunteer at the zoo and people seem to understand that, you know, I always, when I take ’em by a cat exhibit, the cats are sleeping.

I say, well your cat at home sleeps all day, doesn’t it?

So, you know, and that’s sort of a wow experience when you can you see ’em. And you know, the other thing that’s more wow than when you and I started in zoos is the mesh that we have now, it somewhat disappears. It’s not chain link and it’s not bars. And we use a lot of glass now. So often you go to the tiger exhibit in Cleveland or the lion exhibit in, in Akron and the animals three inches from you. You know, it’s just laying there on a rock right there and you can see how big that poly is. And you, you, you know, and if they open their mouth, they yawn, you can see that three inch tooth. That’s a wow. And so the opportunity to get people close to the animals respectfully, I think has increased because we use glass and these really nice meshes that you can, that you can see right through and almost see the whole thing.

And if they’re back away, your camera, you can phase out the mesh too. So, so there’s lots of ways to make make a wow exhibits. It starts with exhibitry when you can, when you can interpret ’em close, it’s, it’s even better.

Why don’t zoos seem to have more sister zoo relationships?

When I got to Cleveland, we had a sister zoo relationship in Wuhan China. It was a disaster in a sense that it was really just a way to trade animals. We gave them a raccoon, they gave us red pandas, you know, I mean it was kind of silly. And we gave them a chimp, I can’t remember actually it became controversial ’cause a a couple, they gave us some pangolins and they, they escaped and died and got kind of nasty. So I don’t know if anybody has sister zoo arrangements, but it was more of a way just to, to trade animals back and forth. We could give you this and that. I think you don’t need a sister zoo relationship to do that. I don’t know if there’s still any sister zoo relationships.

I know there probably are because I think cities sometimes have sister zoo relationships with probably not so much with China anymore, but with, with places. And, and through that you might part be part of a delegation that would go to the, the city because there’s a sister zoo relationship. And so it would help the city more than the zoo. But it was just a way, I think to trade animals and I, there are easier ways to train animals.

How important do you feel it is for a zoo director to make rounds of the zoo?

And is that something you did?

I did not do traditional rounds. I think it’s important for zoos to be out in the zoo. And I, I’m sure I was out in the zoo every day, but I didn’t get there in the morning and traditionally do a round and walk around. First of all it was 180 acres, but I did have a golf cart, but I walked it a lot. But I used the golf cart. I did two things that I thought were fairly effective in doing in quote, doing rounds. And I believe in rounds like Tim, Tom Peters, a management guy that wrote a lot about management, had a term called management by walking around, which is the same thing as rounds. You gotta get out there and talk to people. You know, I, there’s a traditional round where I go around and look at each debit and tell my curator to do this or that.

No, but I did management by walking around and I thought it was very effective and people knew it. So what I did, I did two things every month. I took a checklist like yours, I had 192 exhibits from a leaf cutter and exhibit to an elephant exhibit.

And I, on that checklist I would, could I see the animal or not?

And as I was doing it, I’d talked to keepers as I walked around or even guessed as I walked around.

So I came back ’cause my, what I was worried about is would the maintenance staff not finish one project and then start another?

And so there were exhibits closed all the time because they hadn’t done this or that. So we, we tried to keep most of the exhibits open and with animals. Now it might be sleeping, it might be back in a corner, but I could see it. And so that was one thing I did. I did that on monthly. It was formal, it was post-it, everybody knew, knew about. The other thing I did, I, I don’t know who I learned this from, but it was great. I think I had at that when I left about 160 full-time and maybe some full-time permanent part-time. And I had a candy bar made a Hershey’s candy bar.

It had a wrapper on it and I forget all the things it said, but it said, you are appreciated it. Happy birthday, you’re appreciated. And, and everybody’s birthday, I would try to find that person. Now it might be a day late or a week late or whatever, but everybody’s birthday. I’d go see ’em sometimes we’d talk about their family. Sometimes we’d talk about the job. I all, it was mostly went behind the scenes and of course we had a radio system says, oh, Steve’s looking for here on your birthday. So they knew I was, which was okay too.

They knew I was walking around. So I, I think that was helpful that, you know, and it was part of that management by walking around, just going and thanking them. And they all knew I was coming and, and they kind of appreciated, I think. And it, I, it was a, it was a great tool to get me out in the zoo. ’cause I had a list, okay, this is George ER’s birthday, this is so and so, so I’d have to go find those two people. And maybe I, it was a weekend I missed them, I’d get ’em another day. So it was a, so I did did rounds in those ways, but I wouldn’t call them rounds, you know.

Do you feel zoos and aquas need to be more involved with animal welfare?

Oh, I think they are so much more now than ever before. Every, any, any zoo. Now, even a small zoo, Akron has their own animal welfare curator. And all that person does is goes through the, you know, the accreditation has a real process of animal welfare. Now you’re supposed to evaluate yearly, every animal in the zoo as to, and you give them a number ratings and what it is. And if they could use some, now you can’t build a $2 million exhibit overnight. But if they need more space, that’s listed and it’s a, it’s a really good process. And, and, and it is holistic and involves the curators, the keepers.

And as I said, sometimes most zoos now and credited zoos have their own person that keeps track of that. So they make sure the keepers are looking at their animals regularly and filling out the forms. And sometimes quarterly, at least yearly it’s required. And there’s a whole system of how you do it. And, and you rate it usually as a number scale. And that gives you priorities of what your next, you know, big project is or what you can do. Sometimes it’s really easy to do, you know, sometimes it’s just adding enrichment or, or whatever, or different or hiding food or whatever. But sometimes, you know, gotta get the, and maybe some of it says, no, we shouldn’t be keeping these animals ’cause we don’t have the proper facility.

So where I think we always did that. Now it’s really documented and it’s scientific in a sense that because it is documented and, and, and everybody takes place. And I think the keepers at first just didn’t like it ’cause it was so much work. But now I think everybody, it’s just a standard now that all a ZA zoos do. So we’ve come a long way with animal welfare.

And what I worry a little bit about it, and I’m not a scientist, but we do all the cortisone studies to show if they’ve stressed, is stress a bad thing?

You know, how do animals stay alive in Africa?

They’re stressed. So I’m not sure if we just measure stress. Again, I’m not a scientist. Maybe there’s different kinds of stress or something. But if an animal is stressed a little bit, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing because that’s the way animals survive by being stressed. So it’s, it’s interesting. I’d like to know more about it actually On a different sub.

Any advice for that Neophyte Zoo director about the importance of it marketing a zoo?

Well, a lot of zoo directors at Nephi, they all understand marketing. Yeah, no, you have to get people to come to the zoo. I think marketing and zoos, first of all that Sue Allen was the greatest marketing person. And I was fortunate that we were able to work together for my years in Cleveland. One, she kept me out of a lot of trouble by saying I didn’t, if I said something stupid, she could get me correct it and stuff. But we did a lot of stuff by going to TV stations, like all these did, we had a fairly good advertising campaign, et cetera. What I worry about, I’m a serious zoo director. I, I mean, I want zoos to be known for their scientific information.

And when and when we have animal birthday parties or we have animals choosing who’s gonna win the Super Bowl, you know, I think it kind of takes away from the seriousness of the zoo. I’m not saying I never did it or we didn’t do that kind of thing, but I, I question it as all. And you know, we come up with this really slick things, but sometimes I think we go a little too far with that said, and even new marketing person or or development person. I had, I had him read Gary Clark’s book about, you know, his first book. I think it was, there’s a, sorry, there’s an alligator on the plane or whatever because he, he had some of the most clever marketing schemes of all, and some of ’em are may appropriate still today, but some of may not be. But my favorite was when he had the, the two wildebeest also called news. And he named them news and sports because he could say, I have two, today’s news is news and sports or whatever. He said, what was it? It wasn’t news and sports.

But anyway, it was something like that. He said, yeah, he was news and sports. So he had two news. Yeah, he, but he had came up with some breakfast with Tiffany where he had a gorilla and Tiffany and he brought in a mail and so he wanted him to come and see b have breakfast with Tiffany. So he had some very clever things as always.

So would you say there are some really important aspects of marketing that you really need to consider Important aspects?

No, you just need to get your name out and people, people need to respect that and, and respect the zoo. And I understand the zoo.

I don’t know what aspects would be, do you have any examples?

For instance, as I said, I think there’s certain things, by the way this, I’ll go back to the story about his news, his new, his, he named his animals weather and sports. So he could say we have news, weather and sports. That’s what it was. Yeah. But Another area.

How does, do you think Zeus can improve their connection with kids and teenagers?

Yeah. To heighten their zeal, their awareness about the natural world. You know, I noticed one thing, it was reminded that, ’cause I just saw something in our newsletter, Cleveland has a 50 teenagers in vol as volunteers during the summer you have a teenage volunteer program. And, and maybe those teenagers can relate better to other teenagers. As, as we know, we don’t do really well with teenagers. We get, teenagers are not interested in necessarily, some are not interested in coming to the zoo and I don’t know how we could attract them more. But I think maybe having other teenagers as educators can help and with, with kids, you know, again, people come as family, so they bring kids. But teenagers are, are a tough market. And as our grandparents, unless they’re bringing, unless they’re bringing their grandkids, our two people, but it, it is, I think you have to be happy with what we have.

Families love the zoos. They love coming to the zoos, whether it’s instigated by the mother or the father, because it’s a nice place. It’s outdoors. You can have some food, you can learn something. So I think families really appreciate the zoos if we don’t do as well with teenagers. I don’t know anybody that does well with teenagers unless you have fast rides and, and those kind of things that attract them.

So what do you want families and kids to feel about the zoo?

Well, I, I think I want them to feel that the animals are well taken care of. That the zoo’s an important part of the community. It’s a beloved part of the community. Like the orchestra, the, or any of the other things in the, in the, in the community. And it’s a, a safe place to go. I think that’s something that is very important in today’s world, that it’s a safe place to go. You can see animals, it’s gonna be different every time you go. You can get some walking in if it’s a big zoo or even it’s a small zoo and just have a fun day at the zoo.

It provides everything you need it pro you can have a picnic, you can be together, you can see the animals together. You can learn something together. The parent can teach the child something. The first thing to do as a volunteer is if the father says something stupid to this kid, you certainly don’t wanna make the father feel stupid. So you have to handle those things very, very carefully. You know, I mean, it, it’s not important. You just let it go. But if it is important, you might be able to somehow steer the conversation a little differently. What can, what can be done to make that visitor connection, the programs more meaningful.

When you had programs for your visitors, You mean special programs for visitors?

Yeah, Yeah. Well when, in Cleveland, when we built a couple of exhibits, we had programs in it. We had in Australia we had quote show where they’d bring out a marine tote or something and they could talk about animals. We also had a bird flying show. Now we, they don’t have those anymore. I thought, I thought that the animal shows were a good way to get people involved where they attended by everybody that came to the zoo.

No. Did it give them another opportunity to learn something?

Yes. Were they expensive? Probably yes. And that’s probably why they had to discontinue ’em. But again, you can do things that get people really interested. We, we’ve mentioned giraffe feeding and Laura Keaton parakeet feeding and stuff. So you can get people close to animals that way. I think vol, I think Cleveland now has like 700 volunteers, by the way. They don’t call ’em docents anymore. They thought the term people didn’t understand.

So we’re, we’re all animal ambassadors. And with a lot of people out there talking to the animals, I think it adds a lot. And I have found that I spend more time in the zoo now with guests than I did as a director probably. And I found people are delighted to talk to, especially when we can exchange something that’s absolutely phenomenal. And one of the things in Cleveland Metro Park Zoo that right now that’s absolutely phenomenal is three baby gorillas. The first one was born and the mother rejected it. I’ll make this story somewhat short, but the mother rejected it and these keepers thought that might happen. And fortunately they had an older gorilla named Freddy, and they got Freddy, 40-year-old Freddy, 45-year-old Freddy to adopt this baby.

They still trained the gorilla, the, to Freddy to bring the baby over to the, to the mesh to give it a bottle. I mean, absolutely amazing. First they trained Freddy to hold the baby, although she had had babies before. So they trained Freddy to hold the baby and by using a baby of stuffed gorilla. So, but Freddy had just went right over, got that animal, brought it over to the mesh, got her treats, and the baby was able to fit. And Freddy has raised that baby Kababi now it’s like almost three years old, or is three years old. So then we had another girl, I may have the sequence wrong. We had another baby gorilla born.

So now we had a couple babies, you know, and that mother was actually taking care of the baby. Then Fort Worth Zoo had a baby and they tried, excuse me, they tried and tried, but they couldn’t get the mother to take it.

They flew it up here to Cleveland and who took that baby?

But Freddy, they put it there. Freddy came and grabbed that baby. Now her other adopted baby Kabi was, was, you know, two and a half years old. So it was fine. And to now to see those baby gorillas in that exhibit and to tell people that story, most of the people that come there to see the gorillas are, we got a lot of regular visitors like you would’ve in Lincoln Park. They know that story. But it’s amazing to tell ’em that story. And I’ll bet you those people come away and thinking, wow, that is a really great zoo. And we did it because we had good scientists.

You know, we, Chris, we, we have good primatologists that were able to figure it out and get it done. And, and it’s just such a success story. I just can’t stop talking about it because it’s so amazing. The other cute thing that, that with gorillas, like all people, like all zoos you know, they usually have a pediatrician or an obstetrician also on board to help with deliveries or whatever. And it was really cute. He had this doctor from the Cleveland Clinic and he was doing an exam on a female gorilla. And of course it’s all draped up, you know, like it would be in a human hospital. And he looks in his female gorilla’s, private parts, and he was just amazed.

It looks just like a human female. He was expecting he’d see something a little different, but he said, no, it’s just, I knew exactly what I was looking at. So that’s a good thing zoos can do. I mean, most zoos have a dentist and a, you know, different people that can help ’em. And we’re fortunate to have the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, and those doctors have helped us a lot. But it was cute. He was giving a le we had a lecture and for donors and he was one of the speakers and I thought that was really cute that he, he was, and, and my dentist was actually the dentist for the zoo and it was a big thing for him. And he, his clients and stuff thought it was great that he would do dental work at the zoo. So most of those doctors obviously are glad to volunteer their time.

Cleveland you mentioned was municipal zoo.

What do you think is the most effective way to deal with elected officials and municipal bureaucrats in order to help develop and manage the zoo today?

Well, good communication. Let me, let me tell you a little bit about Cleveland Metro Park Zoo that is different than other zoos as the name applies Metro Parks. So in the turn of the century, Cleveland got to the state legislator and created a thing called that counties could form Metro Parks with three park commissioners, a pan non-paid and could, could put levies in that county property tax levies. So Cleveland was the first to form a metro parks. Right now it’s 25,000 acres. I mean, it didn’t start like that, but it started with a few parks separate from the county, separate from the city, and really separate from the state. The only thing the state does is, is allowed the legislation to they place. And it’s been very successful.

So all the, I think all the counties in Ohio have Metro park systems and they’re funded by property taxes. So we had three park commissioners appointed by the, they had to have something in every county. Flip a coin. The head probate judge in the county appoints the commissioners. So there are three non-paid commissioners, and they are the city council or the county council. And they re, they appoint the di, the executive director of the park system, who I reported to. And I, I guess I went to, you know, I, I went to every park commission. They were usually twice a twice a month and now they’re monthly. But I, I was there at every meeting, so if there were questions on the zoo or if I had an item on the zoo that they could ask me.

But I was always at every meeting. Fortunately I was a landlord for my boss, the park director. ’cause the parks office was in the zoo. It was the old zoo office. But they moved the zoo office in different place and used that for the parks office. So I would go to every meeting and, and they traveled with us. They, one commissioner was particularly interested in construction and he would travel with us to New York or any, or St. Louis if we were doing something for Australia or Laura Keets or whatever.

So they would, they would go there. And as our sister zoo agreement with Wuhan China, the two of the commissioners came on that. So they were very involved and, and particularly with construction project, but obviously they set the fees. They had a re they set an agreement with the zoological society. They never, which is also required by Isaiah, but they, they never really questioned animal decisions. I mean, they stayed away from the, you know, the Timmy, the gorilla story. I, I don’t remember them ever having an issue with animals other than a good one. We were building an Australian exhibit and we talked about it a lot.

And what we were gonna do, and in the planning process, and I didn’t really have koalas in it because they’re expensive. I think it costs the zoo 30 or 40,000 a year for one koala get two shipments. One from Florida and one from Arizona of Eucalyptus to feed these little koalas. By the way, they waste a lot. They just eat the smallest branches. And so at expenses, I didn’t thinking, and this commissioner insisted we had koalas. Well, who was I to say let’s don’t have ’em. I, I, I said, here’s what the issue is, you know, oh no, we gotta have koalas.

So we, we added koalas at a late date in that, just because this one commissioner, who by the way had spent a couple of years in Australia, so he said, you can’t have an Australian exhibit without koalas. So we had koalas and we’ve had ’em ever since and done very well with them. And he was absolutely right. I suppose in design, one of the mistakes we made was, we called it the gum leaf hideout. And people would come and say, we’re the koalas. So we put a big picture of a koala on the outside eventually. But yeah, so the commissioners, we had some other issues with him, but you know, most of the part, they were right. They, we had a, they had metro parks had taken this old factory and built a building that was gonna be an education center and even had some apartments in it so we could have visiting scientists.

And I, oh, I thought that was kind of cool idea. That’s kind of forward thinking. And this one commissioner came in there and said, no, we’re not gonna do it.

Let’s tear it down. I said, no, we can’t. What do you mean?

Well, we’ll build another one. So, and he was absolutely right. It would’ve been a disaster. And we built a new education center that was much nicer. So, you know, they made some decisions pretty much different than I would’ve made. But for the most part, they actually made the right decisions all the, a lot of the times. And, and same with the, I reported to the executive director and he had some id, he was involved in construction too. And some of the things he said, they were minor things I didn’t think were necessary, but it wasn’t a problem.

Always got along, all friend, all friendly people. We got along together and again, we traveled to different zoos together because I think it was important to commissioners. And now the Zoo society course, they go on a private plane to, to different zoos. They came to Lincoln Park last year and, you know, talked to people there and just to see the difference between you. So I think it’s important that the, that governing, whether they’re the nonprofit board of the city board, are somewhat educated about the zoos. Obviously even with accreditation, they shouldn’t be making animal decisions or animal welfare decisions, but they should be aware of them, that’s for sure. So education and communication is, is a big thing. Now, when I was in Sacramento, again, I reported to a park and recreation director and, and then he reported to the city council.

There wasn’t a park commission and I wouldn’t go to every city council meeting, but if there was a zoo item, I was there. And we had quite an issue with master planning and stuff. So I was there quite a bit. And, and so occasionally I had to talk to the city council, but not always, but a lot of times I was just there. Fortunately, we could sit off in sort of a, a waiting room and watch it on tv and then if the zoo thing came up, we could go out there. But it was a, it was a different arrangement with Sacramento than it was with Cleveland.

You mentioned in the building a place for visiting scientists. Did you ever do that As They do in your own?

Yeah, no, we never did that. We, we never did that. I think we have a room in the hospital where somebody could stay overnight if there was a issue there. But it’s not a, not a big room or anything. And I can amused for several things, but we could let somebody stay there if they had to. And you talked about mistakes. You have said that I’ve made mistakes.

What kind of mistakes?

Every kind imaginable. I suppose one thing, I I, I have a temper, lost my temper a couple times. I really wished I would’ve never lost my temper in front of people. That’s a mistake I made one, one that I, I think of constantly, but when we built the rainforest, I had seen something I really liked in the reptile house in New Orleans where they had no door in the back because they pulled the exhibits back and were able to service ’em from the front. And we did that in the, in the rainforest, but we did it all wrong. And so it’s very awkward to pull ’em back and stuff. It didn’t, didn’t work as well as I would’ve liked. So we had to modify, had to modify ’em and stuff that it would’ve been better just to have doors in the back and make it easier not to do it.

But so that, I think that was something. So I I I’m sure there were other mistakes. I probably hired some people that I might’ve got somebody better at the time, but it all, it all worked out. And trying to think of other mistakes. I’m sure there were a lot of others that, that, I mean, Do you feel sometimes that, you mentioned that type of mistakes.

Do you feel sometimes that zoos don’t have the luxury of doing portions of exhibits for proof of concept to say this is gonna work because they have a budget and they can’t do extra things to see if something will work and then throw it away if they don’t need it?

I’m trying. We certainly try to design things that’ll work. Hopefully we’ve seen it somewhere else, you know, and, and had it work. It is nice if you, we certainly had to redo things that, that didn’t work as well as we thought. Or the, the barrier was too low or wasn’t high enough or whatever. I can’t think of those, but I’m sure we’ve done some of those. But yeah, it’s always, you always value, I don’t know I’ve ever had an exhibit that didn’t do some kind of value engineering. In other words, you had to cut out something and if it didn’t affect the welfare of the animals or the visitor experience, but it was just nice to have. It’s a good thing. The other, I mean, you can make mistakes that are, are almost like a lot of places.

Our old bear grottos, the keepers had to get down and almost on their hands and knees to crawl out. ’cause there was never any door, you know, for the keepers. So you don’t wanna make those kind of mistakes. You need those doors for keepers to walk out. There’s some things you have to have and but sometimes we just have to value engineering something down. It might be a garden or might be something that’s, that’s more of a visitor amenity or a nicety. And I, I don’t think I’ve ever had an exhibit where we haven’t had to, did not do something. I mean, when we did the African elephant crossing, which was a $24 million elephant exhibit, and I think opened in 11 when we first designed it, we had a big hippo pool in it.

We got new hippos and you could see elephants behind the hippos. Well, that was valued. Yeah, this was gonna be very expensive. So that was, we value engineered out and just did elephants. We had some other smaller exhibits like battered foxes and we just had to not do those. So we had basically an elephant exhibit.

Should Zeus be doing anything to help governments protect land masses in Africa and other places?

Well, I think when they can, if they, sometimes the zoo doesn’t have the political clout to make their government do it. I mean, it, it, it can happen. I mean, it certainly, it’s, it’s a little difficult when you’re a, a government run zoo to make any political stance. If you’re a zoo society, it’s much easier to take a political stance. And, and, and because it fits your mission government, it’s a little more difficult because you got all the government restraints on things. So I think zoos, particularly zoos, logical societies can, can, you know, work with, work with agencies to, to promote expansion of national parks and, and wildlife and wild places things. And I know even Cleveland, it’ll take stances on certain political issues that are within the mission. As long as it’s within the mission, you can, you can do it legally.

If it’s outside the mission, it’s a little more difficult. So yeah, I think zoo should take a stance on a lot of environmental issues, including expansion of parks and, and that kind of thing.

What issues would you like to see the National and International Zoo Aquarium Association such as a ZA Laa, ZAA be addressing that?

Well, I, we’ve, we’ve worked, we’ve said this for years and we’ve not been very successful. This is one where we could work with some animal welfare institutions like HSUS. I think we need to be really good about trying to be against, I’ll just call ’em because it’s a generic term, roadside zoos. So, and there’s, you know, USDA sometimes they give permits to these zoos that you know, that they shouldn’t. I mean, lately I’ve seen them actually close a couple zoos. There’s one in Virginia, they just got closed and took the giraffe away. But I wish they’d do more of that one in South Carolina, they got closed ’cause the guy was really illegal and we’ve seen it since the Lion King, whatever that video, that movie was. So they’re starting to close roadside zoos.

But I think zoos can be in United States, but also in, in in waza organizations. I think they can be more aggressive about getting zoos, substandard zoos closed. Now what do you do with the animals becomes another issue. You can’t just close the zoo and move the animals to some, but if they can be sent to sanctuaries or in adopted zoos, I think that would be good. I’d like to see all zoos accredited and have higher standards. But that’s, I think one thing we could work on together. For sure. I know in Africa there’s an organization, I can’t remember his name now, but Dave Morgan, who was with one of the zoos in South Africa, has done a lot to try to help substandard African zoos, of which there are many. So I think that organization I, I think is very, very involved in getting zoos either improved or shut down, which I think is a good thing Within our profession.

There are two professional zoo associations, a ZA and z, a zoological association market.

Is there room for both?

I wish there wasn’t. I wish there was just one organization, but it can’t be for a couple of reasons because a z there’s two things that a ZA does that keeps people from joining or becoming a member. One, we have a very strong ethics code and you have to apply by that ethics code. And two, you have to cooperate with SSPs. It’s sort of mandatory. So if, if the Lincoln Park Zoo has a giraffe and the SSP and it says it needs to go to Cleveland, you really have to abide by that. That makes some people very uncomfortable. The fact of the matter is there’s always negotiation. I I I’ve been, was involved when I was in a leadership role of a couple.

Some, some zoo director doesn’t wanna send it there. We usually work out way we, we usually make a compromise. So that, so that keeps people out.

I see the ZAA, is that it?

ZAA Yeah, as a, as a minor league. So we have, they have 80 members, we have 250 or 240 members.

So there’s sort of a, a a of a minor league, you know, so could we have two organizations?

No, that, you know, relate to each other. I don’t think that would be, be, work out that way, but I, I wish ZAA didn’t have to exist, but it’s better than nothing. And again, I think those people don’t wanna be a member. Lot of them don’t want to be a member of, of, of a ZA for the two reasons I mentioned and, and probably think it’s an elitist organization. When we passed the exotic animal leg, I say we, when zoos worked and others, including the main groups worked to get the exotic animal, whatever it’s called, the lion and tiger and bear legislation from going to private parties. ZAA was there too. And so they’re also exempt. And because, you know, government agency didn’t wanna be an elitist. They say, well they got these two organizations, they do good work.

So those are the two that are exempt from having to do a permit. So I wish we didn’t have it, but I understand why we haven’t, I don’t, I don’t think it would be easy to combine the two.

I mean, what would, what would a lesser organization as part of a ZA be?

You know, we have these codes, we have this very extensive accreditation program and you gotta go through that. And we have a very extensive ethic code. So if, if anybody that wants to abide by those three can be a member, and it’s a little, you know, so I don’t know how, why, how we could combine the two Within the zoological field conservation field.

To what extent do you continue to be active?

Well, I’m, I’m pretty active. I, as I said, I’m a, I’m an animal ambassador in Cleveland. I’ve been for six years. It’s just, I started just before COVID and I didn’t do much. So I do about a hundred hours. I walk around, people don’t know who I am. I walk around, I talk to people, I have a ball, I get a four mile walk in. I talk to people about animals.

What I didn’t know, I mean, I could do a two hour lecture on orangutans, but I didn’t know, I said I gave candy bars to the workers. So I knew the worker. I didn’t know the animal names. So in my phone right here, I have all the names of the rhinos because that’s what people wanna know and the birthdays. So that’s one reason I’m involved. And, and when I retired, pat Simmons got me invited and, and I got approved to, so I’ve been on the board of directors of the Akron Zoo. It’s about an hour from my house in Rocky River. And I go down there probably twice a month. I’m the chair of the animal welfare committee and I really enjoy it.

One, it’s easy, it’s the most well financed zoo in the country. I mean, they do very well. They have their own property tax revenue. They, they, when, when I came here in 89, pat Simmons and would always joke and I agreed it was a zoo with a duck and a chicken. But now it’s a real zoo. They’re one of a couple zoos that during accreditation had no areas of concern, zero areas of concern. They’re that good of a zoo. And so it’s fun to do that. I also still do, in fact I’m doing one next week accreditation inspections.

I don’t know why they still let me, I guess. ’cause I, I volunteer and do it. And last year they gave me a plaque. It’s not in the zoo anyway, a ZA gave me a plaque. I’m one of three people that have done over 50 accreditation inspections. So I’m still involved in that. When I retired, they, they took up collections and it’s called the Steve Taylor Conservation Fund and it’s about a hundred thousand dollars, kinda like what we were talking about early. And we used that money, they kind of stopped for a while, but now they’re gonna do it every year.

We use that money to bring an af, a young African scientist curator over the United States for training. They come to ours. They’re usually going to some specialty conferences in the United States. So that’s fun. And I get to meet ’em every year and shake hands. We have a little lunch, so that’s kind of cool. So in those ways I am, we donate to conservation causes, particularly zoos. So were involved, my wife’s actually on the board of directors of the Cleveland Metro Park Zoo. They couldn’t have me because I’m involved in Akron. So you know, there’s that, that issue.

But no, so I’m still involved. I still go to try to go to some a ZA meetings. I missed a few, but I do go, because I’m a past chair, they let me go to the director’s policy conference. I do like that. And I know the, of the 2, 250 people come, I probably only know about 25, but I meet some new ones. I meet the young new directors. That’s kind of fun. So I enjoy that and I’m glad they let me go to those. I really do enjoy it. They’re always in nice places. Like, this was last year was in Santa Barbara, so it was beautiful.

Take my wife along and stuff. So it’s, it is fun. So I’m, I think I’m pretty well involved. It’s a passion of mine. It’s still what I like to do. It’s a hobby. Still go to zoos, try to get different new zoos all the time. So I’m still involved.

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

Hmm. Well we mentioned the reptile cages. You know, I, I know obviously there were exhibits I wish we could have built, but, you know, we went, I I only built four, maybe five big exhibits. We got a lot of, I said I I, I built five new restrooms and several new gif gift shops and several new concession stands. But, you know, I would’ve liked to have had a penguin exhibit. There were exhibits I would’ve liked to done, but I, I did, you know, we finished the rainforest, we built wolf wilderness, we did Australian adventure. We’d broughted a brand new hospital and then the African elephant crossing. So that was pretty good. I obviously would’ve liked to do more.

But as far as people and stuff, I, and we were always able to expand the staff, which was great. I think when I started we had 80 people. We probably doubled up by the time I left. So not a whole lot of things I would’ve done a lot differently, I don’t think.

Are there programs or exhibits that you would’ve implemented during your tenure that you did not, did not have?

Well I mentioned Penguin. We, we had some things that I would’ve liked to do, but on a big scale I would, we have an area almost in the center of the zoo, unfortunately it’s in a floodplain. But right now, as you walk towards what we call wilderness trek on the lower road, you look over and this is where they stage lights and stuff and it really looks tacky. I always wanted to build like a wild dog or a cheetah exhibit in that space and make it so if the flood waters came up in the river, the animals would be safe in their area. So that’s certainly one thing I wanted. And then the original plan, excuse me a minute. The original plan called for us taking over another 50 acres in the, in the adjacent park, which was part of a metro park. So it was our property. And I would’ve built something like Wild Asia in Bronx where you would actually take a tram and go through Asia or North America or something that was in our grandiose plan.

But as any, I think any zoo director would say, there’s always like things you would’ve liked to do. And, but you know, I, I think we did a lot and, and what they, I have to say this too, I am just so happy with what they’ve done since I’ve retired. I mean they, they really got rid of some of the worst of the worst. There’s still a couple things to get rid of, but you know, they got a new Tiger exhibit. They got a new bear exhibits, they put in a carousel, they got the just on and on. They, they’ve done something, they did, they, they expanded the elephant program with better shade structures and hay feeders. So they’ve done some really nice things since I retired. Now they’re building, I don’t know, I’ll just say a hundred million dollars.

It could be bought more, but they’re expanding the rainforest. The rainforest is closed right now and they’re expanding the rainforest to, for, for an outdoor exhibit for rings. ’cause we didn’t have, we only had indoor for rings and eventually for a, for gorillas stew. But it’s a huge project and they’re raising money for it. So I’m really proud of where the zoo’s gone even after I retired. You’ve done some things through the years of course.

So what would you say is your proudest accomplishment?

I think it was the two couple of people things. For instance, you know, we talked about quarter, but it wasn’t just the quarters for conservation, but it was, we hired the first conservation director and so we had a conservation, I think it was called conservation coordinator, a young lady from St. Louis and it was Tammy Inger who had chimps. And then for 15, 20 years it’s been Kristen Lucas who came from Lincoln Park and she’s just done a great job. Now that department has five or six people and has it trains PhDs. They always have three PhDs because we have a joint arrangement with, with case Western. I have to, at the time Hugh Quinn was my, our general curator and he helped change that. We started that department with an IMLS grant that hired the first one.

And then we just kept growing. So creating this quote conservation department, which was really involved in field conservation, although they do obviously in-house projects too, was great. So it was really building up the staff and, and really supporting the education and education program. When I got there, was run not by any professionals and we hired several education curators. The one that’s been there the longest who just retired. Vicky, Vicki Searls. She’s done a great job. I thought we had one of the best education programs in the United States and it was good. When I got there, we had no marketing department of our own.

We hired, so we had a marketing department. We, the, the education department at the time when I got there was also running guest services. And now they have a real professional guest services department. So creating those departments was good. And also helping to build up the Zeus Society or at least supporting it, like you said, in, in Lincoln Park we had the metro parks and we had the Zeus Society. And while I always got along, the Zeus society was just three people and now it’s like 24. And they’re raising a lot of money and, and working with the Zeus Society and closely with the Zeus Society. And I’m not saying I did it, but they raised into a real fundraising arm.

And I have to say all the, the chairs of the Zeus Society, I, most of them went to Africa with me. So I, you know, I was, well, well-liked by the Zeus Society and, and we worked to, again, the commissioners got concerned that the Zeus Society was raising money, but in a sense keeping the money. And they, they did a very smart thing. And it was another thing that I wasn’t sure this is, they were doing it in the right direction. It turned out to be perfect. 70% of all the general membership revenue. Not the thousand dollar donors are the ones, but the general goes to the Metro Parks General fund. That meant the Zoo Society had to raise enough money for their operation and that’s when they became very successful and, and the money that goes to and they actually changed it now.

So I think 60% goes to the general operating fund, which is a sense operates the zoo and then 10% goes to a conservation fund of their, and then, and they’re able to raise a lot of money that way. So that arrangement is, is very good. I’m really proud of the arrangement now that they have with the Zeus Society and the Zeus Society and, and the Metro parks really get along well now. Not that there’s not some issues, the issues occurred a lot because Metro Parks is out there raising money too on sponsorships and the Zeus Society out there raising money and partnerships. So there’s, there’s some conflict there. But they, they work it out and they talk constantly and it, it seems to work out well. Are there any zoos in the world you particularly admire? Why there’s A lot and where there’s so many, there’s so many. I love the Singapore Zoo.

I think it’s just a classic zoo and it’s obviously in a very tropical area. I love Zoo Victoria with the three or four zoos. ’cause I really like the Hillsburg Sanctuary outside of Melbourne. It’s all native animals, you know, they got platypus and they got, and it’s really done well. They’re a great bird show. I could go on and I, I got to do some accreditations of the, and I actually visited a be before that the Cali Zoo. The Cali Zoo in Columbia. Beautiful. They have the best Andean animal exhibit you’ve ever seen.

It’s absolutely gorgeous. I’m trying to think, some of the zoos in Europe, Munster had some really good exhibits and another one, I can’t remember which one ’cause they all kind of go together now. Incredible polar bear exhibit where, you know, you can go under water in a ship and see ’em under water and a polar bears come in there. It’s just, there’s some wonderful exhibits there. But I like things I, you know, I love the living desert in Palm Desert because of this, the theme that they have. And, but you know, a lot of people ask and we could compare notes.

We probably have a lot of the same, you know, what are the 10 best zoos in the United States?

I mean you’d have to put WCS and Bronx Zoo there. You’d have to put San Diego. I put Denver and St. Louis, but we could all argue which are the best. And there’s some great small zoos. I there’s a neat little zoo in, in Green Bay, the New Zoo, Northeast Wisconsin Zoo, you know, and it’s a classic little zoo. It’s just, it’s really clean and perfect and it’s a small zoo. So, but I could go on and on there. There are some really, really good zoos.

In fact a lot of good zoos now. It’s hard to, hard to pick. Yeah.

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

Well, I think we’ve come a long way and I mentioned it a little before that I think sort of attacks by the Humane group have helped us do a lot better job. It’s gonna be hard to have enough to have a self-sustaining cat zoo population. Fortunately they’re long lived animals and they live a lot longer now that we take care of ’em better and we need to keep up the breeding, hopefully we can, the, the, the virus that’s affecting Bo was starting mostly with Asian, but now with African, I hope we can contain that virus has killed a lot of that herpes virus that’s killed a lot. If we can contain that, I think we have a good chance. ’cause as zoos that are committed to now, I don’t know if there’s 20 or 30, it probably was 60 and now there’s 30 have really built good exhibits. They can have numbers of animals, you know, a ZA change the standards. You gotta have at least three animals because they’re herd animals, with the exception of somebody who has a really old animal that is can’t. So, you know, you look at Sedgwick, you look at San Diego, Cleveland, Tulsa, there are some really good elephant exhibits.

And I think we have the capacity now to keep both Asian and and African elephants. And we probably are gonna have to import some that may not even be able to happen anymore. But I, we probably will need some, some new blood in our population or at least, or some of the blood can come from Europe and to American vice versa. So we can maintain good bloodlines. I think that’s something we don’t do enough of because it’s so difficult for curators to do, to move in endangered species back and forth between even Europe and United States or even Canada and the United States. So if that would ever become easier to do, that would help all our self, all our programs become more self-sustaining. But I think we can do it. And I don’t think there’s any reason when people say they don’t have enough space, hell, the, the leaf cutter ants don’t have the space in the zoo. So no animal has its space, but if you make the habitats interesting enough, you take care of their welfare, they get good veterinary care.

I think elephants can do very well in zoos. They’re smart animals. They adjust very well to, to human care, I believe.

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

There’s a lot of quotes. I like, I think, I think it was Warren Thomas that told me, and maybe he quoted somebody else, it’s not enough to be right and what it, what it meant. And that, and remember I grew up in the fifties and the sixties and I went to college in the sixties. So we were all hell bent on doing the right thing. And Helen, you know, we didn’t listen to anybody else. But I think what, what he meant by that was, you know, you gotta get things done. You might be right, but that ain’t gonna do it. You gotta convince other people of your, of, of being.

Right. So I think that was important advice and I, I knew that it would, again, no matter how passionate I would feel about an idea, unless I could sell it to other people, it didn’t really make any sense. But I love the mile angel quote about do the best you can until you can do better. And once you know to do better, do better. And that to me represents exactly what zoos are doing. We didn’t know better when we were taking care of elephants or we didn’t know about marmosets and how you keep the male with the female ’cause they, the babies learn and all and the male takes care of the babies. A lot of things we didn’t know. But now that we know a lot more, I think we can do a lot better. Certainly elephants is a great example of that. You know, we used to use, you know, we had the bull hooks and we used to go in with the elephants.

We don’t have to do that. It took a long time to change people’s mind, but now that we do it, everybody understands that, that elephants are much better off. They, they, they have choice and they, they volunteer to do things. They’re smart animals, they do it. So I think that’s another, I don’t know if anybody told me that, but I think that’s a quote I live by.

You’ve had mentors, what lessons did you take away from ’em?

Everybody I worked for gave me something. As I said, Warren Thomas, one of the things he taught me is no matter how small the, the pro, how small the issue is, do it. If I say do it. So when I was that assistant curator, you know, I, Rick Rundell was a bird curator. He say, you wanna go to San Diego with me and, and we’re gonna pick up some bird or whatever. I said sure. And I went, but that day, Warren, I was the one that set up his slide projector. So I just guess he could set it up himself or something. But he was really upset with me that I wasn’t there to set up his slide projector. So, you know, whatever your boss wants you to do and you can’t, you make sure you do it.

And when I went to San San Francisco, Margaret Burs was my boss, Peggy Burs, and she was the head of the Zeus Society. She got us taking a class called Management by Objectives. And my whole life I’ve worked that out, you know, where you set up plans and goals and you and you, you work ’em, work ’em out. And I thought that was something I learned. My other, my boss in Sacramento, Bob Thomas, I think maybe I learned from him to delegate ’cause he really delegated running the zoo to me. So I think that was it. I I learned things from people in high school. I remember there was a, Mrs.

Benedict was a drama teacher and I had just been elected senior class president. I was giving some speech and she took me aside, I gotta teach you to public speak. He said, I gotta teach you to project. Now you can see I’m yelling too much. So I have a problem with projecting too much. But that was nice that she, I wasn’t in drama or anything, but she took me aside and did that. And Mr. Harvey kept let me stay in city council because, oh, after senior president then I was free for a semester. ’cause you had a new election and I sup poor student body president.

I supported my best friend Mike and the other guy got elected. So I wasn’t gonna get appointed to the Hees saw that I got appointed to a position so I could have something to do for that semester. So I’ve, I’ve learned things from, a lot of people have helped me along the way, that’s for sure.

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

I think ’cause it’s a great profession. You gotta be passionate about it, you know, you gotta understand it know, I think it’s a great profession and there it’s a lot of fun. I mean I, you know, I travel the world as a zoo director for god’s sake. So, but whether you’re a curator or a keeper, it’s a great profession. It’s outdoors. You’re working with incredible animals. It’s incredible interest. Obviously you have to have, you don’t necessarily have to be an animal lover, but you gotta really like animals and you gotta understand animals. I, you know, and you gotta understand that sometimes it’s a dirty job if you’re a keeper and, and you work weekends and you work holidays and you work long hours sometimes, but if you like it, it’s, it’s, its greatest profession in the world was, I always said, I always say I had the greatest job in the world until I retired and it’s even better.

But I just, I just enjoyed it. But I don’t know what’s not to enjoy about it. Again, you, we’ve talked a little bit about politics and depends how the zoo is organized and sometimes that can cause a problem.

You gotta understand as, as when people ask Bill Conway how many animals die in a zoo?

He said, a hundred percent, you know, he is, you gotta understand you’re gonna have some sad times. Never bothered me too much. I’m not saying I’m not, didn’t feel bad when an animal passed away. But I, the ones that, the ones that bothered me the most were elephants I just didn’t like. And I’d go up there and help the keep, you know, the, we always let the keepers, they didn’t have to stay by for the necropsy, but they all did. But I wanted to make sure that they were okay. That, that, that’s always a tough death. And I never stayed. I mean, I stayed a little bit, but I didn’t need to be there for when an animal died.

So Two parts.

How should zoos think about dealing with surplus animals?

And does euthanizing of endangered species ’cause of surplus genetic issues still pose a political problem for zoos and aquariums?

Yeah, it does. I mean, as when I was in Sacramento, we certainly did it with hoad and I think you can do it with hosta because they’re basically animals that we eat, you know, and so people sort of have a, we’re never gonna u we’re never gonna euthanize elephants or gorillas. First of all, they’re not surplus. But with those animals we couldn’t, we did in Sacramento, I, I didn’t think I had support from the staff or the board to do it in Cleveland, we also didn’t have a very big OC collection. We don’t, Cleveland doesn’t have a big OC collection, so we never really did it in Cleveland. But I don’t have any problem with it at all if it’s well thought out and you know, obviously it’s humane euthanasia and it can create space and it can help with the, our endangered species programs.

What do you feel is the role of conservation breeding in zoos relative to other conservation activities?

I think it’s very important. That’s how we have these species, those species we have that are endangered conservation breeding, if that’s what you want to call it. So they’re parting for our education programs and to teach people about different types of conservation such as human animal, human wildlife conflict or lack of space or reintroduction like of the wolves in the wild. So there’s a lot, those animals are, we always call ’em ambassadors of their species and I think they truly are. People when they see wolves in zoos can, can say, this is why we’re reintroduced them in a Yellowstone. This is why we have to protect these animals elsewhere. So I think they get a real feeling of the need to protect the animals when they see ’em in zoos.

Do you feel we need, or do we have any charismatic and committed heroes to help shift public opinion for conservations?

Obviously example of Jacque Gusto or Jane Goodall?

Yeah, well they’ve both been important and Jane at sometimes was a little critical of zoos, but she’s been a zoos have really supported over a lot of her work. You know, Jack Hannah was, whether you liked them or not, or thought, I thought he was a little silly at times on some of his statements, but Jack was America’s zookeeper and everybody liked him and he was on all the talk shows and that kind of thing. So Jack was very important and yeah, I, I think it helps to have somebody, I think Jim Bini was the best and is the best when his sous show on the national, on the, on the TV was a great, is a great show. And now we have Peter Gross and his assistant there. I knew Peter when I was in San Francisco. They’re doing a zoo show. I think that they could be good ambassadors. I think Ron McGill in Miami is good sometimes and particularly good in the Spanish speaking press.

He’s, he’s in all those presses. I think he can, he can do, they bring him along all the time. But I think particularly the Spanish speaking the community, he’s very important. So we’ve always, we don’t have a Marlon Perkins anymore, so, you know, but there’s always been somebody that was stepped up and there’s many of ’em now, unfortunately, there’s a lot of, you know, wannabees too that don’t do a very good job. And so you have to be careful of that.

Do you feel that within the zoo community, the people, whether they be directors or other positions, understand about the seminal papers and ideas such as Heine, Heger being the father of zoo biology, if they read them or understand them, or the Lee Crandall who’ve written books on the subject, is there that interest in the history Conway’s talk paper about Fraud Be a bullfrog, Right?

Those kind of things. Is it lost or, Yeah, I think it’s somewhat lost. I, I would always push those articles on any new people. I think it’s, but I’m a history buff, you know, I, I like all kinds of history, but I think it’s important that people read that just to see what people used. I think you learn so much from the past, not that you that was good or or bad, but you learn from the past. So I think people should look at Crandall.

I keep Crandall in my, I’m always interested and if I have a new species I haven’t worked at, what did they do in the past with it?

I’m always fascinated by that. And, and the work of Head of Girls is obviously important. So I think it’s important to see the past. I, but I agree that again, many of the curators are not coming with that background. And, and I think they should, as I said with marketing people, I give ’em some of Gary Clark’s books so they could have the background in what, what we used to do and, and that kind of thing. So, but I’m a history buff and I, I like to know the history of zoos and where zoos have come and how we’ve improved and for and for no other reason. People today need to know how much better zoos are than they were in the past.

And that some of those books teach us how much better we are now When a zoo spends multimillion dollars on a gorilla or an elephant or a tiger exhibit and critics ask, why isn’t this money being used to help animals in the wild? You say, what?

That’d be wonderful, but it’s not gonna happen. That money, whether it’s from the government, from the city or the county or from donors, is going to your local zoo. The few of those dollars would ever go to just conservation. So it’s unrealistic to say you could take that money and give it to conservation if you could. Maybe you should, but you can’t because that, that money is, most people, the donors that give while they like animals, they’re really giving to their community, whether it be Cleveland or Chicago. They want something good there in that zoo and they’re not, they’re not necessarily gonna give that money to in conservation of giraffes or elephants. With that said, we hope those exhibits then inspire people to give money in those cases. I said whatever it is, I think it’s close to $400 million that zoo, a ZA zoos do give to animals in the wild.

And one of the, there’s not many organizations, of course, we’re talking collectively when, you know, it’s, so, it’s a big collective. So we do a lot for field conservation and, and, and it’s really growing and hopefully it’ll be a lot more in the future because of those exhibits and the programs that we put on.

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

In what direction do you think will help them stay relevant?

Yeah, I’m a little concerned. I think we will stay relevant only because the, the wild for one reason because the wild is disappearing and because all people can’t go to the wild. So I think, I think that’s, those are two reasons that zoos will stay relevant. And you’re, a lot of kids and people growing up are not gonna be able to go see animals in the wild as much as they’d like. They might see things and Americans might see things in their national parks, but they’re not gonna go to Africa. So it gives them a chance to see elephants and, and get close to animals and to appreciate animals. So I think we will be relevant in the future, hopefully even more so as, as nature becomes less and, and zoos become better.

What are your thoughts about private zoos owned by people of means?

Will they survive the length of time municipal zoos have?

Yeah, I think so. The good ones, again, it, it depends on their funding sources. If, if they’re heavily endowed, and there are some obviously that are members of a ZA and they have to show that they have ability to maintain themselves over the years. So if they, if if they are, as you said, wealthy people that have enough money to make sure the animals are well cared for and that they have a future there, it’s not just somebody that’s gonna have ’em for the 10 years that they’re alive or whatever. But if they’re bonafide collections, the animals are well taken care of and they have a way to support that institution for a long time, or at least a plan to where the animals would go if they leave. And we’re talking to somebody that maybe has one herd of animals versus many animals. And so it can be very different depending on what animals are actually keying or if they’re keeping birds or whatever. It’s very different than if they’re keeping large hoofed animals giraffe or whatever.

So, but there’s, there’s, there’s some people that do a very good job. I think there’s probably people that are not doing a very good job too, that I don’t know that we would support.

What do you know about this profession that you’ve devoted your many years of your life to?

What do I know about it? It’s, I think it’s a, a very important part of any community. It gives people in their community something different to do, you know, and to see the zoo and see animals and, and teach people. And you know, I think years ago we thought of ourselves as an educational institution. Now we see ourselves as a conservation institution. And boy conservation of wildlife is a great need. If we don’t conserve wildlife or we don’t conserve wildlife in wild places, I think we’re in trouble and we’ve lost something so valuable more so than bango paintings or more so than anything else if, if we lose it. So zoos can help keep wild places and wild place wild animals viable for the future. I think it’s very important.

How would you like to be remembered your legacy?

Hmm. Well, professionally I’d like to be remembered as somebody who championed the saving of wildlife and wild places by supporting zoos and the work of zoos and being a good zoo director for a couple of zoos. And personally, I like to be thought of as a, a good husband, a good father, good friend, good brother throughout my life.