Tom Meehan, DVM

I’m Dr. Thomas P. Meehan, and I was born on March 26th, 1952 in St. Louis.

And who you were your parents, what did they do?

Dorothy and Michael P. Meehan. He went by Bud where dad was in advertising and he was the general advertising manager for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, one of the daily newspapers. And mom was a homemaker. Worked at home for most of her life. She did some work at our, my elementary school a little bit later on, but mostly, mostly a stay at home mom.

What was your childhood like growing up?

Were animals a part of your life?

Always. We had, we had dogs. We were, we were definitely died in the wool dog people. And, you know, we had, we raised hunting dogs. Dad was big into hunting and fishing and, you know, like a, like a lot of folks, my, my brothers were always bringing home, you know, the odd baby robin or snakes, squirrels, various things. I was, the, the joke is, especially my, my oldest brother was the one that always brought home wildlife and I always took things apart and to see how they worked.

And he became an engineer and I became a veterinarian. So How many children were in the family and where were you in the, in the order?

I was the fourth of five kids and they were real spread out. And my, my sister, the oldest, my sister Nancy got married when I was six. So, so we were kinda spread out in years. So I mostly grew up with my, my younger brother who was three years younger and my older brother is four years older. And were zoos. . .

What zoos did you see growing up?

What, what impression did they have on you?

Well, I mean, like most people that grew up in St. Louis, the St. Louis Zoo was a big part of, I mean, it was only the major attraction in St. Louis and we always were regular attendees of the zoo. I have pictures of myself as a, as a little guy at the zoo. There’s a picture my mom had of her when she was pregnant with my older brother walking through the zoo and being by some of the historic red rocks areas that are, that are still there at the St. Louis Zoo.

So what kind of effect did going to the zoo as a kid have on you?

Childhood memories?

Well, uniformly good childhood memories of the zoo. And, and again, back in the day, that’s one of the things that’s, that’s changed a bit now. I mean, I, I think anybody growing up in the fifties and sixties and even into the seventies, zoos were just, there was always a positive vibe about zoos. If a newspaper wanted to know something about wild animals, they talked to somebody at the zoo because they were the respected experts and they, they were just pretty uniformly seen in a positive light. And, and so that’s the way, that’s the way I, I saw the zoo when I was growing up.

And what kind of schooling did you have after high school?

Well, after, so, so when I was in, I, I went to I parochial school, a Catholic grade school through eighth grade, and then did two years of a Catholic high school and then switched over and graduated from a, a public high school. But around that, around the time my late high school time was when I, I first got experience working in, working in a hospital, human hospital. Some, a friend my sophomore year in high school, you know, had volunteered in a hospital. So I was kinda what they call the candy stripers and volunteered and, and got interested in medicine that way. And, and that sort of translated in me and of combining my interest in medicine and, and my interest in animals in looking at vet school. And So you went from high school to vet school or No, no, you need to, you need to have at, at the time it was a, a minimum of two years of college before you got into vet school. I think there was only one in my class that got in after two years. Most did three years or more.

There were a lot of people in my class that had a, a bachelor’s degree before they got into vet school, one had a PhD, so, so you do some college before that. And this was, you know, I think some of the folks at my high school had a, a slightly out of date idea of the requirements for vet school and said, you know, you really, if you wanna be a veterinarian, you really have to come at it from that agriculture angle, you know, it’s about horses and cows. And that wasn’t true at the time, but it kind of steered me into agriculture school. So I did my first couple of years at a community college and then transferred down to the University of Missouri. And I got, I was in a animal husbandry program in the agriculture school. And then you were accepted to university And then I was, and then I got accepted to vet school af after I applied. Now did any teachers along the way have any effect on your life as a mentorship or, Well, I, so I, when I was at University of Missouri, I in, I was enrolled in a program that they call the Honors scholar program. And, and what it meant was if you, if you were in this program, you, you didn’t have to meet requirements.

You could, you could sit down with your faculty advisor and make up your own curriculum based on what career path you were on. The downside of that was if you ever dropped below a b average, then all of those went away and you might have two extra years of college to get all the requirements that were now in effect. And so I was part of that program and so I met with my advisor who was actually a nutritionist in the AG school. And, and that’s how we charted our course. And, and actually once, once I got into vet school, because I had been enrolled in that program and I kept that grade point average, we threw all of our plans out the window and made my first year of vet school classes apply towards my degree. So I got my bachelor’s degree at the end of my first year of vet school, which some, some folks that I’ve talked to about that thought that was cheating. But I, but I, so I have a BS in animal husbandry and then, and then my DVM after that and, and that advisor, I, I never took a class from him, but I spent a lot of time, you know, going to his office and talking to him about plans and all that sort of thing. And I didn’t find out until later.

He told me later after I was accepted to vet school that he had written me a recommendation. ’cause he knew a couple of the faculty very well and I hadn’t even asked him for a recommendation because not having taken, you know, I thought he had, I haven’t had him for a class. I didn’t know him well enough to ask that, but he wrote me a recommendation because he thought it would help.

And, you know, maybe that’s what made the difference for me getting into vet school. So, So at what time, so to speak, in the, in your life, did you start thinking, I want to be a veterinarian?

It, it was really after I had worked in a, in a human hospital and seen medicine and worked with some doctors that I became intrigued by that and kind of put that together with my, you know, kind of lifelong love of animals. And, and the, the zoo part of it came a little bit later because when in order to get into veterinary school, you needed to spend time working with a veterinarian because how, how do you know you wanna be a vet if you don’t know what they do, if you haven’t worked in a veterinary office.

And so the way that was normally done was that you, you volunteered at a veterinary hospital?

Well, I was in high school, I needed money to go on dates to buy gas for the car, volunteer job, wasn’t gonna do it. And, and I also was, you know, from my experience going to the zoo, I was really interested in, in working as a, working as a keeper, potentially working in the zoo and getting my experience with animals and, and with veterinarians that way. And so, you know, right, actually before I finished high school, I applied for a job at the St. Louis Zoo and their response was, well, of course you wanna be a keeper. Everybody wants to keep be a keeper in the children’s zoo. You have to prove yourself first. So you did that by working in one of the refreshment stands. And so I spent a summer rolling hot dogs and selling balloons and making cotton candy and that sort of thing.

And that’s how you showed that you were a good employee and were dedicated, had a good work ethic. And then I got a call partway through that next summer, early on in the next summer that there was an opening at the Children’s Zoo. And so in early summer in 1971 started working as a keeper in the children’s zoo Full-time, So full-time in the summer. So it was sort of like what we would call a seasonal employee here at Brookfield. So this was normally what high school and college students did. They would work, it would be your summer job, and then at the end of the summer, the, the back part of the children’s zoo, the outdoor part of the children’s zoo would close seasonally and, and they would contract the staff down and run with just a, a part of the overall children’s zoo. And so a lot of the, the, the staff that were in high school or college would go back to school, come back and work at the Children’s Zoo on the holidays. But I did that basically all the way through my first year of VE school when we no longer had a, a more traditional summer break.

So your first job at the zoo is not as an animal keeper, but you become an animal keeper.

Yes. When about what year did you become an animal keeper?

A 1971. And it was just applying for it?

Well, I had applied for it the year before and they, it was, it didn’t, at the time, it didn’t require any sort of degree. As I say, it was more, more like what we have seasonal employees for here at Brookfield. So they, their qualification was, they wanted to know you were a good worker. And so that’s where I put in the work selling hot dogs and balloons and cotton candy.

What was your responsibilities as an animal keeper? Starting out?

Starting out, it was essentially animal husbandry, cleaning cages we had, and at, at the time, we, we knew more about, we knew less about contracepting big cats than, than we did about, you know, having them in a situation where, where you could get breeding. And so a lot of animals came through the animal nursery. And I think that first year we had something like something over 20 big cats, lions, tigers, jaguars, leopards, mountain lions. We had hyenas. These all came through the nursery. And this was a, a Marlon Perkins thing that, you know, establishing a nursery with dedicated keepers just to take care of newborn big cats, other primates apes. And so when they outgrew the nursery, they lived in the children’s zoo. So working with lions and tigers and leopards, the size of house cats was one of the big things that keepers did. And so coming from a family that were dedicated dog people, my exposure to 10 pound fills all was started with leopards and lions and tigers.

And so when I got into vet school and had my first introduction to house cats, it was like, oh yeah, it’s just like a baby leopard. Yeah, I, I, I get that behavior that’s just like a, just like a baby tiger. So I, my exposure was kind of backwards from what most folks experience.

And at the time were you thinking about other opportunities in the zoo world as you were doing this keeper job?

Or was this something you thought could be the rest of my life?

I love it. That was definitely, you know, when you’re, when you’re looking to get into vet school, you want a backup plan because not everybody that applies gets in. And so, so yeah, along those, you know, in those, my first couple of years of college, you know, that was something that I was thinking about while I was looking at vet school. And then when I finally got to the stage, you know, after three years when I got to the stage of applying for vet school, I actually expressed an interest in being a zoo veterinarian. And they let me into vet school despite that because I, I didn’t realize my graduating class would have filled every full-time zoo vet job in North America twice. I I graduated in a class of 70 and there were about 35 full-time zoo vets in North America at that time. So I didn’t, you know, I, I was interested in being a zoo vet, but I had no concept of, you know, how how big a pool veterinarians were versus how many zoo vet jobs were out there.

Did you have any mentors at this time?

Well, I, I, I spent time with, with Dr. Beaver at the hospital again, around the time that I, that I started. So by the time, by the time I was full-time in the children’s zoo, Dr. Beaver was established as the full-time vet at the zoo. And the, the keepers there, there was one keeper position at the Zoo hospital, and obviously they had, they only worked five days a week, so on the off days, a keeper from the children’s zoo would go up and take care of the animals at the hospital. And so, you know, I got to, I, I got to see some of the, the folks working up at the hospital and I remember being recruited as a, as a keeper to, to do things like monitoring, monitoring anesthesia, you know, counting heart rates and breath rates and things like that. So, so that was sort of my first experience, kind of behind the scenes working with a veterinarian.

So after you graduate from veterinary school, do you start a men an internship?

Well, there were, at the time there were two internships in zoo animal medicine, one at San Diego and one at National Zoo. And so I applied for both of those along with 60 or 70 other folks from across the country. And, and I actually was first alternate at National Zoo, so I was one person away from being the, the intern at national. And I didn’t, I didn’t realize this at the time, but they, their senior vet at the time went on a medical leave and then retired. And so right about the time I was coming out, they, you know, when I was had applied for the, the internship there, they offered the current intern the chance to stay on another year, and if she had left, then they would’ve taken the, their choice for the first candidate as well as taking me. And so, and, and so I was, I was really rooting for her to go on, move on to another zoo somewhere else, but she stayed put and I wound up not getting that either of the two internships and did a year of private practice. So I was in a practice, you know, a classmate of mine and I both went into a big multi veterinarian, small animal practice in Indiana. And, and then I applied, I applied for the internships again.

And now that I hadn’t done anything to advance my zoo career, I didn’t even make the final cut on either of those. So recognized that I needed to do something a little more academically rigorous to increase my chances in applying for other zoo positions. So around that time I got an offer from one of my small animal professors at vet school who had gone on and was running a small animal referral, an emergency hospital up in New York, and they were gonna have interns. And so he offered me a small animal internship. And so I took that move with my wife up to New York, an hour outta New York City and did a small animal internship. And then with that experience, my other veterinary experience and my track record at St. Louis, I was hired on as a resident. I, I got the residency at the St.

Louis Zoo, and I started that in 1979.

So the residency is different than the internship?

Yes, yes. The residency at the time, the residency was a two year program and it was the first one in the country that was, that was associated with a university, but actually located at a zoo. So I, I think I was about the 11th person to complete a zoo animal residency in the United States.

So during this residency and, and also the internship, were you thinking about how you would approach zoo medicine?

I, I think it, it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit like thinking about the, the Super Bowl at the beginning of each football game in the season. You’re, you’re engaged in what you’re doing now and learning everything you can and getting through your residency more than setting your sights on, you know, I’d like to be in this kind of zoo, or I’d like to manage this way or that way you’re engaged in learning everything you can, taking care of the animals at, at the time, even though, you know, it was a very large zoo with a large collection, there were only two veterinarians at St. Louis, there was Dr. Beaver who was the veterinarian and the resident. So you’ve, you’ve got your hands full, taken care of things every day. And then I also regularly went down to the University of Missouri to do things like residency presentations and those sorts of things. So you finish your residency and now you’re looking for a job full-time.

Yes. And how do you, how do you get the job at the Lincoln Park Zoo?

Well, the, you know, as a, as a veterinarian, it, it’s a, it’s a bit of, it’s, it’s determined by what your specialty is. If you are a small animal practitioner, you could look at practices anywhere in the country. A large animal food, animal veterinarian would be, you know, in a rural environment someplace as a zoo vet, you’re working in a big city. A big city, large enough to have a zoo that was hiring a full-time veterinarian. And, and around the time I graduated, there were three positions open. One at Zoo Miami, Miami Metro Zoo, one at Houston, and one at Lincoln Park. And so I could have wound up starting my career at Miami or Houston or Lincoln Park. I wound up interviewing at Miami and going down there and around that same time, interviewed at Lincoln Park.

Lincoln Park was my preference because with most of my family in St. Louis, there was a relatively much shorter commute to go home for visits. So I was, I was interested in Lincoln Park and I got that position At the time when you went to Lincoln Park, who was the head vet, Dr. Eric Ashkin. And, and the, they weren’t, they weren’t at the two veterinarian stage yet, but Eric had had some health challenges and, and needed some assistance. And so I actually didn’t go to work for the Chicago Park District and the Lincoln Park Zoo per se, Lincoln Park, recognizing that Eric needed a helping hand imposed on the Zoo society to create an assistant veterinarian position. And so the job that I applied for and got was as an assistant veterinarian. And I was technically working for the support organization, the Zoo Society.

What type of zoo did you find when you got on the job?

I, I, I guess one of my, one of my first experiences, that was one of the first things that interested me. ’cause I, I really had an attachment to the Children’s Zoo at St. Louis. That’s where I started out working as a keeper. It’s where I met my wife and I came to Lincoln Park and, you know, it was a much smaller zoo. It was probably a third, the size acreage of St. Louis and right downtown in the big city view of the lake. It was a beautiful place, but the children’s Zoo felt so familiar. You, when you went in, you, you went into an inside building and off to the right was the nursery just like St.

Louis. And then you went outside and this was only open seasonally, but you went outside and there was this area where there were lots of exhibits and different animals exhibited out there and there was artificial streams running through it. And, and it all felt very familiar. And what I realized after the fact was the children’s zoo at Lincoln Park was the first children’s zoo that Marlon Perkins built. And then when Marlon moved to St. Louis, he built one kind of along that same model that a lot of the same elements, but a little bit bigger and more modern at St.

Louis. And so that was the genesis of feeling very at home in the children’s zoo at Lincoln Park And in Lincoln Park at the time you were there when you started, who was the first director of the zoo and what was your relationship with the director?

Well, the director that was there throughout almost all of my dozen year tenure at Lincoln Park was Dr. Les Fisher. And Les was also a veterinarian. He started out as the part-time consulting veterinarian at Lincoln Park Zoo in the late forties. And somebody with a lot of, a lot of experience who, and moved up into the director position and had been the director there for some time when I got there in 79. And, and was a very good mentor, good to work for. And he had a veterinarian’s perspective, so, so I could rely on him, not just as the boss and the director of the zoo, but he, you know, had insight into some of the, the challenges of zoo animal medical practice.

What were your responsibilities as a young veterinarian?

When I, when I started the hospital, staff was myself, one veterinary technician and one keeper to take care of the animals in the hospital. So my responsibilities was running that staff of two people, but was responsible for the medical care of a very good size and complex collection. We had 2000 animals, half of those were mammals, half of those mammals were primates. So, so it was sort a, a medically intense job of supporting the medical needs of that entire collection.

How hard or easy is it would you say for a young veterinarian to work into the medical routine routine of a organization?

I think so. So Dr. Ashkin had been a consulting veterinarian there at the zoo, and they hired him out of small animal practice and into the zoo full time when they built the first purpose-built Zoo Hospital in 76. And so this was just a few years later. So I was really able to kind of pick up that program and move it forward. You know, I was the first per person there that had been through any sort of postdoctoral training in zoo medicine and, you know, so I got to put into practice all of the things that I had learned at St. Louis.

Was there any secrets when you first came to Lincoln Park of getting and working with the Animal Creek animal keepers to accept you?

Or had you thought about that philosophically before, Before I, I hadn’t really thought about that. It, it really was, you know, trying to develop their trust. You know, I, I remember jokingly when I, because I, I’m, I don’t know that I was aware of this, but certainly I I must have said more than a few times, well, when I was at St. Louis, we did it this way when I was at St. Louis, I did it that way because some of the, some of the keepers reminded me a dozen years later when I moved on to Brookfield, they said, now remember when you go over to Brookfield, you say, when I was in Lincoln Park, I used to do it this way. And when I was in Lincoln Park, I used to do it that way. So, so I’m, I’m sure I, I’m sure I referred back to my St. Louis roots more than a couple of times.

Were any of the animals at Lincoln Park where you started medically challenging?

And how did you handle it?

I, I think probably the, the biggest medical challenge and, and not based on animals being prone to illness or whatever, but just the volume of the collection. When I was at St. Louis, we had two, we had a pair of elderly gorillas, a handful of other great apes. And when I got to Lincoln Park, there were in the low twenties of gorillas and couple of groups of orangutans, a group of chimps. And so the, the number of great apes with their profile and, and the complexity of what we were able to offer medically was, was a big change. And, and I sort of, I sort of always felt like if there was a niche, I was mostly a primate veterinarian because those are the things that I remember taking up a lot of my time. And then we also had a rather successful breeding program with all the great apes and with the youngsters, ones that may need to be hand raised or need particular attention. You know, my subspecialty kind of became a grade eight pediatrician. So I, I’ve been around for, I’ve been around between Lincoln Park and, and here at Brookfield for something like twenty four, twenty five gorilla births, which is not an experience that pretty much anybody’s gonna get anymore.

So, so those are, you know, that, that, that was one of the big changes and one of the challenges that I really enjoyed. Now you were hired as a staff veterinarian, but you moved up to the head veterinarian position.

How did that occur?

Well, it, Or was it one in the same?

Well, I was, I was an assistant veterinarian, but Dr. Ashkin was, you know, because of declining health, he had a brain tumor and he underwent various surgeries and he was, we, we didn’t work together very long a after I started there. And so I was still officially the assistant veterinarian, you know, when Dr. Ashkin was still the head veterinarian in terms of his name on the door, but he wasn’t able to be at the zoo very often. So it was a while after he left that he officially retired. And I assumed that head vet position, but being, being the head vet at a place with one veterinarian is not a huge move up.

So your responsibilities to the collection didn’t change much?

N not too much. It was, you know, who I worked for and where my office was. But you know, those things changed after I’d been there about a year, year and a half. But I had been mostly on my own for, for that time.

How did you handle events when a routine procedure resulted in the death of an animal?

And can you relate the story of the snow leopard that died while you were doing a routine tranquilizing and lessons learned from experience?

Yes, that was a, that was a, an interesting case. The thing that complicated that was, so, it, it turns out that this was a, it was a female snow leopard, an adult that had a condition that we call eno occlusive disease now. And it was relatively common at the time and caused a lot of liver damage. And so this was an animal that we were simply immobilizing her to move her from point A to point B and doing a rou, doing routine things, trimming her nails. It was absolutely nothing of a, of a medical nature that required us to immobilize her. But because of this pending liver failure, she wasn’t able to clot blood normally. And so, and then to add one further complication, we had, we had had a request from a local TV station that had a, that had a, a news presenter that was doing a, it was doing a TV program on endangered species. And as part of that, you know, you know, it was basically about animals being trafficked in the wild.

And as part of that, they were interested in just as a sidelight a, showing what zoos were doing to help conserve endangered species. And so they just had a standing request, if you’re, if you’re doing anything with some of these animals, invite us out. So in addition to moving this animal from point A to B without any knowledge of her pending liver failure and her inability to clot, we were doing this procedure with a cameraman, a half a dozen feet away. And so we, you know, we went through, here’s how we get drugs into animals and here’s how this stuff works. And we’d done some of the interview stuff. We are towards the end of the procedure. We had already moved the animal, done our thing. The technician said I was, I was getting blood and, and she won’t stop bleeding and her neck is blowing.

And I said, just don’t worry about it, just hold it off. And he said, I am, but her neck is getting big. And I went to look at her and her neck was getting to be the size of a volleyball and, and she was having difficulty breathing, she was literally strangling. And so we were actually just finishing the procedure. So we got, we got our EKG machine, we got everything else hooked up. I wasn’t, things were compressed to the point where I wasn’t able to even get a trach tube back in or to establish an airway. And so wound up having to cut down through all of this swelling, which was all subq blood, got down in there, did a tracheostomy, put a tube in, and, and we were never able to get a heartbeat back. I I found out later that strangulation is something completely different than just cutting off an airway.

And it happens much more quickly than just an animal asphyxiating because they’ve got something plugging their airway. And she had probably been on her way out before we even started to resuscitate her, but at some point, after having gone through four or five inches of subcu hemorrhagic tissue and, you know, trying to resuscitate her and having blood from my fingertips down to about my elbows, I said, that’s it. I’m, I’m calling it, she’s gone. And, and that was the very first time I looked up from what I was doing and I looked up and I was facing the cameraman who had in the middle of this, packed his camera back up and come back in and was filming all of the drama associated with us trying to resuscitate this cat. So, okay.

So it wound up being part of a television show as well as being a losing an animal. So Now, so the press was present, but how do you feel about the press being present when procedures are being done?

Pluses and minuses of that at Lincoln Park?

Certainly press was involved in a lot of procedures, specifically when Sined was tranquilized. Yeah, yeah, I think so. So this one was sort of an odd case. It wasn’t one where usually the publicity is about you’re doing something unusual. We immobilized a gorilla named Sinbad at Lincoln Park who had gone over a decade without ever having been anesthetized because we were concerned about the risks. I mean, I think unnecessarily concerned and overly cautious about immobilizing animals. So we, it wasn’t a practice to do routine immobilization. So the fact that we got our hands on Sinbad because he was showing signs of dental disease and, and we were, we had to get in there and address the issue.

So that was unusual and it was an animal that, that hadn’t been touched in a long time. So we invited the press out. The situation with the snow leopard was different in that it was sort of their request. They just wanted to see, they just wanted to get some, what they call int VB roll of a procedure on an endangered species. So, you know, it was sort of our routine practice at Lincoln Park that if we had something high profile, that we might invite the press out. The same was done here even before my time at Brookfield. I remember that actually on the other side of this conference room, there’s a picture of a huge procedure with dozens of people involved in an elephant dental procedure that was done here. And when they immobilized her, they invited all the press.

And so there were three TV cameras, there were people from the Chicago Sun Times the Chicago Tribune. So it, it was sort of routine when you had something high profile and unusual that you would invite the press out to see it, Go back to the gorilla, tranquil for a minute, and you were concerned about a secondary procedure that was going to be done on the gorilla, and you were concerned about it. And you had spoken to your then director who didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, and he had a way of, he Had a plan Diverting the press from This. He, he had a plan. Talk About that. So one of the things, one of the things that is routine and kind of always has been in zoo medicine, since we have the opportunity to get our hands on the animals relatively infrequently compared with humans or dogs or cats, that we make the most of a procedure. So we are drawing blood samples for routine testing, we’re doing other things. And in this case, working with the reproductive physiologists that worked at the zoo, we wanted to collect semen samples from, from Sinbad because we wanted to find out more about more about gorilla reproduction. And, and so part of that procedure, it’s something that is done in, it’s something that’s done routinely in cattle and other species.

They use, they essentially put in an electrical probe and stimulate the animal to give semen so that you can test it. And the best way to do that in terms of the proximity of the nervous system is to insert this probe into the rectum and do the electrical stimulation. And as you might imagine, it’s not, you know, it, it’s not the best looking procedure in terms of being something that you want to put on tv. And so we were finishing up the dental work on Sinbad, we removed some teeth, cleaned up some things, and, and we’re pretty much wrapping up the medical part. And the doctor who was gonna do the semen collection was ready to start. And as we were getting close to that time, I was like talking to Dr. Fisher, Les we’re about ready, we need to do the semen collection. He says, and I’m saying this in the context of three big guys standing outside looking through the glass with their TV cameras, the, there were lots of press there.

And, you know, I reminded Dr. Fisher multiple times and, and finally went out and said, we’re getting ready to start, so what, what’s the plan?

And he walked out to the front, addressed all the crowds standing there and said, the, the reason we did this procedure, the the dental part is pretty much done. All of you are welcome to stay and watch while we just wrap things up. But if you’re interested, we have coffee and donuts in the library down at the other end of the building and you can go, everybody put down their cameras, they grab their notebooks and they vanished. And it, it was almost like a cartoon, you know, like you, you see the clouds of dust as this big group departed for the coffee and donuts. And Lester turned to me and said, you’re all set to go. So yes, somebody, somebody working from a, a lot of experience. Now you mentioned the director of Lincoln Park was a veterinarian.

Was this an advantage or a disadvantage to you?

I think it was, it was an advantage because I think you, you didn’t, you didn’t need to, you didn’t need to go into the background of why, you know, what it, what will this problem, what will this problem turn into if we leave it alone, what are the risks of anesthesia?

Those, those were all things that were part of his experience. So you could, you could kind of dispense with a lot of the more remedial parts of things that you would, you know, if I, if I was explaining the risk rewards equation to a keeper or a curator, somebody that didn’t have the veterinary experience, you could, you could skip past a lot of that stuff talking with a veterinarian. So, so yeah, it was good in that way. And, and, and Dr. Fisher wasn’t so much, he didn’t limit you in terms of, you know, I’d, I’d like to buy this EKG machine because, you know, it will offer us A, B and C. You didn’t get well back in my day. We got along without you. We just put a stethoscope. You didn’t get that. He understood what was needed to move things forward, you know, so you didn’t have to, it was like, I, I heard a, a, a veterinarian one time in a lecture say, we should endeavor in our careers to practice 40 years of veterinary medicine, not the same year 40 times. And you know, Lester wasn’t one of those, he, he was one that knew there were advances that should occur at each step and, and was supportive of those.

I think one of the things about the, the colleagues at Northwestern, there really was a, a battery of physicians that, as opposed to some of the things we’re dealing with nowadays where we’ve got a diagnosis, the animal’s been through the CT scan, we’ve done all this stuff, and we say we have an animal and it’s got this condition, could you help us fix that?

We would, we would rely on some of the folks from Northwestern back in the day to say, we’ve got this animal and it’s sick and we don’t know where to go with it. And part implied in that was, we also don’t have a lot of the equipment that you guys have in order to do that. So one of those was a female gorilla named Mumby who at, at Lincoln Park that had a probably early in her pregnancy, had something go wrong. She lost the pregnancy and I had been around at the zoo and treated her when, when we were dealing with those signs. And then unfortunately I went on vacation and, and I was outta town at the time. My associate veterinarian was Dr. Perry Wolf. And not too long after I left, maybe a week plus after we had treated her, following her, losing the pregnancy, she started having vague signs. She wasn’t eating well, depressed, lethargic.

And she really went downhill, I think on a weekend day one time. And, and so she called some of the folks from Northwestern and it, and it wound up turning into a, a marathon procedure, both of diagnostics. They did laparoscopy where, or endoscopy where they’re putting the scopes down and the, this is all equipment that they brought up from Northwestern and wound up figuring out that she had an infection in her, in her belly, in her peritoneal cavity and wound up taking her to surgery and, you know, finding that she had essentially all of her internal organs were covered in infectious material and they had to flush that out and, and clean all that up. And that whole, that whole process was something that would’ve been completely impossible without those resources.

Were you able to have the freedom at Lincoln Park to develop medical initiatives?

If so, what were they?

We, I guess my approach had, had always been to, you know, you’re, you’re trying to answer questions. Sometimes that’s just a one-off, you know, what, what do I need to do with this animal to treat this problem or, or diagnose this problem, which is more the detective side of it. But stepping back, one of the things that we had recognized was, while we had very good success with reproduction in the great apes, there was sort of a subset, particularly of the gorillas that had reproduced before but weren’t getting pregnant. And one of the things that we were suspecting was this cohort of the gorilla population was fairly overweight. You know, the, the, the euphemisms, they’re big bone, they’re, you know, those sorts of things. And so we wanted to put, I wanted to put some science behind quantifying exactly what was, what was going on, how, how did they compare with other gorillas. And so we had a nutritional consultant at the time who had done work with, you know, some pretty high level scientific work and in this case using heavy water, you know, the D two o, it’s, it’s water with an extra nuclei on the hydrogen side anyway, but it’s, it’s the, the process was you, you inject that, let it equal equilibrate over all of the water in the body, draw it out and, and what you can find out by knowing the animal’s weight and then subtracting the total amount of water in the body, you can tell how much of the body is regular soft tissue, bone, whatever, versus fat. ’cause fat has no water in it.

And so it’s a very precise scientific and kind of involved way to determine percent body fat. And then we also experimented with some other, or took some other measurements so that we could come up with a considerably less complicated but equally precise way of doing it. And so that’s an example. So we did that with a number of the gorillas, published a paper on it and, and determined how to make those measurements. And so we weren’t, we weren’t trying to solve an individual problems, but I had the freedom to, to take a step back and say, we wanna look at this population and try and determine whether obesity may be a problem and try and put a precise number to that.

Were you able to expand the veterinary staff during your tenure?

What were your goals?

The goals was to have a more, more complete coverage. You know, the, to have, nobody would really think about having a collection that size, you know, be the responsibility of one individual. I mean, you know, as I mentioned, Mumby mumby took place later. I was on vacation. If, if I had been on vacation and that happened in my absence when I was by myself, they would not have had it, it would’ve been complicated to deal with. So that’s one of the challenges to just having a, a one person show, but also being able to do a, a better job of addressing not just the, what we call the fire engine practice, just dealing with, you know, putting out the fires as they pop up. Trying to be more on the prevention side really requires a, a bigger staff. And so the first one of the things that I’ve done, you know, throughout my career is have a goal or have something that I would like to make happen.

And then I either push or watch for any opportunity to, to take that first step. The associate veterinarian, assistant veterinarian is a perfect example of that. Dr. Barbara Thomas at the time now, Dr. Barbara Baker worked with us as, as an extern during vet school, had obviously a passion for zoo medicine and once she graduated, she did some, some work at the Bronx Zoo and, and was, was very interested in getting a position. And she had the ability and, and the desire that I can, you know, if I can, if I can find somebody to help put me up and help support me, I could do this on a voluntary basis. And so I said, well, if you can be an associate veterinarian without me having to get the park district to find the money to pay you, which I knew they wouldn’t, I said, absolutely. And so she came and, and spent a few years with us as an associate veterinarian. And then, you know, as we demonstrated the utility of that we’re able to offer first her and then others funding from, you know, I was able to convince people within the park district that this was a necessary position to, to get on the books.

So you work at Lincoln Park Zoo till 1993?

Yes. And Then in 1993, you leave Lincoln Park to work at Brookfield Zoo.

And can you talk about what prompted your decision to change jobs?

That was interesting because I wasn’t, I wasn’t looking to go anywhere. I was happy at Lincoln Park, but one of the things, pathology, finding out why animals died, doing necropsies or animal autopsies is a critically important part of zoo medicine. That was part of my training at St. Louis. And we had a, we had a pathology program at Lincoln Park that existed when I got there using volunteers, physician MD pathologist, as well as veterinary pathologists from various institutions, from hospitals, from industry, from the medical examiner’s office. And they would come in, you know, a, a few times a week and do necropsies and it worked after a fashion, as you might imagine, the reporting and the complexity was a little uneven, but as, as times changed, particularly people that were, that were working on government research grants that were more generous, had more time, and they could, you know, take tissues and process ’em on their own dime, as those things started to dry up, people dropped out of the program, then it became more of a commitment for the ones that were left and then another would drop off. Anyway, by the early nineties, we had recognized the need to start paying for that service. And we were doing that through University of Chicago, where, which had been kind of the home base for the volunteer pathologists. We were providing funds through University of Chicago.

And then eventually that grew into a program where they actually hired an individual to help do the pathology service. But, you know, because we were trying to cobble things together, he had multiple responsibilities that probably each could have used a full-time person. And two of those were down at University of Chicago, and I was 10 miles up the road in Lincoln Park. So when we sent an animal down in a box to have a postmortem exam done, we would hear back from it much later or maybe weeks later, which really isn’t the service that you need. You, especially if there’s a group health concern, you need to know about that as soon as possible. And so we were, we at Lincoln Park were kind of looking for other opportunities. My predecessor, my at Brookfield Zoo, my colleague from across town saw some of the, he also recognized the importance of pathology, having had a lot of experience at the National Zoo where they had a full-time pathologist on the zoo staff and probably the first place to have one. And he recognized, he recognized the advantages, but saw some of the challenges I had and, and had no interest in jumping into that mix.

But we started talking about the new dean at the vet school at Illinois, who was a pathologist by training and had worked, had been the head of pathology up at the University of Guelph in Canada. And they had a relationship with the Toronto Zoo and pathology was an integral part of the resident training of the zoo residents at Toronto. So my predecessor and I are going, we have a dean of the vet school that gets zoo pathology. That’s, that’s a real advantage. And so he and I spent a year or a year and a half regularly driving down to University of Illinois and, and talking with the dean and developing the idea for a zoo path program that would be provided by board certified pathologist that worked for the university, but were based up here and could come to the different zoos to provide the service. So it started out as Lincoln Park at Brookfield and then by the time the program launched, it included shed aquarium. So we were actually to the point of selecting the person to run that program.

When I got a call from Dr. Phillips saying, Hey, have you ever thought about working at Brookfield?

I said, not really. Why do you ask?

And he said, well, I’m being recruited to go out to Davis, California to the vet school out there. They’re really interested. My wife is from there, so she’s really interested in heading out to California. And so it looks like I’m gonna be headed that way.

Would you be interested in thinking about Brookfield?

And so long story short, I did, they were building this brand new hospital and I came and I interviewed and that’s how I made the move from Lincoln Park to Brookfield. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t something I sought out, but, you know, because of that relationship that developed around working, collaborating to develop the zoo pro path program, the offer came and I wound up here and was here for a little over 30 years. So you are familiar with Brookfield and now you’ve come to Brookfield and you’re part of it.

What kind of zoo did you find when you came to Brookfield?

Obviously with my particular interest in, in the medical aspect of it, they had just built this state of the art hospital that was a real attraction. We were talking at Lincoln Park about what we can do to expand this, you know, 20 some year old facility and you know, here is one purpose built by somebody that has experience and has included all the bells and whistles, a much bigger campus. The ability, the freedom to live out in the suburbs, which I didn’t have being part of the park district at Lincoln Park. Employees had to live in the city of Chicago. So I had that freedom, different challenges and you know, it, it seemed like a, a real opportunity. Multiple veterinarians getting to work with some new things, dolphins, which I had never worked with before.

So Who was the zoo director at the time and what was your relationship with him?

Was he your immediate boss?

It, yes, Dr. George Rab was the director and I at the way things were set up at that time. I directly s reported to Dr. Rab and the, Dr. Rab was an amazing director and conservationist, but he was a super interesting personality and he could be kind of, he, he could be really challenging for people that hadn’t, hadn’t met him before. I heard stories of people doing job interviews and never actually seeing his face because he spent the entire time looking at papers and they, they looking at the top of his head. I had a very different experience because sometime before that, well, for, for a number of years I had routinely come out to Brookfield and taken part in veterinary procedures when they were doing something big here, mobilizing a bunch of big cats, doing immobilizing, all of the baboons on Baboon Island in one day. They would routinely, or, or doing elephant anesthesias, which I had experience with. I would get invited out to participate in that.

And even some things that turned out to be disaster management, it had a giraffe procedure that didn’t go well and wound up having to euthanize the giraffe. I had all those experiences and I had met George multiple times throughout that time and prior to my immediate predecessor getting hired, they had had some difficulties hiring on a new veterinarian and had some challenges in terms of communicating and essentially developed a reputation such that they put out an ad for veterinary position and nobody applied because zoo veterinarians, a relatively small field word, had gotten out about some challenges between veterinarians and others. And so their solution was to put together a search team. And George knew, George knew a handful of veterinary zoo veterinarians. Well, I was one that he knew from my time coming out for procedures. Dr. Wilber Amond, who was a director, assistant director at the Philadelphia Zoo, and Dr. Bonnie Rayfield, who was the veterinary advisor for the Oppy SSP George was the SSP coordinator for a copy and knew Dr. Bonnie very well through that.

And so he asked us all to come on board. He asked me to run to, to chair the search committee simply because I was really close, I could come out and communicate much more easily than the, the folks that were widely scattered. So through that process, I, I got to come out and, and work with Dr. Rab and basically say, here’s the problem you have, here’s why you have the problem. Here’s, here’s kind of how you’ve developed this reputation. And it was something that would’ve been, it, it, it would’ve been challenging to have that free conversation if he was my boss, but he wasn’t my boss. I worked at the zoo across town. And so I, I got to, I was in this sort of unique situation compared to all of the curators and the former vets is that I had, I had gotten to know Dr.

Rab and to talk at length about the program without being one of his employees. And so I, I think that was a huge help and, and I think, you know, may have been a factor in me getting the job after the person that was hired after that search, you know, when he decided to head to California, you know, that that may have been a factor in asking me to apply and selecting me for the position.

Was the medical staff at Brookfield larger than Lincoln Park?

Yes, yes. At Lincoln Park, 50% bigger. There were, there was a head veterinarian and two assistant veterinarians at Brookfield, and there was a head vet and an associate at Lincoln Park, roughly similar collections. But you did not start out as a staff veterinarian, you’re director of veterinary services at Brookfield Zoo.

Does this mean you’re no longer doing veterinary work, but only administration?

So I, I was, I, I can’t, I I can’t actually tell you what my position was. It might have been chief veterinarian or it was head veterinarian. The veterinary services thing wasn’t part of the title, but I was the, I was hired to, to fill the role that Dr. Phillips left, which was head veterinarian of this staff. I, I liked, I wanted to present a, a different model of veterinary care with the title of veterinary services because I felt like animal health was, animal health was a, a responsibility that was broader than just the vets. And, and there were things that we did besides veterinary medicine. And so I changed the name to veterinary services and so I was the head of veterinary services and there are always, you know, for the person that’s administering that program, there were, there was a staff of, so there were, there were two other veterinarians, there were three keepers and a fully staffed LA laboratory that had three medical technologists. And so it was quite a bit bigger staff. And so that, that does entail more managerial responsibilities.

But I was a clinical vet, as is the head of the, the program today still has clinical responsibilities.

Were you accepted by the new veterinarians and staff?

Yes, I think so. One of the new, one of the new veterinarians, actually, one of the very first responsibilities I had before I ever even officially started is there was, as Dr. Phillips was making the decision to go to California, there was also an opening for a second associate veterinarian. And so they, once he decided to make that move, they put the other hire on hold and, and actually invited me to come out while I was still working at Lincoln Park to interview candidates for the associate position. So, so for one of the associate positions was a, an existing one and, and one of the other, the, the other one was one that, that I helped select right from the get go. So, so one of ’em was brand new that I was familiar with. Right. Right off the, right off the bat. And the other was, you know, accepting of that as well.

As a director of veterinary services, did you have more opportunities to make changes in the manner in which veterinary medicine was practiced at the zoo?

Absolutely. I mean, you have the, I mean, part of it started with the, the hospital. The hospital opened about a week or two before I started. So I walked into a brand new building, but there was also a significant amount of budget that had been allocated for equipment that hadn’t been spent yet. So, so I was helping to equip the hospital and in terms of support, equipment, anesthesia, monitoring, equipping the laboratory. So one of the, the clinical chemistry analyzer that we had in the laboratory was a relatively, a relatively new piece of equipment designed by Kodak to do, you know, where you could put in a, a blood sample and a relatively small blood sample and get a whole ray of chemistry tests done on it. And it was such a new piece of equipment that after we were here and that was installed, we had people coming from human hospitals to, to see this for the first time because they were considering it for, for their operations. So, you know, we had the opportunity, you know, as we, as we moved into and kind of christened this new facility we had, you know, that that gives you much more than an incremental opportunity to kind of up your game. You know, you can, you can make a, a pretty big leap all at once in terms of the space and, and equipping that.

So I, I think in terms of surgical equipment, patient monitoring equipment, and particularly diagnostic equipment, those were things that, you know, we made a, a big jump right around the time we moved into the building. And then because of the space that we had available over, you know, over the coming years, we were able to seek out donations and look for equipment that we didn’t have, upping the game on ultrasound equipment, adding more modern radio radiographic equipment. And then, you know, one of the big ones was I was actually up on my roof shoveling snow one day and got a call from the head radiology manager over at Loyola about would I be interested in the donation of a CT scanner. And I thought about it a few minutes and I thought, I think there’s potential in this space and I think there’s potential with this donor. And I said, absolutely. And it took us a couple of years, some remodeling. We, you know, things moved along in fits and starts, but we were, I think only the second zoo in the US to install a CT scanner. And, and that has really been a game changer.

And the zoo has been a big proponent of getting that installed as the standard of care in lots of zoos and even developing a database to help radiologists interpret zoo radiographs or Dr. Mike, who has since become our director, got a grant through the institution of mu museum and library services to develop a zoo animal radiology database. The idea behind that is getting normal exams, whether they be radiographs, ultrasounds, cts, mrs.

And developing a comprehensive resource so somebody can go out and say, what does a normal, what does an MRI or a CT on a normal aardvark look like, or a gorilla or a dolphin?

And, and that’s just, that’s been going on for a couple of years now. The, the grant was a collaboration among a number of institutions. Everybody has pooled their normal exams, hired a database manager to, to essentially oversee the whole operation. And it’s probably sometime early next year it will go live as a resource for zoo veterinarians around the world to rely on. And, you know, part of that is built on some of the diagnostic capacity that we’ve been accruing Since this building opened. You had published extensively.

Was there pressure for you to publish or was this something you wanted to do and why?

I have not published nearly as extensively as a lot of my colleagues have been accused of having an ink allergy. But, but I’ve, I, I hope I have contributed to the field, you know, particularly in areas of research, some of the unusual cases, things like the gorilla that we perform brain surgery on and some of the other important cases. But I think I, I’ve had much more to do with creating opportunities for, and programs that support other folks that, you know, put our collective group between us and our colleagues and partners at the University of Illinois, you know, pretty much at the top of the heap in terms of contributing to the zoo veterinary literature.

Based on your many years at Brookfield, what impact on the field of zoological medicine did working at Brookfield provide you?

I, I think a, a very supportive environment in terms of being, I mean there, there’s a real cost in terms of resources involved in supporting a veterinary program at this level, whether it’s adding the zoo pathology program, adding veterinary staff, upgrading equipment as new thing, all the things that I talk about is, wow, the gee whiz thing, that Kodak machine, all of that stuff is long gone because the technology advances so quickly and, and throughout my time here, under different directors, under different managers, we’ve been able to, we’ve been able to demonstrate the, the advantages or the value to that program such that they’ve been able to, to support aiming the donors in that direction and, you know, providing the ongoing operating support.

Can you discuss your role with the Great eight Heart Project and how you became involved?

The Great Eight Heart Project, I, for me, it really started all the way back when I was at Lincoln Park and I was, I was named as the veterinary advisor to the Gorilla, SSP, I think as the first veterinary advisor. And we’ve had some, some other associates, other veterinary advisors, and, and now it’s a group of four of us that, that share that responsibility. And one of the, one of the first things that I, that I did, because it’s data that’s more available, you, you wish you knew more about what’s going on with these animals in real time. But data that was available retrospectively was looking at necropsy reports, pathology reports on why animals died. And we recognized a, a couple of things. One is that gorillas, the most old adult and older adult gorillas died of cardiovascular disease. And if you tell that to a physician, they say, yeah, I get that, you know, heart attacks are a big deal in people. Cardiovascular disease is a, a really important cause of death.

But the second thing is they almost never get heart attacks. The, the, the same sort of myocardial infarct, the thing that, you know, is characterized as a heart attack in humans. They have other cardiovascular disease that are not unheard of, but less typical, more unusual in humans. And so we had an interesting, an interesting issue, and I gave a presentation in 93, 94, somewhere in there where we said this, this seems to be one of the key areas health wise in gorillas, if not the chief one. We need to, we need to find out more about this. And particularly at, at the time I talked about that nobody had diagnosed these cardiovascular problems before the animals died, you know, which makes treatment pretty difficult. So we said, you know, we need to, you know, it’s certainly a challenge, but it, it would be good to do more diagnostics, particularly echocardiograms to ultrasounds to see what’s going on with the heart, to try and figure out how this thing progresses. And that led to discussions.

It, it started a, a, a group looking at Gorilla Health and then one of the, one of the other veterinary advisors who was particularly interested in that topic, right from the get go, Dr. Haley Murphy, who’s currently the director at Detroit, Haley, put together a grant to look at this issue, but not just in gorillas in other great ape species as well, because we, we put on, we put on seminars and symposiums, and we got together with colleagues and, you know, we had recognized this thing as a particular problems in gorillas. And the folks that dealt with orangs said, yeah, we see that too. And the folks that dealt with chimps said, yeah, we see that quite a bit and Bonobos. And so, you know, it grew from my interest in, in sort of one lane focus on gorillas into recognizing that at a, as a bigger problem. And Dr. Haley has just taken that and run with it. She started the, got a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to start the Grade A Park project. It started with hiring a database manager who is still with the program. And there have now, you know, fast forward, I was just at a grad, a heart project meeting few months ago, and, and there are well over a thousand echocardiograms from great Apes.

I mean, there’s a huge number and it’s, and it’s become, you know, Haley and I talked about this and said, you know, I’m not sure if we’ll ever get anybody to do echos on their gorillas. And thousands have done it. So, and, and putting that in the form of a database, collaborating with, you know, and this gets back to the, the various consulting collaborators. There’s a group of physicians, MD cardiologists, as well as veterinary cardiologists that serve for each particular species. There are people that are experts in and will interpret. So if Albuquerque or St. Louis or San Francisco does an echo on an ape, they can send it off to the Great Ape Heart Project and they will get an interpretation from an expert in that species that’s a boarded cardiologist that can, and, and give them some recommendations on what’s going on with the animal, normal abnormal and treatment recommendations, and then follow on things. They did another grant focused on pathology where they actually hired a postdoc veterinarian that was a pathologist to look just at Great Ape Hearts.

And she did that for over a year and now has finished that grant and is going into that specialty full-time. So, so the, the bottom line is we’ve, so I, I was involved in, in this process sort of from the beginning and, you know, now I’m, you know, one of the old guard, kind of a hangar on, on the Great Ape Heart Project, but have sort of been there since before the beginning. So, so that’s, that’s how I got involved in that and that’s how that program has evolved. But it’s just, again, it’s like seeing your kids do things and have accomplishments that you never could have dreamed of for yourself. So You had a bigger staff at Brookfield Zoo Zoom.

How would you describe your management style?

How do you think they describe your management style?

That’s a good question. I think, I think what I, what I tried to do was give folks freedom and direction and, you know, allowed in, you know, I have a particular interest in this species or that research. I think I tried to help facilitate that, not not necessarily focus it and say, no, that’s no good, you know, I want you to work on this, but to try and be supportive and help find the resources to, to do things. I also, I think one of the, one of the big things that I did a few years back, probably well over a, a decade ago now to, from a management standpoint, I needed to distribute some of that administrative load. So in terms of direct reports, I had, I had overall oversight of the program, but had one of the associate veterinarians be in charge of the laboratory side and the other one in charge of the veterinary technician side. And one of the things that I, I recognized along the way, you know, is like, there’s, there’s too much work there. You know, we need more, we need more veterinary staff because we were all involved with administrative stuff as well as the veterinary care and, and looking at options. We said, you know what, maybe, maybe let’s follow the lead of private veterinary practices out there.

And, and they’re not having the veterinarians, you know, the clinical veterinarians aren’t responsible for managing staff and oversight. They have hospital managers. There’s actually programs that certify hospital managers. And so what if instead of hiring another veterinarian, we hired a qualified hospital manager and reduced all of those workloads by everything that you’re putting into staff management to hr. And so we were one of the first places, and that’s, and we still have, you know, the hospital manager is now the department operations manager. And that’s been a very successful model and one that a number of zoos have picked up because, you know, recognizing that HR and personnel management is, is not something that necessarily is best served as something that you kind of do on the side. You know, it was like back in the day, I’m a clinician, but I do pathology on the side. So I let all the, I let all the animals that have died over the week.

I let them gather up and then every Friday I carve out some time, well, then you don’t get good results because animals deteriorate. And pathologists, our professional pathologists now think that something is really old if it’s been dead for 12 hours. And we used to let them wait days. So the moral of the story is, you know, clinicians may not make the best pathologists and clinicians may not make the best personnel managers. And so by creating a whole new position of hospital manager, we were able to free up veterinary time by taking something off their plate that perhaps wasn’t being handled in the best way.

How, how did you shape the zoo conservation programs as it relates to veterinary medicine?

I th the, the zoo’s conservation program, I mean, it’s been through a number of iterations as as directors have changed and as management has changed, there was a, we had a director of operations that said, you know, his definition was conservation was what went on outside the fence. We didn’t do conservation in here. We ran a zoo. Conservation was what went on out in the field, which is not something that we subscribe to today or that I subscribe to. So we weren’t terribly involved in conservation programs before. There were veterinarians that were here that, that had that, that contributed directly to conservation programs that they were involved in themselves, that weren’t necessarily the zoos program, but we could provide them the, the freedom to pursue that. And, and so we, we went from that stage to the stage where we provided veterinary services to things like Dr. Randy Wells Dolphin research program down in Sarasota, which is run under the auspices of Brookfield Zoo. And, and it is Randy’s study that’s been going on for more than half a century, which is incredible. And we started out offering veterinarians to assist with sample collection analysis and that sort of thing, to the point where the veterinarians, particularly Dr.

Langan, are an integral part of the, the work that that Randy’s doing on the, on the dolphins. Dr. Atkisson, our director, brought programs, I mean, one of the things that was amazing that he as a, as a resident, he developed a program while he was at St. Louis looking at penguins and marine mammals down at Punta San Juan in Peru, particularly built around Humboldt Penguins and essentially started a program in terms of veterinary assessment and disease surveillance in that population, which has grown into a very credible and very productive conservation program. You know, bringing the local population and getting them involved in population of wildlife in that area that they have never had. And, and it was building on a program that, that started with folks out of the WCS decades ago. But that program and that partnership that’s been developed has really taken on a much more significant conservation component under, under Dr. Mike. And now it’s become one of our flagship conservation programs. So the answer to the story is, it, it’s been an evolution and probably compared to, compared to medicine, there’s always been zoo veterinary medicine going on here during my tenure.

And, and that program has grown, expanded in terms of conservation, wildlife conservation.

It went from, you know, the change was much more marked in that it went from, we didn’t have any involvement in it to very substantial integrations of veterinary components in all of the various research progre conservation research programs, programs that we’ve got going on, What should the veterinarian’s role be in animal escapes?

Can you describe some of your experiences, both in Lincoln Park and Brookfield with major escapes?

What management lessons did you take away from ’em?

I think, and I’ll also speak here, one of the things that I’ve done with a ZA is I’ve been a part of and now an advisor to the A ZA safety committee since that committee was created. And animal escapes is a, a key part of that. The biggest role of a veterinarian in animal escapes is prevention exhibit design, you know, and beyond, beyond prevention, beyond trying to understand animal’s capabilities, developing, developing plans for how to effectively deal with animal escapes, particularly dangerous animal escapes. One, one thing that I’ve been a proponent of recently, it’s, and, and this is an experience that I’ve had part of zoo medicine, and it was a much more important part early on in my career, is being able to get drugs into an animal at a distance. We used, we used to use old metal darts that we fired out of a modified BB gun, then we developed into things that we blew out of a blow pipe and other things that were less traumatic and more effective. But part of the things that a zoo veterinarian has to use on a regular basis is e equipment to shoot a dart into an animal to inject antibiotics or whatever, or anesthetics. And one of the, one of the pieces of feedback that I’ve heard on from the safety committee is, well, we want to get our veterinarians to practice for animal escapes, but they go, we don’t need to practice. We use, we use dart guns all the time.

We, we don’t need to practice. We, we know how to load up a dart and, and shoot an animal with it. Problem is when, when you put an animal into a smaller enclosure or a bedroom size enclosure, they’re not very far away. They may be 10 feet away, maybe 15 feet away. And, and if it, you know, if you dart them and it takes ’em 10 minutes or 15 minutes to go to sleep, that’s fine. They’re not going anywhere. However, if it’s an animal that’s running around loose in the zoo, you might be shooting it from five or 10 times the distance that you would in your normal, you know, everyday work. And it can be problematic if it takes 10 plus minutes for the animal to go to sleep. So the message that I’ve been trying to get out there is darting animals with anesthetics to make them go to sleep in your routine veterinary work and an animal escape might be completely different, different drugs, different darts, different dart guns, different dosages.

They’re, they’re really comparing apples and oranges. And so trying to get that message across that we need to, that veterinarians need to understand that they are two different circumstances. The animal’s behavior is completely, you know, an animal in a space. The animal in that’s, that’s in a space that they’re familiar with may be apprehensive that they’re gonna get darted. But an animal that is loose in an environment that they’ve never experienced before may be panicked. And the amount of drug that it would take to make animal A go to sleep may have little to no effect on animal B. So, so anyway, that’s the veterinarian’s role. And my role is to convince veterinarians that a and B are different.

What importance should a veterinarian put on infectious diseases and how they may affect the zoo population?

I, I think, I mean, infectious diseases is a particular interest of mine, more from the standpoint of wildlife and things we call emerging infectious diseases. A great example of an emerging infectious disease that’s in the news on a pretty regular basis is highly pathogenic avian influenza. This is a disease that’s now jumping into mammal species out of birds. It’s having an impact on marine mammals in wild settings. It’s having an impact. It’s gotten into dairy animals, food animals, and also into some people in that regard. So, and it’s, and it’s from birds that are flying overhead. So you need to guard your zoo population as well as the public health and the health of your animal staff.

So infectious diseases is perhaps not as important as it used to be in terms of a direct threat, something that you had to treat on a regular basis. But in terms of being aware of it as an environmental threat and something that can move between people and animals or wildlife and and animals or to zoo animals, it’s critically important. Covid covid had a huge impact, obviously on the global population, but it, it’s had an impact on zoo populations as well. And we have to, particularly during the, the heat of the covid outbreak, we had to manage our animals differently than, than we did previously to prevent humans from spilling over their virus into our zoo animals. And, and we wound up having to be very cognizant of it and had it pop up in parts of our collection that I and many zoo veterinarians weren’t really expecting it. The logical thing would be to have COD attack the things that were most like people. ’cause that’s what we were used to dealing with. That’s where the, that’s where the pandemic was happening.

And, and, and so we were looking at gorillas, chimps, orangs, but instead the animals and the populations that have been mostly impacted are carnivores, big cats, canids. It’s gone through a few zoos as a few zoo gorilla populations, but we haven’t seen it in other great apes. And the extent of the gorilla outbreaks have been less numerically than it has been in the big cats. So live and learn, You become vice president of veterinary services.

How does this promotion come to you?

Well, the, the veterinary services part, and again, I’m can’t remember exactly the, the chain of events, but I think it happened around the time that we changed the name of the department to veterinary services. And, and I think it was a recognition of, you know, I, not necessarily a higher status, but, but recognizing, I think, the importance of veterinary medicine as a program. So it, it’s not, you know, Tom did a wonderful job, this is a slap on the back, but a recognition that, you know, we have people leading animal programs and veterinary services and, and we see those things on a par.

Does your role or responsibilities change in this position Like the day before and the day after the position changed?

Not really, you know, but, but I, I think it’s, you know, if you look at, if you look at what our job was, what our responsibilities were, and then the things that we were accomplishing, I think you’ve got this sort of, you know, steady progression. And then, you know, at some point you say, this is now, this is now bigger than this title, and, and we bump it up to this. So it’s, it’s almost like the difference between a ramp and a stair step in terms of recognizing the growth in, in, in the importance of a particular area. So did it allow you more freedom to shape the veterinary department or No, I, like I say, I, I think it was, I, I think it was more a recognition of what had been done than, you know, certainly not being handed an entirely different slate of responsibilities or additional responsibilities. Throughout your career, you’ve had exposure to many animals and stories during your career.

Can you relate some very specifically, the gorilla with the removable cast?

That was when I was at Lincoln Park. I used to, we used to, I used to host a nutrition meeting and you know, as, as we, as we had those meeting, as those meetings evolved, I chose topics that were of interest to, that I thought was that were important and were of interest to me. And they, they tended to attract a lot of zoo veterinarians. And so we would exchange stories among zoo veterinarians.

And one was, I, I had talked with veterinarian that she called me up and, and asked, have you ever put a cast on an adult gorilla?

And I said, well, I haven’t, but I, I wouldn’t let that stop me.

You know, gorillas have always surprised me with what you can get away with, but what are you, are you are, are you trying to fix a fracture?

’cause I think internal would, she said, no, it has nothing to do with that. It’s, I think it may have been a spider bite. The animal has a big patch of skin that Necros died and we have to do a skin graft and, and you can’t disturb those. It’ll be itchy. So they wanna put a cast over it. And I said, I’d, I’d give it a try. You know, you’re gonna have to go a joint above and a joint below so it can’t slip off. And so I said, yes.

And it was some time later when I ran into her at one of these meetings and, and asked, so what, whatever happened with that?

How did, how did that work? She said, oh, it worked great. We, we put the cast on her. The biggest thing we were worried about was that it would get an infection, a bacterial infection, and we weren’t gonna be able to see it. She wasn’t gonna be able to tell us and it could go bad. So we trained her to come up each morning and get a treat and hold the cast up so we could sniff and, and make sure that nothing bad was going on under there. So she said, we did that worked great. We immobilized her. Every few weeks, changed the cast. And you know, we got to the point where it was sort of a tossup, you know, that the dermatologists were saying, you know, maybe we could get away without it.

Maybe we ought to cover it. And they said, well, let, let’s just, let’s just do it one more time and you know, we won’t have to put the big cast on, we’ll just put a short one on. And they came in the next morning and the gorilla was there, and the cast was laying on the floor a few feet away from her. And when she saw the keepers were there, she, she quick grabbed the cast, put it on the wrong arm, and came over and put it up for them to sniff, because it’s like, I, yeah, I gotta get my treat. So she didn’t know The story of the tomato well, that licked Dr. Wolf Springs. Well, you, you sort of gave the story away. So we were doing a, a reproductive study onus, and what we were looking at was reproductive tract cytology. So we would take a swab of the, of the vulva, of the ua, and, and then look at the cells under microscope.

And so we developed a, a very particular way of restraining the animal, or you’d grab one back leg, the other back leg, put an elbow on each arm and hold the animal so somebody could take a swab. And, and that meant that the command to his head was like right here. And command was are anters. They have a tremendous long tongue. And Dr. Wolf was there with her nose, and the Amanda was nose within an inch or so of each other. And the Amanda had just shot her tongue all the way up, Dr. Perry’s nose. And she said, oh my God, I think he touched my brain. So, so yes, that was the, You brought animals home.

Yes. Your daughter had a perspective about baby gorillas. My younger daughter backing up, we sometimes when we had pediatrics, even when I was at Lincoln Park, you had a very accomplished nursery staff that could take care of whatever they needed in general. But when it got to be critical medical care, IVs, IV medications, that sort of stuff, they, you know, it, it was not something that you could, you could give to that staff. And, and in those selected cases, animals would come home. And the one that I’m thinking of is a infant gorilla that actually lived in our living room in an isolette, my wife and I, a alternated sleeping on alternate four hour shifts because he needed meds either down the stomach tube or in the IV every two hours. And so if we alternated those, we could, we could sleep four hours at a stretch. And as ti got a little, got a little more capable and, you know, was just taking regular nursery care and could be out of the isolette, you could sit within in a rocking chair like you would an infant. And I remember my younger daughter would sit with him in the rocking chair for long periods of time.

I very, and, and seemed very comfortable with that. And many years later I was talking with her, you know, thinking about things and, and wanting to kind of explore how, how would you know, you looked like you were having a good time interacting with the gorilla.

What’s your perspective on that?

And she said it was terrible. I couldn’t, I couldn’t put him down. I, you know, he’d be all relaxed and I’d want to just take him and go to bed and I, you could take two hands off and he would hold you with his feet, and then if you got his feet off, he would hold you with his hands. And I would try and put him down and just have to completely give up and I’d have to go back and sit in the rocking chair again. So I thought, wow, that’s not at all the way I perceived that. Now you hand a a copy that tossed you into a wall. That’s what I heard. And this, as somebody that likes zoo stories and collects zoo stories, this is one of the better ones that I have, and I have no recollection of it because I was, I was working on an oppy, this was, was a female that had an ear infection. She had drooped ear and she was rubbing it.

And so we were doing, we actually meant to immobilize her. I, I gave her enough drug that most maleo copies would’ve been asleep, but she was just standing and droopy, but she wasn’t moving. So we thought, no, give that a try. And I went in, I don’t, I don’t recall this, but I actually went into the stall and had one of our vet techs come in with me and I was swabbing an ear, and of course the ear was on the opposite side. So, and then fast forward to, I was standing, leaning against the back wall of this stall about 10, 15 feet away, and aware that if I stood up and stepped away from the wall, I was gonna fall on my face because I was really woozy and felt the back of my head. And there was a lump about half the size of a tennis ball on the back of my head. And the thing is, with, with large animals, with anything, you know, that can exert a lot of physical force as opposed to a bite, you, you want to be either up close hanging onto the animal or far enough away that they can’t get to you. You don’t wanna be in that sweet spot where they can get up a good head of steam and clock you.

So having my arm wrapped over the animal, I know that my instinct would’ve been when she took off to hang on for dear life. And that’s what people described, witnesses described that I rode an OCO for the length of that stall until she clocked my head up against the cinder block on the backside and left me there. So, so, yes, then I went off in the zoo’s ambulance to the hospital and got checked out. But, – But it, it, like I say, it stinks that I don’t actually have any memory on my own of a story. We had talked about escapes and you were involved in the escape of a large male gorilla at Lincoln Park Zoo.

Can you relate that story and your reactions?

That was an interesting one. That was auto. And we were, we were having rounds and, and by rounds, I mean hospital rounds. This is when Dr. Baker, now Dr. Thomas was working with me. And so she and Joel Pond, the vet tech were sitting around my desk, we were having rounds in the morning, my phone rang and Barbara picked it up and said, yep, yep, okay, we’ll be right there. Sort of matter of fact. And hung it up and said, I’m sorry, not Otto Sinbad, I’m sorry it was out of the grill. Anyway, Barb said, Barb said, they called and said, Sinbad’s loose. And Sinbad didn’t live in the a house, he lived in the primate house.

’cause he didn’t make the move based on social compatibility and what had happened. So, so we packed up all of our stuff knowing that he was gonna be contained within the building ’cause that’s the only place he could have escaped into. And so we were getting ready to, you know, put together a dart full of anesthetic and figure out how we were gonna get access in the primate house. And as I drove our truck onto the zoo ground, encountered Dr. Fisher who said, it’s not Sinbad, it’s Otto. And he’s right over there. And, and there was Otto knuckle walking down along the north side of the big cat house, line house at Lincoln Park. And so we, looking at that, you know, obviously that was not what we were expecting. What had happened was the, the keeper that first spotted him was a keeper in the primate house where Sinbad lived.

And Otto walked up the back steps to the building and she was looking out the window at him. And because Sinbad was the only gorilla she took care of in the panic, she just thought Gorilla Sinbad. And, and that’s the call that she made. But Otto had actually climbed out somehow of the enclosure and gone around and was now behind the primate house. So the concern that I had, you know, we were all in the truck and he was walking down the side of the Lion House and I thought if I get behind him in the truck and chase him and try and catch up with him, and he could just keep going straight, get to the edge of the zoo, climb out and be in Lincoln Park. And so seeing him, looking like he was headed around the building and not heading straight out of the park, I went around the other side of the building and, and cut him off between the Lion House and the reptile house. And he turned around and I followed him. And as he walked up, he kept the Lion House close on his left side and wound up in front of the, you know, where the guests look into the tiger exhibit and it’s sort of a triangular nook that people can be in with the tigers right there.

And so I pulled the truck kind of across, closing that triangle and darted him and then backed off and just waited for him to go to sleep. He walked up on top of the Crown Field Center in the middle of the, the zoo scared the whatever out of the Japanese Maccas that had never seen a gorilla before, certainly not up close. And while I was waiting for him to go to sleep, saw the zoo photographer standing in the doorway and motioned her to come up and hop in the back of the truck so she could document some of this. And she got some pictures of him sort of precariously sitting on the edge of the building. And he was still doing that like a floor and a half up above the sidewalk when he started going to sleep and teetering. And I was worried that it was gonna come down and impale himself on the little posts that were on that along the edge of the sidewalk. And our little vet truck, pickup truck could fit just barely down the sidewalk in between those and I, so I pulled down and put the front end of the truck underneath him. So if he tumbled off the building, he was gonna kind of ricochet off the hood and not fall fully on the, on those little posts.

But as it was when he got really, really ataxic and unsteady, he stepped back off the edge of the building and sat down in the bushes and went to sleep.

Can you relate the story of a Brookfield Zoo when you were involved with a child that fell into the Gorilla Exhibit?

That was another very interesting day. That was, I was actually in a meeting in this room, we’re in the Brookfield Zoos conference room. We’re in a meeting with all of the senior animal management staff, and I had stepped out to my office to get something and heard this commotion. And as I stepped out when the curators said, we got a radio call that a kid fell into the gorilla habitat. And so we all went over there as quickly as possible. I met one of our keepers, said, you know, start making up darts with this level of drugs. And you know, I was preparing for what my role might be in rescuing a kid in that situation. And when, when we got over there, the, and a lot of this is what we found later because this was videotaped by a, by a bunch of visitors to the park that the kid had climbed over a railing and he climbed over a barrier and then up on top of a rail railing in a planter and then slipped off, landed on the other end of the planter and fell more than 20 feet down into the exhibit.

And he sort of ricocheted off a sloping wall and wound up unconscious on the floor in the water. And one of our females, benty, who had her own youngster on her hip, came over and scooped him up and was holding him. And you can see from the video that while she was looking at all the screaming people and the panic that she was doing a gorilla mom thing and patting him on the back, you know, just to kind of calm him down as she was surveying the situation, there were keepers. I mean, the public, the guests ex literally exploded out the door, knocked the door off of its tracks, looking for somebody to help. And there were a bunch of keepers just changing lunch shifts right outside the door. They told ’em what was going on. Elite keeper deployed some folks inside, some folks downstairs. They opened up the, the shift doors that actually let the animals from the mountain in that habitat down into the holding area.

And so when they, when they did that, the gorillas, you know, one of the females kind of directed everybody to go down and shift off exhibit and Bente went up and set the, set the child down next to the door where, where she went in. And so now close the door, then they close the doors and the zoo has its own paramedics and its own ambulance. And they were on scene by then and we all were able to go down and get access to where the keepers go into the exhibit and get the child all packaged up on a backboard and secured and then into the ambulance and over to Loyola and with all, with responding and, and you know, getting the kid safely put on a backboard so that he could go into the ambulance. They, they punch a clock when the ambulance leaves the police department and then they do the same when they get to the hospital. And from when they left the hospital to when they dropped him off at Loyola was 30 minutes. So he got good care in a very short period of time.

And in, in normal circumstances today, somebody would be putting microphones in the parents’ faces and, and saying, you know, why do you think the zoo did this?

You know, you know, don’t, aren’t they negligent in terms of not letting kids climb up and over barriers, et cetera, et cetera. But mom, who was a nurse, knew that for the rest of his life, anytime it was a slow news Newsday somewhere, certainly on the anniversaries, somebody would get the idea whatever happened to Gorilla Boy and they would come and bother him and his family. And so she said, we don’t want anybody to know our name. And since it was our ambulance, not on the police blotter anywhere, nobody ever knew his name and nobody ever bothered him or his family. He recovered nicely. He had a concussion and I think broken ankle, but recovered and left the hospital within days. And, and so there wasn’t a, there wasn’t a downside to the story. The story was, you know, the gorilla taking care of this kid.

And so it got press attention from around the world.

So in your, in your history with the zoo and people meet you and you have a unique position and they say, is there any story that’s a personal favorite of yours?

Is there one where you were involved?

Bente Bente is one that, that folks know about. There was the, the one that I, the one that I tell zoo people that generally makes them drop their jaws in disbelief. When I was doing my residency at St. Louis, we had an, an anesthesia resident, so he is one of my co-residents down at the university. They came and spent a two month block with us looking at problem anesthetic cases in the zoo. Very helpful. We, we worked on a lot of animals where, you know, we, we have problems getting these guys to sleep reliably, getting to wake up. Well, and so we were working on Randy, a Greater Kudo, which is a very large antelope with these great big spiral horns. And, and we tried drugs in a, you know, in an amount and staged in two different deliveries.

And it, it worked great and you know, we just did some routine stuff, hoof trims, physical exam. And, you know, at the end of it we were high fiving each other and we, we woke him up. It was a drug, it was a drug that was partially a combination that was partially reversible. And so he was up and groggy and the curator Bruce Reed said, we got a problem. What’s that? We left a dart in Randy, and this was one of those big palmer metal aluminum darts. And to keep it from bouncing out, it had a barb on it. So this wasn’t coming out on its own. We were gonna have to pull it out and we couldn’t immobilize him again ’cause we just had the reversal on board.

So I said, well he’s, he’s still got a sedative on board. He’s as sleepy as he’s gonna get.

What if, what if you tried to lure him up to this side of the stall with a treat?

And I snuck in the back door and pulled it out real quick. We tried that. And of course as soon as we opened the stall door, he whipped around and dropped his head, that one’s gonna work. So Bruce thought about it and he went back to one of the keepers who was a big beefy guy, built like a football player. And he said, Paul, we’re gonna have to hand grab Randy. And Randy, as I said, was a big antelope. He’s not quite the size of a cow, but close and big, formidable horns. All the color drained out of Paul’s face. Bruce said, here’s what we’re gonna do.

I’m gonna walk into the stall and he’s gonna charge me and I’ll put his horns into the wall on either side of me, but he’ll try and pick me up and throw me off. So Paul, you gotta drape yourself over his neck so he can’t pick us both up. And then Tom will reach in and grab the dart and, and everybody was sort of incredulous hearing this plan, but it worked exactly like he said. He walked in Randy and took a step back, dropped his head, boom, popped the horns into the wall on either side of him. Paul draped himself over his neck. I came in, snatched the dart out real quick. Paul rolled off, Bruce shoved him back outta the stall.

It was like everyday stuff In all the animals you’ve taken care of, have you learned any life lessons from ’em?

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a tough one. Life lessons from my, Your interactions From my patients, from my interactions with them. I, I think that sometimes animals really do have a sense perhaps that we are trying to help them. ’cause I know in hindsight there were circumstances where by all rights I should have gotten hurt. And I think the animals were like, nah, it’s, it’s not worth sticking a hole in him or killing him. It just would be too easy. There’s no challenge to that. But I think it’s really, you know, maybe the animals knowing what my purpose was and perhaps giving me a pass for that reason.

What would you say made you a good veterinarian?

I I, I think it was perhaps the genetics in my family of coming from a line of salespeople, people that got along with people I’ve heard a lot of, a lot of animal keepers say, I, I like to work with animals because I, I really don’t get along with people that well. And, and every animal, you know, as a veterinarian, every animal comes with a person. And, and so it’s those relationships that, that really you that you need to build on to, to be successful as a, as a veterinarian.

What skillset would you say a zoo veterinarian needs today as compared to when you started?

I, I think the, the big difference I, from when I started, the year I graduated from vet school, there was one textbook on zoo animal medicine and it was in German. And today there are volumes and volumes of literature on very particular topics in various animals. So today, some, an aspiring zoo veterinarian needs to, needs to be exposed to a, a great deal of the, the literature and the publications that are out there on the nuances of zoo and wildlife medicine. For me, in my time you had to extrapolate, we had domestic animals, human medicine and, and you were perhaps a little bit more winging it in terms of applying what you could from the available resources. Now you’ve been exposed to many things throughout your zoo career, not only zoo medicine.

So as you’ve seen some of these things unfold, what skill, what kind, what can a small or medium sized municipal zoo do today to be involved in wildlife conservation, either nationally or internationally?

Well, I, I think I’ve seen that for a small to medium sized zoo. I, I’ve seen it done two ways. One is they can be a participant or partner with another institution on a big global program that they’re doing on ape rescues in Africa, or the work that Brookfield Zoo, Chicago’s done with marine mammals and, and birds down at Punta, San Juan and Peru. So a small zoo can really have an impact by helping to financially partner in one of those big projects. The the other end, the, the opposite end of the spectrum is I’ve seen small zoos do some amazing stuff doing local and regional conservation. Perhaps they partner with, with a biology program or zoology program at a local university, and they’re doing frog restorations in some local habitat and they can do some really meaningful things on a, on a smaller scale.

Considering these financial resources available to these smaller, medium sized zoos, do you think the focus, they should have a focus on their collection for all animals or endangered species or western zoos with western animals?

I think there’s so many different ways to develop an institutional collection plan.

You know, what are the interests of the, of their membership or their visitors?

What, what kind of space do they have available?

So it, it really is gonna be up to their particular resources. But I think you can do, you can do a good job representing both endangered species, some international as well as regional species. This is not an experience that, that I was involved in directly. It didn’t involve an institution or animals that were in my care. But I was very involved a number of years ago in a, a very high profile animal welfare set of concerns at the National Zoo. And this was, it was spurred on by staff at the zoo releasing necropsy reports, animal animal autopsy reports to the Washington Post. And, and it was, it essentially stemmed from an, an internal beef among staff. But the result of that, having those things made into very high profile concerns in the Washington Post led the industry to discover something that, you know, that was, it.

It it led folks to discover that there was a real weak spot that animal rights advocates could use to go after zoos. And, and that was with these, so like, like a lot of folks in our country, we don’t talk about death a lot and zoos didn’t talk about animal deaths, but every single animal in the zoo, just like every one of us is going to die. And so what what was discovered, and this was an article that was in the Washington Post, it was picked up by the Los Angeles newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, that said, normally in a, in a particular year there might be several animal deaths at the National Zoo. And in the past few years there, you know, something like 10 animals have died. Well, the National Zoo at the time had a collection of 3000 animals. And if you take several to bean three that would give the average animal at the National Zoo a lifespan of a thousand years. And the folks at the Washington Post were pretty bright, and these other papers that picked it up, it went completely over their heads. They, they didn’t think animals died in zoos ever.

And the animal rights groups are like, wow, this is, you know, we can go out there and say this animal is gonna die in this zoo and they’re probably right because the animal’s gonna give, live a nice long life and pass away as we all will at, at the end of our time. And the idea that people weren’t reasonable, the general public wasn’t reasonable enough to assume that each animal dies was a huge, you know, a huge hole in our relationship with, with our public. And a very noted, very experienced public relations expert who’s worked for this zoo and worked for a lot of zoos around the country. And the A ZA said, this experience changed everything in, in zoos in terms of providing an opening for animal rights groups to go after zoos. And so we learned, we in the industry learned something from that. And we are much more open about sharing our experiences in some cases, sharing experiences in advance when a, when a very popular animal is starting to fail, we might share that information to try and, you know, prepare people for the whole circle of life that’s going on in the zoo.

Well now when you talk about making sure animals are well taken care of, what do you feel is the value of a medical group to a zoo veterinarian?

And can you give us some examples of this and how it helped?

Well, a, a medical group, when I was at Lincoln Park, we had a group of medical consultants and, and they met on a, on a regular basis. And that, that con the concept of having outside consultants, you know, get together sort of as a, as a committee or as a group is a little unusual. We don’t have that here at Brookfield Zoo Chicago, but everybody has consultant experts in, in various fields, whether these are veterinarians, physicians, folks with different specialties, orthopedic surgeons, general surgeons, ophthalmologists, we, those are, those are experts that are essential to anyone’s practice in zoo medicine. An example We did, this is sort of an extreme example, but almost 30 years ago we had a gorilla, a young black back, 10-year-old gorilla that was, that had a slow onset of muscular weakness, stumble, he’d have some sort of, you know, he, he was perhaps not aware of his surroundings disoriented. And these episodes would come and go, I mean, almost like you turned on and off, turned off a light switch and, and he would be better. And so we got to, it progressed to the stage where we needed to do some advanced diagnostics and we worked with physicians over at Loyola and brought him over there to have a MRI scan. And what we found out was that he had a tumor in the center of his brain, so, you know, almost the size of a small egg right in the center of his brain. And I remember looking at that and saying, yes, we found out what’s wrong.

And then immediately he’s like, oh my god, that’s not something that he can survive. I mean, that, that’s not something that, you know, is within our scope to treat. And then as we thought about it a little more, we consulted with some neurosurgeons over there and, and they said, you know, obviously we don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s something that has been slow growing because these, these signs came on, not in a matter of days, but over, you know, the better part of a year. We saw this slow progression, so it’s probably not a very hot malignant tumor and these are things that, that we can take out. So we started talking about it, we had about 10 days or so of planning that we did, and then we took chicory over to Loyola and the surgeons over there, and the anesthesiologist did a procedure that lasted for 12 hours. They were in his brain for 10 hours and were able to successfully remove the tumor. So, so that’s a, and and there we could, we could do a, a long discussion about all the different factors and, and we, we made the decision when we were, when we were doing this procedure to share that with the public. And so we actually at the, at the start of the day and even before during the planning stage, we had our videographer recording this, this the efforts that we were going to.

And we, on the morning that we brought him over to the animal section of the medical school for the surgery, we got film of that, we edited that film down over, over the morning while the surgery was ongoing. And by the time the surgeon stepped away from the animal at about 10 30, 11 o’clock at night, it had already been on the news twice and we had banners get well chicory, and the surgeon had never left the side of the animal. And all of this had transpired while, while the surgery was ongoing At another level.

What is the, how important is that relationship between the zoo pathologist or the pathologist and the veterinarian?

I started my training, my formal zoo training. I started at St. Louis. I started working at the St. Louis Zoo in 1970, working in the refreshment stands, trying to get work in the, in the children’s zoo, and then moved into the children’s zoo. And the, the very first formal veterinary job at the St. Louis Zoo was actually in pathology. So when I came back and did my residency, pathology was a huge part of that. My success, my predecessor here at Brookfield came from the National Zoo where pathology was, you know, on an equal footing with the veterinary staff. And so I’ve always thought that pathology was a critical part of zoo medicine.

And before I, while I was still at Lincoln Park Zoo, I actually got together with my predecessor here at Brookfield and came up with the idea of collaborating with the University of Illinois for a formal zoo pathology program. And, and so we started a collaboration among Brookfield Zoo, Chicago, Lincoln Park Zoo. And then joining us a little bit later in the process was shed aquarium in partnering with the University of Illinois for a formal pathology program to provide all of those answers. And 30 plus years later, that’s grown into a powerhouse of a program that does national and international work in the area of pathology and pathology research. And, and they’re, they’re now, while they’re part of the University of Illinois, the Zoo pathology program is based here at Brookfield Zoo.

In your career, what changes have you seen during your years in the zoo field regarding zoo medicine?

I, I think one of the biggest changes is, well, the, probably the biggest change is a result of the fact that we’ve got more access to animals back not long before I started there, there weren’t very good anesthetics if, if all you had was ether and barbiturates, you had to have the animal in hand and put a mask over their face or get an iv. And so the development of zoo medicine really came hand in hand with the ability to safely anesthetize animals and, and get our hands on them. So, so that has changed a great deal during the time that, that I’ve been a zoo veterinarian.

Well, what changes have you seen, or what issues most caused you concern during your career and those issues?

How do you see the future regarding those issues?

I think from a, from a medical standpoint, I think one of the things, one of the other changes that has happened is veterinarians have gone from being more or less animal plumbers, which is the, the veterinarians are in their private practice or they’re in the zoo hospital, and when something breaks, we get a call, we go down and fix whatever issue that was, and then we go back to wherever it was we were. And, and so it was not really integral to managing animals in the zoo. And, and that’s been a real change. Veterinarians have and should become an integral part of the planning for what animals to have, where the animals live, and how the animals are taken care of. So, so veterinarians are much more integrated into the zoo for that reason.

The veterinarians are, you know, their, their problem isn’t, how do we deal with hoof care and giraffes?

How do we deal with, you know, some of these other particular things, cardiovascular disease and gorillas and other great apes. But your problems are of a broader scope and, and involved in, in zoo management. And I think one of the, one of the challenges that we face is sustainability of the animal populations in zoos and making sure that we can reproduce our collections, maintain genetic diversity, and, and keep the animals that we do without going back to the wild and collecting things the way we did in the forties, fifties and sixties.

What issues would you like to see Zeus address in Zoom medicine in the future?

I, I think one of the things, one of the areas where we’ve really advanced and where I think we need to continue to advance is in the area of diagnostics. We’ve always, we in zoo medicine have always had a challenge compared to our colleagues work with domestic animals. If you’re working on a dog or a cat or even a horse or a cow, you can walk up to the animal, listen to its heart, do a physical exam, draw a blood sample, give injections, and for many of our animals, either for our safety or the animal’s safety, we need to immobilize or anesthetize those animals just to get a hand on them. So all the tests that you would need to undergo before you went under general anesthesia, we have to put the animals under general anesthesia in order to get those tests in the first place in order to listen to their heart and find out what things are going on. And so I think the, the, the challenges are the same as they’ve always been, how to safely get access to animals and also advancing tests, molecular diagnostics, the things that have been developed during my time as a veterinarian allow you to learn so much more about an animal’s conditions or some of the underlying concerns that groups of animals may have, that I think those are in the area of diagnostics is an area that we need to continue advancing.

Would you say operat conditioning and training has been a big boon to veterinarians and laying hands and doing things and blood draws on unique animals?

Yeah. That, that has been integrating with integrating with the behaviorists and the animal care staff in order to more easily get hands on animals. This took a real, this took a real upward swing when COVD vaccinations became available for zoo animals. And, you know, there was a, there was a real growth in the number of animals that were trained for hand injection. When we had covid go through carnivores here, the very first animal that was diagnosed was a full grown tiger that was diagnosed by a keeper, getting a nasal swab from the animal awake, just through training the animal came up, they were able to get a swab and, and get a diagnosis on that. Veterinarians are part of a group.

Can can you speak to how important the American Association of Zoo veterinarians is to the profession?

It, it’s, it’s very important. I think in addition to putting on annual conferences, we, I just got back from an international conference that was a collaboration among the European Association of Zoo and Wildlife Vets and the A A ZV up in Toronto, Canada. And, and so as a means of networking and sharing scientific information there, invaluable, but they also are very important in recruiting new, new folks into the profession. A A ZV is probably one of the most welcoming organizations in terms of supporting students that have an interest in zoo veterinary careers. So assuring our sustainable future as zoo professionals by recruiting new members into the organization is critically important.

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

It, it does. I I think it’s all part of the issue of sustainability sustaining populations over the, over the long term. You know, we we’re challenged to have large open spaces or spaces for large breeding groups of animals, and I think one of the, one of the solutions to that is partnerships. There’s, there’s a group called C two S two, it’s Conservation Centers for Species Survival. And it’s a collaboration among places like the San Diego Zoo, the National National Zoo, the wilds in Ohio, and others that have large amounts of space. And one institution could focus on cheetahs, another on white rhinos, another on large, large hoofed animals, and then be facilities that can, you know, that are particularly successful at breeding certain animals that can then be moved to, to other institutions.

So with the role of conservation, what do you think is the most difficult concept for a zoo to understand and and implement regarding their relationship to conservation?

I, I think one of the challenges historically is in, in a place that we are improving is thinking back 20 years ago, it, it was easy to talk about habitat disappearing in Africa and there deforestation in, in South America, it was easy to talk about the challenges that people were having in other continents, but when it came to things that impacted us, either locally or nationally within the US zoos might politically shy away from that a little bit because they didn’t wanna, you know, it was, it was easier to talk about something several continents away as opposed to stepping on any toes locally or regionally. And I think we’re, I think we’re getting better at that and doing better at collaborating with local conservation efforts and, and making good faith efforts to be advocates for conservation, not just internationally, but locally and regionally. Do you think that some people have said animals need to earn their ke I’m not sure. You know, my, my interpretation of animals needing to earn their ke is like, they need to have a job. They need to go out and visit with the guests or be ambassador animals. And I, I, the way I look at that and, and some of the research that’s going on here at Brookfield indicates that animals like to have a job and, and doing some of those things like going out and meeting people, being ambassador animals has shown to be one of the choices that animals might make that gives that, you know, that is enriching for them and not just guests that those animals might come in contact with. You have traveled extensively.

Is do you think there is still a wild out there or have the majority of wild spaces been turned into managed wild zoos?

I, I don’t think, I don’t think it’s a, it’s a matter of us having confined animals to a zoo like setting, but rather populations have carved out holes in, in areas animal habitat that may range over a whole continent or on a continental scale. And, and so I think what we’re doing is not so much turning the wild into the zoo into a zoo, but coming to realize what impacts we’ve had on the greater wild and, and trying to mitigate some of those impacts. And I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give you an example. We did some genetic work here a number of years ago. We had veterinarians that were studying lions in Africa, and as everybody knows, lions live in a pride. They have a lead male and that male breeds with, with the females. And so that’s where the progeny come from. There are also lions males that pair up and move across the landscape.

So they’re not affiliated with a pride. And, and so the way they were seen in, in some countries in Africa is they were a nuisance. These pairs of boys didn’t have an impact on the population. They weren’t part of the genetic input, but they were moving across the landscape and making mischief killing farm animals. And so they were seen as something that needed to be removed. Well, some of our genetic work indicated that the cubs in these prides of lions may not have been the progeny or weren’t the progeny of the pride male, but they were perhaps the progeny of these males that moved across the landscape and, and were just passing through. And so we discovered something different about genetics and gene flow. And so rather than confining a pride or groups of pride into a zoo setting, how do we mitigate the removal of some of these males that were unbeknownst to us part of an important part of the genetics of the lion population.

So I get the, I don’t do short answers very well, but the short answer is we are not carving up a piece and making a zoo out of it, but trying to find some of the places where we have, you know, where human populations, human settlements have impacted the normal biology of the natural system and, and try to mitigate some of those changes that have occurred. Elephants are a major animal in, in many zoos.

Why do you think zoos did not implement a major elephant national breeding program?

I, I think there were, there were a couple of different issues with that. One is, particularly in Asians, but in both species of elephants, it can be challenging to house breeding males just behaviorally. And, and it was, and it’s difficult to move elephants around the way we do some other animals to introduce animals to, you know, to basically manage the genetics of the population by introducing new males or new females to a group. And there’ve also been some challenges that, you know, some folks have made great strides in this, but artificial reproduction, you know, which is very common in domestic livestock, has been really challenging, particularly in, in elephants. So I think there, there are a number of things based on animal size, their biology and their behavior that, that we don’t have with some of the other animals that, that we work with.

Do you think zoos and aquariums have been successful in achieving the reintroduction of species back into the wild?

I, in, in some places they’ve been spectacularly successful. California condors, you know, has has been one of those and, but it’s not, you know, it’s never gonna be the primary way that we save the wild because you have to, you always have to attack the issue that caused the decline in the wild in the first place. You know, if we, if we had the space to reproduce lots of animals like black-footed ferrets, California condors, if, if you don’t solve some of the problems that cause the decline in the first place, then you’re not gonna be able to address the program or address the problem. So I, I think where zoos can really be helpful is trying to both reproduce animals that might be a, a rescue population or a replace a replenishment population, but trying to better understand the problem that caused the decline in the first place and attack that politically. You know, in the case of the condors, it was lead shot from hunting that caused, you know, these obligate carin eaters to be exposed to lead. And that was really the cause for the population declines. So collaborating with hunters and, and hunter’s organization looking at lead free shot and, and doing things to mitigate that can make it make it the possibility that the reintroduction will be successful because they’re not facing the same challenges that happened originally In some larger zoos. There’s many veterinarians working within the zoo.

And in your role as a senior veterinarian, how did you deal with different opinions by different veterinarians for cases?

I, I, I, I heard, and this was, this was not in the context of veterinary medicine, but I’ve heard management trainers say, if, if I have 10 people that work for me and they all have all the same opinions as me, then I got 10 people that I don’t need working. For me. The the beauty of having, you know, putting more heads together is that everybody comes with a different set of experiences. And so the key to working together is trust. You know, you trust that, that they’re competent and they know how to, how to adequately manage a clinical case, but understand that they’re likely not going to do it exactly the way that you do. And the way we learn from that is we get the veterinarians together. You know, we’re not, we’re not consulting on every case, every step of the way, but on a regular basis, and in our case, weekly, the vets get together and kind of go over, you know, here’s what I’m, here’s how I’m managing this case. And there’s usually a primary veterinarian for any given animal. And, and so the other vets know the approach, but you’re able to share the clinical knowledge and the clinical experience of how veterinarian A, B, C or D is managing a, a particular animal.

But as the chief veterinarian, sometimes you have to make a decision. It, it, it’s, it’s very infrequent that there’s a right way and a wrong way there. There’s lots of, you know, particularly in medicine, there’s, you know, there are lots of different approaches for some very high profile animals.

You know, when you’re making the decision, do we, you know, do we put an animal under the knife to do a 10 hour brain surgery?

That’s something where you have the opportunity to kind of put your heads together and not necessarily vote on it, but, but to, to have input from a number of different individuals. But it’s very unlikely that there’s one single right way to approach a particular medical problem. In your career, you have been mentored by other veterinarians, and I know it has been said to you, and you’ve probably said it to people.

Can you explain the phrase, when you say balancing risk versus reward and how that played out in one particular case of the sedation of a large gor at Lincoln Park Zoo, that phrase risk versus reward?

Well, I, I think so. So the concern is you want to, you want to make sure that the, the benefit that you are going to get from a particular procedure is worth the risk of anesthesia. And, and as I, as I mentioned before, the risk of anesthesia is something that, you know, we’ve worked to manage over decades in zoo animal medicine. And, and so the entire profession has been about mitigating or reducing risks associated with getting our hands on animals. But back, you know, a number of years ago, but during my time in the field, there were times when we were very, very risk averse thinking, you know, if I, if I put this animal under anesthesia, it, it very melt very well, might die. And, and then, you know, there there’s gonna be all this negative, negative reaction from the zoo or from our guests that were attached to that particular animal. And I think we largely, we largely overstated those risks sometime, particularly with you were, you were mentioning gorillas, there were times when, you know, it was pretty, they were pretty much off limits in terms of, in terms of doing anesthetic procedures because we were so worried that something bad might happen. And, and there were, there were cases, I know there was one that I saw in print decades ago where a gorilla was clearly bothered by something, it was annoying, its ear, it was scratching, you know, it progressed to having a head tilt and by the time they immobilized it, it had a rip roaring inner ear infection that the animal eventually succumbed to.

And it was because it had something like a plant on in its ear that could have been immobilize the animal, take 10 minutes, look, pull something out when you first saw an animal irritating it, perhaps put it on a course of antibiotics that, that could have saved its life. And, and so I think over the decades we, we learned that we learned both how to lessen the risks related with anesthesia as well as balancing what the potential problems could be. And I think the case that, the case that you’re talking about, I think is Sinbad the gorilla was a very, very high profile gorilla at Lincoln Park that it hadn’t been immobilized in many, many years and was obviously having some sort of dental issues. And in terms of risk reward, we had, we had a very competent human dentist, a fellow named Ray Coates, who we knew could get to the bottom of what was going on, if there was any dental problem, extracting teeth if needed, but, but identifying what Sinbad would need in terms of care. It wasn’t just like I was gonna go look in there and say, you know, those, those teeth don’t look that great, but I, I’m not really expert enough to figure out what to do. You know, you go into the case with an idea that the animal has a dental problem. And so you have the dentist and his assistant there on hand when you begin the procedure. And you know, if it turns out that, you know, he has an infection in his cheek and his teeth are all fine, sorry, we cost you a day coming to the zoo, but you’re prepared to, to do what you need to do in one procedure.

So you mitigate a risk of anesthesia by doing one instead of two or three and, and you have somebody there that’s more likely to be able to, to have a good impact on the problem at hand. And speaking of preparation, you’ve been involved with the birth of an elephant.

What would you say were the key medical considerations that you had to be concerned with and how key were these preparations, both from a medical standpoint and a management standpoint?

I, I think there were, there were two different things. One was the mom’s behavior and how elephants give birth. And, you know, mother elephants don’t have hands, they can’t pick them up and put them upright, you know, so they’re pushing the kid around with their feet and they do a good job, but it can be terrifying to watch. So that was one of the pieces of preparation. Another thing that we spent a good bit of time on was preparing if something went wrong, there have been elephant cesarean sections, but at that time, most of them, because of the terrible technical difficulties, hadn’t been terribly successful. But we had a surgeon on on hand that, you know, had that expertise and we focused on mostly preparing to assist with the birth if the mother elephant had any difficulties. You talked about assisting and so forth.

How, how important is it for a veterinarian, a zoo veterinarian to be able to perform surgery?

It’s not necessarily a skill that they’re all expert at, or do you rely on experts?

It much more, and this is, this is true on the human side and the veterinary side. When I was a practicing small animal veterinarian, I did orthopedic surgery, I did abdominal surgery, did minor ophthalmic procedures that almost no veterinarians in private practice would do today. Those are all, you know, we have orthopedic surgeons, we have dermatologists, they’re, they’re all manner of subspecialties. So it’s important to be competent in surgery, but in, in so many different areas, as the standard of care has risen that the standard of care for an orthopedic surgery or an abdominal surgery or dentistry have risen above the ability of one person to, to have all of that training. Because the, I’ve heard on the, on the human side, you know, if you’re going in for a major procedure yourself, you don’t want to go to an orthopedic surgeon that had, that doesn’t do 500 of these a year. Zoo veterinarians don’t do 500 of anything in a year. And so it, it’s not just acquiring the skillset, but your ability to, to stay current and, and also have the practice and the muscle memory so much more than when I was starting out in the, in the zoo field, we rely on a much more subdivided and rigorous cadre of experts, specialists in various fields of veterinary medicine or human medicine.

And, and when you talk about specialists, and you mentioned it, how important is it to include the veterinarian when exhibit design is taking place?

Well, as, as I mentioned before, one of the big advances in zoo medicine is really integrating veterinarians in zoo management. And a, the things that, you know, in terms of things that might cause problems to an animal, whether they’re physical, developmental, nutritional, behavioral, those things that might eventually show up on the zoo veterinarian’s doorstep, they had their origin in how the animals were managed or how the animals were housed. And so it, it’s, it’s much better to prevent those things by getting the veterinarian’s input and saying, well, you know, a few years ago we had a gorilla that got his head stuck between two bars that were x far apart. So maybe we ought to think about that as we’re designing this next facility. So, so veterinarians that have had a particular experience may be able to head that off in terms of design. I, I think it was Will Rogers that said, good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. So those things that veterinarians have seen, they may be able to help head off You.

Speaking of, of design elements and so forth, what do you think has been the greatest area of development in the way zoos have interpreted their, their collection to their visitors?

I, I think things have, things have really advanced and, and I think one of the, of the keys in interpretation is, is not just, you know, kind of going over a natural history of these animals and quoting from walker’s, mammals of the world on, on habitat or the size of a, of a litter in animal X, but trying to, trying to reach people in a different way to try and develop the, the connection with the animal. And, and so, and of course the technology is all changed, you know, there are screens where we can do interpretations, we can put information about animals and, and actually have that projected on the, you know, on the, the, the front of the exhibit so that, you know, you can see that kind of superimposed on the penguins as they’re swimming by, you know, so, so it’s taking advantage of the tech, of the technology and technological changes. But I think also trying to develop the personal connection with the animals. What would be a personal connection with the animals, Having some, you know, having exhibits with small birds, small reptiles that are kind of on a kid’s level. I brought my children to the zoo as I was a, a budding zoo veterinarian growing up at Lincoln Park. Now I bring my grandchildren to the zoo and seeing it through their eyes, you know, seeing that, you know, the light bulb that goes off when, you know, when they find the animal in the exhibit. And it, and it’s sort of those magical moments where, you know, perhaps the, perhaps the animal isn’t remembering your grandchild’s name, but your grandchild remembers that particular animal and you know, it, it, it makes an impression on them. The, recently the Brookfield Zoo Chicago has developed a new simple three word, what we call our mantra, which is connect care and conserve.

We we’re trying to drive conservation, but you start that by having people make that connection with the animal and having people develop a, a caring attitude towards that, that animal, that species animals in the wild. And then having that drive conservation actions on, on the part of our guests. You talked about the artificial reproduction of animals.

How realistic is reproductive technology in breeding endangered species?

I think the, I I think one of the things that we’ve learned is we are not, it, it’s not likely that zoos are gonna become, for instance, like dairy cattle, pretty much no farms that are dairy farms have dairy bulls to, to breed with the, the dairy cows because they, they give milk because they’re pregnant, they have calves. All of that is done by artificial reproduction, artificial insemination. And, and it’s, and it’s not the exception, it’s the rule that’s how dairy calves are produced. I don’t see that happening in zoo settings. I think the, the goal has been more to improve our understanding of behavior and understanding of habitat design so that we can maintain the appropriate social groups in order to, in order to get natural reproduction research in, in the area of assisted reproduction has really focused more on particular problem cases, like the one I mentioned with doing artificial insemination in elephants. So I, I think it has, you know, it certainly has a purpose. Assisted reproduction was instrumental in moving us moving the giant panda population in, into the situation it is now. The development of artificial insemination techniques has been critical to those guys.

But, but there, you know, there are more, these exceptions rather than having it become, you know, sort of an integral part of management for most species. You talked about pandas and conservation regarding conservation.

What worries you about conservation within the zoo field and, and what gives you hope?

I think the, the thing that gives me hope is, is starting to really make some headway with zoos and zoo clinicians starting to, are continuing, continuing to develop partnerships for conservation locally and globally and, and trying to look at medicine a little bit more broadly and, and trying to understand some of the conservation challenges that are going on at the environmental level. You know, some of the, the, the work we’re doing in Punta San Juan, the, the work on the dolphins in Sarasota, that’s been an ongoing study for more than 50 years to understand the, the biology of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico. So I think those, those things give me hope, the fact that it’s becoming more integrated. The, the challenge is still, you know, what impacts humans are having on the environment. What, what are some of the factors that are leading to population declines in, in the wild. But I, you know, some of the things that we’re, some of the efforts, efforts that are being undertaken to, to help understand the biology is really gives me hope about where we may be going in the future.

What medical issues do managers and veterinarians need to consider when moving animals nationally or internationally?

And specifically because you’ve had experience, can you relate some of your experiential things such as the spectacle bear to South America or other examples of that type of movement of animals and what veterinarians and managers had to consider?

Yeah, I, I think from a, from a medical standpoint, you, you really want to know the status of the population that the animal is coming from as well as the one that it’s going to. And, and that’s been a, a big change. We don’t, we don’t always quarantine animals anymore when they’re coming from one zoo to another. Rather we do a risk assessment where we look at, again, those two populate where an animal’s coming from, where it’s going, if they’ve, if they’re positive for a particular parasite that is relatively innocuous, if that parasite exists to the same level in both places, that may not be a big deal. So, so those are, those are really some of the things that we look at is making sure that we’re not moving some disease organism from one place to another, or taking an animal that’s naive to a particular problem and introducing them to a place where eventually when they’re integrated into the group, they’re gonna be challenged by something that they haven’t faced before. The our our ability to do a, a much greater array of molecular diagnostic tests and other things to try and do those assessments, and particularly as medical care and pathology have improved across the board, we, we get, we get a much better ability to, to assess the sending and receiving populations so that we’re not, you know, we’re not creating some of those issues.

So specifically when you were involved with the movement of the bear to Venezuela, what veterinary concerns did you have and how did you try and mitigate them?

Well, it, so this, this was over 30 years ago, so you know, there were a number of, there were a number of tests that that really aren’t available to us. There are diseases that have emerged in the meantime that, that were to consideration. But what we did was really a full physical exams looking at stool samples for parasites. And so we were, we were interested in ensuring the health of the individuals that we were taking down to Venezuela. And we did, you know, some of the corresponding tests on the animals in the receiving population.

Do you feel that there’s more or less or the same of those types of international exchanges where veterinarians and managers have to be concerned about things?

I would say there are probably less than there have, there, there are many of them that happen on the, the national level, you know, those species survival programs or SSPs frequently make breeding recommendations that that call for moving animals from one population to another, one institution to another. So I think those are, those are pretty common. They’re, they happen internationally, but they’re, they’re, I I think they happen less than perhaps they used to because there are similar regional management groups like Iza in Europe and others in East Asia, south America that manage regional populations. And we, and we’re talking about moving animals among places where we’ve got animals in human care. We’re not talking about reintroduction to the wild, which brings a, a whole nother level of responsibilities and potential threats when you’re thinking about potentially introducing problems into a naive wild population.

So have you been involved in your career at Brookfield Zoo in international shipments?

Yes, yes. Mostly zoo to zoo shipments And, and there were medical considerations as Yes, and, and some of the, some of the more challenging ones were based on, they were based on things completely outside that species and outside of the zoo field. And I’ll, I’ll give you two examples. One, after, after the discovery of a strain of Ebola virus in primates that were imported into a facility in Virginia a number of years ago, that’s what the book the Hot Zone was written about. The Centers for Disease Control really strictly cracked down on the regulations for primate importation, even if it was, even if it was an animal that was born and raised in a zoo in Canada, it was a primate importation. And so you had to jump through many more hoops. And, and that’s because the concern was there are diseases that primates share with humans, and we don’t want to bring in something that threatens the public health. Another example is when we, when we opened up the living coast, we brought in birds from the wild, actually we brought in eggs from some of the various bird species, the turns and others from the wild.

And they were from countries that had bird diseases, poultry diseases that don’t exist in the United States. And so there, instead of human health concern, it’s a concern about the millions and millions of poultry in the United States.

And, and what if you, what if you brought in a disease like Newcastle’s disease into the United States?

And so actually the strictest international quarantine that I’ve ever been involved in was with those birds because they had to be in quarantine for 60 days after the last egg hatched. And so, and everybody coming in and out of that exhibit had to strip down and shower in and shower out so that they couldn’t bring anything in or out of quarantine. And so we had to set up a whole new organization for one of our quarantine rooms. I, in order to accomplish that.

Does Brookfield Zoo have Sister zoo relationships?

Do you feel that’s beneficial?

I, I am not aware of any current sister zoo relationships. I think, I think as a means of connecting, connecting different cultures. I think that’s largely been supplanted by social media. I mean, there aren’t the barriers to, you know, we connect with zoos over baby hippos on TikTok. You know, there are things that can happen at a zoo in Europe that get millions and millions of hits from around the world. So I I I don’t know that, that there’s necessarily the, the benefit for our public in connecting with, you know, these folks on foreign shores because, you know, the global community is, you know, is, is basically on your phone. But from a standpoint of professional growth for keepers having exposure and from both institutions, I think, I think a lot of those things can and do happen more broadly with, you know, keeper exchange programs and other things that, that aren’t, they aren’t limited to a dialogue between two institutions, but rather rely on more regional organizations, the American Association of Zookeepers, a ZA and others to, to help facilitate transfers information transfer between institutions. And again, some of the same technological changes where, you know, we’re able to have Zoom meetings and, you know, share information on how do you, how do you train your gorillas to put their arm in a, in a sleeve to, to get blood pressure and, you know, we’re doing Zoom meetings in real times or, or sharing videos, you know, a lot of, a lot of the things that required face-to-face experience to pass along information, you know, perhaps don’t need that same level of personal contact to in order to share experience.

Now you’ve worn two hats as a veterinarian in both Chicago zoos. What would you say were some of the differences in their approach to veterinary medicine, if any, when you moved from one zoo to the other zoo, one zoo having a veterinarian as its director, another not, And, and, and, and now it’s the other way around this zoo.

Has this zoo has a, a veterinarian as its director?

No, I think the key differences were, were not so much fundamental in terms of the practice of veterinary medicine. It was, you know, there were, for me the reason for the change was other outside issues, being able to live outside the city and, and the challenge of working in a brand new hospital at the time, the reward of working with in a, in a brand new facility and with a, a much larger institution with a, a larger collection, I, I was able to work with citations for the first time in my career. And that’s a big, you know, working with, when you, when you get introduced to working with dolphins for the first time, coming again from Lincoln Park here, that was a, that was a big change. But, but I don’t know that there were probably the biggest differences in veterinary medicine between Lincoln Park and Brookfield. You know, when I was, you know, between when I was at Lincoln Park and where Brookfield is now, we’re we’re more related to advances that have happened at both institutions in veterinary medicine over that time. So Brookfield now is very different than Lincoln Park was when I left. But Lincoln Park is very different than it was when I left. Just because we’ve, we’ve all shared in parallel with the advances in zoo veterinary medicine.

How important do you think it is for zoo veterinarians to make rounds?

I, I think it’s in terms of, in terms of the veterinarian needing to go around and see all the animals in order to, in order to have an idea of what’s going on or in order to spot sick animals, that’s, that’s probably less important. And I think that’s perhaps a bit of a throwback to, to that time when the veterinarians were animal plumbers and they waited for somebody to call them to fix something broken and then they went back and stayed at the hospital and rounds was a way to get them out and perhaps spot things a little earlier. I think zoo veterinarians, like zoo directors, like other people that don’t frequent the back of house very often, they can impact animals’ behavior. And so things, subtle things that an animal might be doing that indicate that they’re, that they’re not feeling well or not doing well may vanish i in the face of a veterinarian, you know, because the animal, you know, sort of, you know, gets a little more alert and maybe masks some of the signs. So I think the real key, and, and in fact it’s, I think it’s A-U-S-D-A requirement, an a ZA requirement that the animal care staff, the keepers that care for animals need to be trained to identify signs of illness. So they’re really the best first responders in terms of understanding things. And that’s one of the things that I was taught in my residency is you really rely on the keepers and, and you develop that partnership and you explain disease pathophysiology and, and you, you get, you help to develop an understanding in the animal care staff on what things to look for. And, and then there’re first line to, to really know what, what’s going on with the animals in the, in the zoo.

And, and speaking of residencies or internships, how important is it to be zoo intern?

What is it accomplishing?

Well, I I think the, the kind of the, the pinnacle of zoo based training is really the residency internships are typically for veterinarians that are right outta school. They tend to be a year long. And, and those are important to any postgraduate education programs focused in a zoo or, you know, based on residency at or based on being at the zoo every day. Those are critically important in terms of gaining experience under professional mentors. So I think internships and residencies are both valuable. I did, in my career, I did an internship in small animal medicine and surgery. And so the, the advantage being you get to see lots of different animals, you get your hands on animals, the number of patients that you see in a day’s time is much greater than it is in a, in a zoo situation. And then I did my residency, a two year residency in zoo animal medicine.

And so I think that combination was very helpful for me. A number of our veterinarians have similar experiences with, they have an internship in a, a different aspect of veterinary medicine and then a zoo residency. And we have, we have residents, we have a resident, we’re part of a residency training program here at Brookfield. That is, I I think the, the next, the next resident that we select in the next cycle, I think will be our 20th resident that we’ve brought on on an annual basis. And it’s a, a shared program between Brookfield Zoo Shed Aquarium and the University of Illinois. And it’s a, it’s a very formalized structured program. They, they develop into clinician scientists. They’re required to do a research project and, and get a master’s degree as part of their residency.

So it’s a, and and this is a three year program that, that they do in, that they do at the three facilities, university of Illinois, Brookfield and shed Aquarium, Just to be clear. So at the end of that three years, they’re not a full-time veterinarian at the zoo. They’re just then on their own to get a job. Yes. And, and our, the folks coming out of our program have been very successful. One of the things I was kind of proud of, the very first resident that came through our program just a year or so ago, completed a term as the president of the American Association of Zoo Veterinarians. And so I, because of the, because of the, the depth and the breadth of the training that they get in this collaboration, they’ve gone out and accepted positions directly at San Diego Zoo Sea World, other institu at aquarium, other institutions. So, so they’re seen as very well qualified and, you know, go into full-time, zoo veterinary positions, often had veterinary positions at other institutions.

Do zoos and aqua need to be more involved with animal welfare?

Oh, absolutely. And, and I think, And can you speak to what that means?

Absolutely. I, I think the, I I don’t want to get into too much technical animal behavior speak, but I think zoos, and I’m speaking mostly from my experience working in a ZA, I’ve been on the accreditation commission, I’ve done lots of accreditation inspections, and so I’m familiar with a CA standards and, and the development and the writing of those standards. And I would say that what we relied on to maintain animal welfare was what the behavior is called inputs. We want to have them in the right social group. We want to have enough space, we want them to have good food, we want there to be adequate heat and light and water. And those are all things that we provide for the animals as inputs puts with the assumption that if we do all these things right, that will translate into animal welfare and what, what a ZA has done. And what I think the, the animal welfare scientists as a group within the zoo community have done is said, you know, there’s more than that. And the way I like to explain it to people is doing welfare assessments, which is now a requirement in a ZA doing well welfare assessments is the equivalent of, okay, we’re, we’re doing all these things. We had all these inputs, the, the food, the water, the light, the heat.

Those are the things that we’ve provided. How are you doing?

How are we doing? And, and so we’ve developed methods and welfare assessments are a process that need to be developed by each institution to determine how an animal’s welfare is and if an animal’s welfare is on the decline. And so that’s a process that needs to occur for every single animal in the zoo or aquarium on at least an annual basis. And, and I think that the development of that standard has been, has been a real boon in terms of causing us to perhaps at, at least from my perspective, to think a little bit outside the box and, and try and put yourself in the animal’s shoes and, and to develop grams, you know, which is a, a suite of behaviors that an animal might have that can tell us how they’re doing, how they’re feeling to do, what’s required to determine for a gorilla, for a rhino, for a micronesian kingfisher.

What are the, what are the indicators of poor welfare?

What are the indicators of good welfare and how does each animal stack up on a regular basis?

So it’s become, it’s become a real integral part of managing zoo populations across the board.

Is this something that helps and assists zoos in dealing with people who don’t think there should be zoos?

I, I think it does. And, and to be honest, I think, you know, some of the, some of the things, and, and this is just my personal perspective, I think when, you know, as a, as an inspector, as an accreditation commissioner, it was a little bit easier to, to look at some of the cut and dried things like, like heating, lighting, you know, provision of adequate food, social groups, those sorts of things were perhaps a little bit easier to measure. But I think there, there was the feeling that we need to, to try and better define and impact animal welfare from the animal’s perspective. And, and I think, you know, there, there was a real push to, to try and make welfare front and center for the animal’s sake, but also for the, the sake of our audiences, our guests, our visitors, and the general public.

In what ways do you think that you altered the science or the art of veterinary medicine in the zoo field?

I, I think the, the biggest thing that I’ve done in my approach has really been developing collaborations. And so I think getting together, getting together with my predecessor here at Brookfield when I was at Lincoln Park and working with University of Illinois and, and the other zoos to create the zoo pathology program, I think sort of developed an interest and in, in zoo medicine at the University of Illinois. And, and that group has really become a powerhouse in zoo and wildlife medicine. I certainly can’t take all the credit for that, but I think it helped the creation of some of these collaborations perhaps helped act as a catalyst. You know, 30 years ago in, in peaking the interest of the, the administration at University of Illinois, there was a, there was a presentation about the Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicine at the recent zoo vets meeting a couple of weeks ago. And they, they were talking about where scientific articles come from in the journal, and they threw up a slide saying, you know, you can, you can parse the data lots of different ways. Here’s one that lists the, the, the frequency of articles by institution. And the very top one in all of that journal is the University of Illinois.

And then Brookfield Zoo is, you know, a few steps down on that list. And, and I think some of the collaborations that, that I worked on perhaps had a part in, in developing, developing those programs and all of the, all of the experts that have come out of that program. So you mentioned at one point proud accomplishment.

What is your proudest accomplishment?

I, I think I, I I, there are a couple and, and can you Gimme a couple?

There were, there were things, they’re, they’re mostly related to people because it’s a, it’s a people business and, you know, it’s not this indivi individual animal surgery or that individual animal surgery. But I think the, the effort that it took and the impact that the Zoo Pathology program has had is one of my proudest accomplishments. And, and on an individual basis, I, I was introduced to a veterinary student very early in her career that Dean Ted Valley down at University of Illinois thought, this is somebody that, that’s really got a passion for zoos and you really need to meet this person. And Dr. Jen Langan, you know, was a, was a vet student here and then did a, did a small animal internship. And when she was doing her residency in Zoo Animal Medicine down at the University of Tennessee, they had just recently expanded the American College’s Zoological Medicines standard for a residency program to three years from the two years that it was at Tennessee. And so I worked with some resources that I had at Loyola and University of Illinois to find funding, worked with the folks down at Tennessee to essentially have her work at Brookfield Zoo Chicago as her third year of the residency. So it can officially be a three year residency, but she finished it off here. And then at the end of that time, we knew that she was somebody that really wanted to have, as a clinician here, she had lots of expertise and drive.

And so she got to the end of the program and said, I’ve got a really good job offer and I need to let them know within a week can we do something to keep me here. Luckily I was getting ready to go on vacation by myself down to Lake of the Ozarks. So I had a week unencumbered by work to create a whole new place for her here and at the University of Illinois. The, I started with the new dean of the vet school on his first day on the job, I talked him into having a joint position. So she would be faculty at University of Illinois, spend all of her time here and it would be a, a shared position. And Herb Whiteley, the new dean of the vet school, thought that was a good idea. And then I spent the we rest of the week taking what was not my money, but the zoo’s money and taking a halftime position that had been vacated by a vet that wanted to just work halftime and convinced them through lots of lobbying and negotiation that it would be a good idea to, to create this new position where we dedicated half the resources and U of and u of I dedicated half the resources to having this shared position. And today, it’s almost 25 years later and she’s still in the shared position between U of I and Brookfield Zoo.

She just won a very prestigious award at the most regent recent zoo vet meeting and has been really the mover and shaker behind our residency program. So she’s really the academic heart and soul of our training program. And so, you know, I, the thing that I’m proud of is not just that we had a position and I picked a person and put them in that spot and selected somebody that happened to be particularly talented, but the fact that I had to bend over backwards to basically create something from scratch that was a collaboration among a bunch of institutions and get it to work and, and it’s somebody that’s had a big impact on the field. Now you mentioned that, oh yeah, Brookfield has a veterinarian that’s a director.

Does being a zoo veterinarian give one the skills?

Come a zoo director?

I, I think there are a lot of, there are a lot of skills that a veterinarian has to have that are useful for somebody in a, a zoo management position. It’s a, it’s an academically rigorous thing to get into and through veterinary schools. So, so there’s, you know, there’re there are folks that understand science and, and have a decent head on their shoulders from that standpoint. They’re also folks that are trained to work not only with animals, but with people. You know, every every animal has an owner or someone that is the primary caregiver for that animal and, and they’re an integral part of the medical care for, for any animal. And, you know, I think the training and working with those is very helpful. Someone, someone that’s that’s got a, that’s interested in a zoo director’s job, a zoo CEO job is someone that’s worked in a zoo. So, you know, the, the, the, the crop of zoo veterinary directors, you know, that have come up within the last four or five years are all people that have ex extensive zoo experience.

So they’re animal people with a good bit of zoo experience, significant people skills. And all of the ones that I know of were interested in this career track so that they made decisions to prepare them for the management side. So they weren’t, they weren’t people that were prepared just because they were zoo veterinarians, but they were zoo veterinarians that sought out other, other training or other experience in the management area. Dr. Mike Atkinson got an MBA, so has the, the business training for managing an organization. Some of the other folks that I know became staff at their zoo that were responsible for not just the veterinary side, but managing, you know, they became associate directors or, you know, folks with other management responsibilities beyond just the, the veterinary department. So I, so I don’t think, you know, I don’t think you could take any old veterinarian and drop them in the zoo director’s spot, but I think it gives somebody a very good education to start with, to that when supplemented with other experience or training, I think potentially equips them well to be a, a zoo director.

And you mentioned relationships, so this is kind of a two part, any advice for the Neophyte Zoo veterinarian about the importance of developing relationships with the keeper staff?

And what do you believe were your key approaches to dealing with the animal keepers?

I, I think the, I think the big thing, and it’s a, it’s a little bit different now than it was certainly when I, you know, when I started, when I did my residency, we had keepers that had been at the St. Louis Zoo for many, many years that may not have even had a high school education, but they had 20, 30 or more years of experience working with their animals. And they were very bright. They were folks that knew that animal’s behavior inside and out. And because I got a doctor’s degree did not make me superior to those people in the knowledge that I was relying on. You know, I wasn’t relying on the fact that they could write a term paper. I wanted to know what that jaguar or what that lion or what that antelope was gonna do, how it was feeling. And again, in, in that area, those people had knowledge way beyond what I did.

And so the, the cardinal sin that a zoo veterinarian can have is to think, because I’ve got all this training, I’ve got all this education, I got all these years of college and initials behind my name that makes me smarter than you or better than you. That that simply isn’t true.

And, and the idea that, you know, if you’re having one of those, should we go this way?

Should we go that way?

Discussions falling back on your degrees as you know, my idea trumps your idea, you know, is never gonna work for very long. So your approach to the Keepers was, My approach to the Keepers was they were partners in the care for those animals. I looked at, again, my experience, my experience working in small animal practice, and I think it was a benefit to not go right outta school into a zoo, but to have experience working with clients, animal owners, you know, that were your, you know, they were your clients, they were the people that you relied on and, and you, you couldn’t just dismiss them. They were the people that were paying you to work on their dog or cat. And so, you know, the, I’ve counseled people to consider the keepers like you would a client, like you would an animal’s owner and try and, and educate them on some of the things, you know, and again, owners, dog and cat owners often need considerably more education on dog and cat care than our keepers do. Our keepers are often very experienced, but you still have something to offer based on your years working as a zoo veterinarian and, and to share and make that a, make that a partnership. You’ve dealt with many curators in your career in management roles.

What qualities should a good curator have?

Again, curators are leaders of a group of animal care staff. They need to have those keeper skills to have the understanding of the animal skills to, to understand the, the, the animals in their care and have a level of knowledge about not just the scientific aspects, but you know, some of the management things. I’ve, I’ve had this discussion, I colleague, you know, zoo colleague with lots of zoo experience that shares my background, educational background of having an animal husbandry degree, you know, learning how to put animals in barns and feed them hay and those sorts of things. And, and, and having that, you know, the, the kind of back and forth discussion about, you know, should a an animal manager have a zoology degree or an animal husbandry degree. And you know, in zoos we put animals in barns and feed them hay. So, so animal husbandry is a big part of it. And so, you know, you can be a, you can be a zoologist and you can be a crackerjack, scientific zoologist and, and not have a lot of practical knowledge about animal care and husbandry. And so that’s an important part of it as well.

There’s, there’s knowing everything about an animal’s natural history in the wild and knowing what habitat they live in, but that can be different than the adaptations that you need to make to, to have animals in human care and substituting our environment for the national environment. And that’s where, that’s where animal husbandry comes in. And for zoo animals that’s something that it’s, it’s nice to have a curator with, with that husbandry experience. And, and it’s absolute, I I would say it’s absolutely necessary within the management structure to have that expertise. I’ve, I’ve worked with curators that had nothing but the scientific zoology side. They studied animals in nature and they knew the biology and had little to no experience managing a, a living collection. And it, and it can work if that comes from somewhere else along the management chain, you know, so you have an associate curator that’s worked with this taxonomic group for 30 years, started out as a keeper, you know, then you can have the, that partnership between the curator and, and an associate keeper, an associate curator, a lead keeper or others to, to supplement their knowledge of the animal’s situation in the wild.

With the, you know, having the animals in human care, You’ve had children if you had grandchildren, how do you think Zeus can improve their connection with kids and teenagers to heighten their zeal and awareness of the natural world?

I think making those, you know, the, you know, like I I talked about Brookfield Zoo, Chicago mantra of connect care and concern or, or excuse me, connect care and conserve. And, and I think it, it’s really developing those connections and developing education programs that are collaborative so that, you know, we can heighten kids’ experience. The, there was a whole field that sort of developed from some of the work done by educators here at Brookfield called conservation psychology.

And the idea that, you know, what was, what was the best way to reach people?

What was, you know, did seeing animals in a zoo have a positive impact or a positive effect?

And, and so I think that’s area that we’ve sort of capitalized on to develop messages and presentation, particularly focused on different groups. I mean, I think that’s part of, you know, why we developed a program of ambassador animals so that, you know, so that the public could see close up and make contact with, with animals and enjoy, you know, enjoy the, the psychology of the experience of being with, with animals and seeing things that are more than the, the squirrels in the raccoons that you see in your neighborhood. But it’s also developing in kids the connection to the natural world so that they look at, you know, even if they live in downtown Chicago, they’re looking at nature, you know, they’re, they’re seeing, you know, they may see monarch butterflies.

They may see, you know, where do those squirrels live?

They’ll see raccoons, they may see a coyote. And understanding how they fit into the natural world, I think are all parts of reaching kids at different levels and, and having an education program in the zoo, and having the education program have outreach to other local organizations or particular schools so that they can integrate the educational component in with joy, you know, enjoying nature.

So on a personal level, what do you want a visit or when a visitor comes out of an exhibit view building or an exhibit theme, what do you want them to feel?

I, I like we look for sort of the magic moments. Did the idea, you know, when you go in, we have, we have an exhibit, feathers and scales, and it’s a mixed habitat. There’s bird exhibits, reptile exhibits in there, and the, there’s a free flight bird aviary that’s open. And so sometimes a cock of the rock or some other bird might fly out and fly by you or land on the railing next to you. And, and it’s that to come outta there with, wow, that was really cool. And to have people have, you know, it’s not like I learned about this, this, this, and this, but to have one new experience that, that they’ll remember and maybe tell stories about, you know, you you want to be able to make those human connections and have those memorable moments.

This in the side. Do you feel the parakeet exhibit at Brookfield Zoo does that kind of thing?

And why?

Absolutely. I, I think to, to be able to see more than 800 birds and to have hundreds of them take flight and just kind of fly right by you, you know, it’s a, it’s an experience on a, on a different level in terms of the numbers of animals and being able to feed them and have them come and land on your stick. And, you know, and I I, from when they were really little, my my grandkids have been big fans of the Avary at Wild Encounters.

What are some of the medical considerations of an exhibit like that?

Well, there, you know, it’s, it’s, you’re managing a group population. So it’s, you know, it’s not, it’s not 10 birds in a series of exhibits where you can work on all of them individually. So it’s setting up population health programs and, you know, things on a, on a flock level rather than so much focusing on individuals and the process for how, how do we look at hundreds of birds and say, that’s one that maybe the vets need to look at. That’s one that the vets need to look at. And so those are all the things that are incorporated in that, that, and there are also, there are also things that can be human health concerns that birds can carry. And so assuring that you know, that the, that it’s a population of healthy birds that, you know, that doesn’t, that doesn’t present any other issues, is an important part of that.

I’m off my place. Do veterinary schools give enough exposure to zoos or aquariums and aquarium medicine?

Zoo and aquarium medicine?

I th I think I would say a, across the board, if you look at veterinary schools across the board, I, I think the answer is yes. Obviously they have different, they have different levels of expertise and you know, the number of staff that are devoted to zoo and wildlife varies from one college to another. But I think the fact that there is a, a board certification through the American College of Zoological Medicine, that I think that board certification sort of elevated the field from an academic standpoint, that it became something that, that needed to be represented at every institution. The other thing that’s a little bit different, it’s a lot different than when I was in school, is there were, I think 14 vet schools in the country when, when I applied, and there was one that I could apply to, and that was the one in my state of Missouri. And I was lucky to have one in my state, but because the majority of their funds came from the state, somebody from Minnesota couldn’t, you know, if they came and say, I, I’m resident of Minnesota, I’d like to apply to vet school, I go back to Minnesota, we’re not gonna take you. You’re not a Missouri resident. And, and that’s changed. So we have lots of students that we have counseled folks that do preceptorships here, externship, you know, where they spend a couple of months with us and or, or we have students pre-vet students that we talk to.

And a pre-vet student may get accepted to multiple veterinary colleges and they ask, you know, which is the, which is the best one to go to?

And so, so they have, they have some freedom to not just go to one place. They might go to some place that has, you know, a stronger program in zoo or wildlife. So, you know, I think for those reasons, particularly the fact that, you know, there is that academic certification that, that colleges really need to provide, you know, a basic level of information on zoo and wildlife medicine and make that available to students. Not, not everybody’s gonna get to be a zoo vet, but they will learn a bit about what it’s about.

You think there’s a, a different psyche of people who say they want to be zoo vets rather than companion animal vets?

I, I’m tempted to say the gluttons for punishment, but no, I think it, it, it comes, it comes down to your experience. You know, I think it’s what has, you know, if, if part of what has, if part of what has encouraged you to be a veterinarian is experience, particularly to zoo animals or wildlife, I think that can, you know, lead folks into the field. In, in my, in my case, I was, you know, I, I wasn’t one of those people that said, you know, from when I was eight years old, I wanted to be a zoo veterinarian. ’cause I heard about what zoo veterinarians did and, and thought that’s what I wanted to do. I I got interested in the field of medicine, volunteering at a hospital with some friends when I was in high school. And, and we had always had animals. My brothers brought wildlife home and we had, you know, raise the robin and the snake and the squirrel and all, all that sort of thing. So I, I had an interest in animals and the interest in medicine.

And I also thought, you know, if I was, if I was interested in being a physician, I, I’m not, I’m not bright enough to get through med school ’cause that’s gotta be way harder. So I went the, the vet school route and I had no idea that because they’re a lot fewer of them, that veterinary schools could be a lot more rigorous in terms of their application process. And I’ve met a number of physicians over time that wanted to go to vet school and weren’t successful getting in and went to med school instead.

So what did I know?

I, I just as, I just assumed I wasn’t smart enough to be a physician and, and went the root with medicine and my love of animals. So Are there programs you would’ve have implemented during your tenure that did not happen?

The, the one that comes to mind back before, back before a lot of emerging diseases have happened before sars, before COVID, before bird flu was a big deal. We, we tried to develop a partnership among Brookfield Zoo, university of Illinois and Loyola, looking at what we call conservation medicine. So it was the, the junction of human health, animal health and environmental health. And, you know, so we, we got some startup funding from the three institutions started that off. We did some cool stuff, we funded some research. It helped fund some of Dr. L’s study and her residency. But it, we never could really get it off the ground altogether because it seemed like, especially in a zoo setting, a veterinarian, working in a zoo setting has an idea of the challenges that wildlife have and the integration of animal health and environmental health as well as human impact and issues with zoonotic disease.

Physicians are trained to look at one species and everything is about that relationship. And so it was challenging to, to really get the, you know, it seemed like the physicians were, okay, that’s all good. How does it impact people? That’s really interesting.

How does it impact people? What does it do to humans?

And it, it could be challenging for some to, to look at kind of the broader integration of all three of those different aspects. And so it, it never quite got off the ground. But now, 25 years later, something like that, there’s a group of medical students at Loyola that are definitely interested in this. And next Wednesday I am gonna be giving the first presentation to this student interest group. And it’s a, it’s a whole group of med students that want to know about the relationship between environmental health, human health, and animal health. And so, you know, maybe as a chance to do something like that in a completely different way and, and not recruit folks that have been taught a certain way, but actually get involved while they’re still students. So, we’ll, we’ll see what happens to it.

Are there any zoos in the world that you particularly admire?

Why and, and why?

I I think some of the places I, I guess perhaps it, not so much admire, but I, I envy places like the San Diego Zoo or the Living Desert as places that, I mean, San Diego, you can plant environments, naturalistic settings, and it grows and it grows year round and you don’t have to worry about it freezing in the winter. And the living desert is a, a challenging biome, but for what they’re presenting, it’s spectacular. It’s just a seamless blend from what is in the animal habitats and, and what’s in the, the surrounding landscape. So, you know, I think those are, you know, when you, when you have to deal with being an inside zoo and protecting your animals from, from conditions that they might not see in nature, like snow around gorillas or other things. So, so yeah, I, I think I’m, like I say, I’m, I’m envious of some of the places that can do such a spectacular job integrating habitats into a wide open space. But I can’t, I can’t think of, of other ones that just, you know, there are a lot of zoos that have done some spectacular work. You know, the ones that come to mind at WCS, the Bronx Zoo, San Diego Zoo, the Safari Park, you know, they’re, they’re just very impressive programs and facilities.

What issues would you like to see national or International Zoo Aquarium Association such as A-Z-A-Z-A-A waza be addressing now?

I, I think the, the big thing is whether, whether it’s with individual examples or just sort of on a global level to, to be more active and inspiring people to both, to change attitudes as well as inspire action on critical conservation issues. One that comes to mind is the 96 Elephants program outta WCS, where they’re talking about, you know, this is the, and this is one that was from a few years back, where they’re talking about, this is the number of elephants that are killed in a day and, and trying to present some challenging concepts about the natural world and, and trying to recruit their audience to, to help change things. And you know, you, you do it, you do it regionally, you do it nationally, you do it internationally, but trying to reach folks that can, that can vote a particular way, you know, or support support issues, support, support, national park, support natural areas, they, they did a Cook County recently had a referendum to help support the forest preserves as well as Brookfield Zoo and, and the Chicago Botanic Garden. And, and it was a program aimed at, so we were actually asking people for property tax money, which in today’s current environment seemed like a really tough ask, but we talked about the impacts, the environmental impacts that we could have or inspire in talking about clean air and clean water. And, and it passed overwhelmingly, I mean, there was a huge amount of public interest in supporting those things that we support in terms of protecting natural environments.

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

I think the advice, we’ve, we’ve talked a little bit about, you know, how we make decisions and collaborations and all that stuff. But there are times when you, you wish to take a particular course and the curator or another animal manager want to do something else. And you know, you, you wind up jockeying for position or lobbying or talking to the supervisor. And the, the advice that I got from my mentor and my residency Bill Beaver, was that you’re in it, you’re in it for the long haul. And, and, and if you want to do this particular thing with bird management and, and you pull out all the stops and you know, you do whatever it takes to, to win the day on your particular argument. He said, you can, you can win the battle and lose the war. And, and what he was trying to say was, you at, at the end of the day, you need to get along with these people over the long haul. And so you need to, you need to collaborate rather than trying to get your way.

And, and that’s something that I’ve taken with me.

How do you feel zoos need to attack the problem of surplus animals?

Animals?

That’s a, that’s a challenging one because I think, you know, I heard presentations at the recent a ZA meeting talking about one of the, one of the big ways that we dealt with surplus animals over the last half of my career was not creating surplus animals. We, we had, there was lots of work done on contraceptives and, you know, we had animals reproduce only under certain circumstances and only particular animals. And the problem was animal reproductive systems are, aren’t generally designed that way, you know, and, and particularly some of the big mega vertebrates, if if they go their first, you know, if they go for half of their lifespan, if a female goes for half her lifespan without having any offspring, they can develop pathologies of the reproductive tract and other things that make it impossible, make them infertile. And so, you know, there’s, there’s a push for having animals breed as early as they can and, you know, maintaining your, an animal’s ability to reproduce and then, and so, and so that’s the direction coming from population managers looking for sustainability. And then on the other hand, there are folks that are, that are saying what we really need to do is kind of go back to where I started in the business, working at a children’s zoo in the 1970s and trying to develop attachments like personal attachments and connecting people with individual animals. And those two things very much are at cross purposes. And I don’t, I I think that’s one of our bigger challenges going forward. And I don’t know the solution to it other than, other than, you know, perhaps spreading that wealth around among zoos if they’re, you know, an animal that may be surplus to our needs may not be the same for a smaller institution that doesn’t have the ability to be breed, that particular animal.

Does euthanizing of endangered species, surplus genetic issues, et cetera, still pose a political problem for zoo and aquariums?

I, I think it does for that same reason. And euthanasia is not something that, I mean, there are different, what you’re talking about, I think particularly is management euthanasia as opposed to euthanizing animals that are having a severely declining quality of life. That’s, I I think it’s something that may have to occur in certain circumstances, but, but I think part of our job is really managing to, to minimize that and try to come up with alternate solutions as an example there. And I, I don’t know, you know, what all the things that were that, that have been tried with gorillas in terms of managing the fact that a normal, a normal population of gorillas, a a harem, maybe one silverback, a number of females in her offspring, half of which are females. And as the youngsters are born 50 50 male and female, there’s a surplus male problem. I, I think in European zoos, they’ve used castration or other things to try and deal with the surplus males we elected in the US within the gorilla SSP to put together groups, put, put together troops of all males. And that was a pretty radical idea when that was first pitched in the mid eighties. But I think coming up with solutions like that, that, that don’t make an animal a surplus just because it’s a male and it’s perhaps not destined to be a silverback of a troop.

Given your experience, what is your view regarding zoo’s, maintaining elephants, and how should it be done correctly?

I, I think the, the trend, and I, I think the trend and, and I think this is a good one, is going for much bigger exhibits, larger group sizes, larger social groups and mixed species exhibits. So I, I think those are, you know, the days of the days of having, you know, one or two animals and having them in relatively small environments I think is different. But elephant management has changed a whole bunch. When I started my residency, we were still doing elephant shows, you know, with elephants playing baseball and all that sort of stuff at the St. Louis Zoo back in the day. So, so yeah. And, and the another thing, you know, a huge change in elephant managements in a ZA zoos is going from free contact to protected contact. I mean, when my, when my older daughter was 10, I’ve got pictures of her doing free contact, footwork, you know, hosing, elephants, and, you know, and now elephant keepers don’t do free contact work with elephants in a ZA zoos. So, Well, when you speak about elephants or exhibits, when a zoo spends multimillions of dollars on a gorilla or elephant or tiger exhibit, and critics ask why this money is not used to help animals in the wild, you say, I, I think, I think our, our job is to, is a couple of different things. It, we need to, we need to connect people to those animals.

The minority of folks are ever going to be lucky enough to do what we have and go out and see elephants in the wild. They’re going to, they’re gonna learn firsthand about elephants by seeing them face to face. And, and I think we, we have a responsibility to make that connection and use that connection so that people can learn about those animals in nature. And, and I think the, it it, to me, it’s money well spent spending it on zoos in addition to spending money in the wild. Because I think the thing that, the thing that has the impact at the end of the day is having people support animals in nature because it, it really is the friction between human land use, human human populations and, and human changes, anthropogenic changes in the environment that really threaten most animals in nature. And so the only way to change that is to change, is to impact public opinion, whether it’s, whether it’s inspiring somebody to donate to different causes or inspiring people to, to lobby for or against a particular issue to support animal welfare in the wild. And I think that’s, i I I think it’s our job to make the money that we spend on the gorilla habitat or the elephant habitat or the zebra habitat, pay dividends for those animals in the wild because of our ability to reach literally millions of people and have them affect them in a way that gives them a concern about nature, such that they’ll donate or act or vote in a way that supports those populations.

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

What direction will help them stay relevant?

I, I think the thing that helps them stay relevant is what I’ve talked about connecting, you know, using the zoo as a tool, as an inspiration to connect people with nature and, and to go from the zoo to your backyard, to your forest preserves to your, you know, to public lands out west.

You know, should we, there’s a huge chunks of Wyoming and Montana that are just sitting there, you know, can’t we build hotels or run cattle on them or do whatever else?

Getting people to, to understand what nature needs to succeed and, and inspire them to, you know, to, to value nature and natural places.

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

Why?

I think so. I, everybody, everybody needs to make career choices with their eyes open. And I think we’re, you know, whether you’re looking at zoo veterinary career or zoo career, or a career in wildlife, I, I think those are, those are all things where there are, you know, there’s, there’s a need out there and you just need to go into it with your eyes open. Drilling down to specifically being a zoo veterinarian, it’s demonstrably not the most lucrative veterinary career, but it’s very rewarding. And salaries are increasing. I think institutions value veterinary medicine and value the training. So it’s for me, and I think it continues to be a good way to make a living, but you need to go into it with your eyes open. I, I had a, that student that I was introduced to, he introduced himself to me when he was one of our, in one of our education programs when he was a high school student. And I’ve followed his career a few months ago.

I was just at his wedding, he works in a private practice in a aquarium out out east. And I remember, you know, he came to me at the stage when he’d been accepted to three different veterinary schools and, and I, and he said, which one, you know, who has the best programs and all of that. And I said, look, five years out of vet school, nobody’s gonna care when you, which of these three institutions that you went to. But if you go to Illinois in-state, tuition is x outstate tuition is this. And so if you try and, you know, if you, if you’re trying to get this specific thing and pay this premium price for it, intuition, eight, 10 years from now, you’re gonna have to make a decision, a career decision based on finances, not what, what you want to do. And so we went to Illinois, graduated from Illinois, and has gotten into the field that he wanted to get into. And his graduation, I met his mother and she gave me a big hug for recommending in-State versus out-state tuition. So, but, but so the moral of the story is yes, it’s something that I would recommend.

It’s been an extremely rewarding career and you counsel people about pluses and minuses and choices. So, okay.

Do you think we need, or do we have any charismatic and committed heroes to help what you talked about shift public opinion for conservation such as Jacques Gusto win, Jane, Jane goodall?

It, it’s tough because things are so diffused nowadays. You know, when you think about, in a time when there were three networks, when an article in Life magazine could literally have a, a national, a nationwide impact with media and messaging, so diffuse it. It’s hard to, to have somebody rise, you know, rise above the rest of the landscape, the way some of those examples are. Marlon Perkins folks like that did. But I, I can’t, I, I think what’s, what’s different now is you don’t necessarily need a, an individual spokesperson to expose folks to such a variety of messages about nature, natural systems, zoos, you know, so, so I don’t, like I say, nothing pops to mind and I’m probably not the most modern media savvy person in the world, but I, I don’t know that there are stars of that caliber, but I think there are so many different messages out there that kids today or the public today are exposed to a lot more opportunities to learn about nature.

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

Will they survey survive the length of time municipal zoos have?

What do the pluses and minuses have?

Yeah, I think that the big challenge is, you know, succession planning. You know, if an individual, you know, an individual can have an infinite amount of money, and, and if there aren’t, if he or she doesn’t build a group around them that have a similar passion that are gonna wind up being responsible for or inheriting their money, it could all just go away. And, and I’ve seen that there was a fellow that started a, a big, very forward thinking ranch out in Colorado, and we exchanged animals with him when I was doing my residency. And he had some spectacular ideas, some really forward thinking management techniques. And I think that whole, you know, when he died, that whole thing just sort of evaporated. So it, it really depends. A a you know, there isn’t, there isn’t anybody alive today that was around when Brookfield Zoo started. So there has to be, you know, if it, if it’s dependent, well, I, I guess to survive the length of time that a municipal zoo needs to survive, it can’t depend on one person.

’cause we’re all going away at some point. And so, you know, it, the key to it really is there has to be succession planning.

To what part, are you still active in the field?

I have, you know, sort of in the last half of my career I got involved with a ZA accreditation in a much deeper manner. I had always done a ZA accreditation inspections, but in 2000 I got asked to be on the commission. And so I did a six year stint, was off for a while, and then did another one starting in 2010. And that’s been, that’s been a focus that, you know, has been really important in this part of my career. And so I still go out and do a ZA inspections and it’s a great way to, to keep up with what’s going on. You, you’re obviously required to attend meetings and stay current on what’s going on in the field and, and you get to get out there and see other people and other ideas. I, I’m also involved in the Gorilla Species Survival Program as a, as a veterinary advisor and, you know, various other groups. I’m past president of A A ZV, so I kinda keep up with the folks in that field.

And now I’m, I, I mentioned this collaboration with Loyola. I’m, I’m getting excited to speak about my field and my career and what I’ve learned with a whole bunch of eager, enthusiastic medical students that are considerably younger than my children. So it just, it’s interesting.

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

Yeah, I, I, I think obviously I have a good understanding of what a zoo veterinarian does and all of the different aspects of the, the things that go into that. And the thing that has interested me most about zoo medicine is I never had any experience or anything that I learned that I wasn’t able to put into use that one place or another across the, you know, diversity of managing animal health, looking at environment lighting, water filtration, all kinds of things that, you know, an an interest in mechanical things that, you know, have, you know, that I’ve been able to, to use at, at one point in time. So I, I guess what I’ve learned about zoo medicine is that it’s, it’s rewarding because of its breadth. And I, you know, another aspect might be another aspect of veterinary medicine might be just as broad if I devoted my entire career to it. But I, I think this one’s more that way than most others.

You know, in terms of all the, of the variety of experience and expertise that you need, How would you like to be remembered your legacy?

I guess I’d like to be remembered for some of these programs that we’ve created. You know, I talked about the Zoo pathology program. I’m not involved with that directly at all, but it’s one that is gonna succeed for many years to come and generate a tremendous amount of knowledge for the field. And, you know, it’s, it’s nice to have been part of that, or all the things that some of the other folks that I’ve mentored, you know, all of their accomplishments, you know, it, it’s, it’s like having kids, it’s like having grandkids. They’re doing things beyond what you ever thought of. And, and you have that kind of pride in, you know, helping to guide them early on.