William “Bill” Boever D.V.M.

I’m Bill Boever, or William Joseph Boever, born in St. Louis, December 27th, 1944.

And what was your childhood like growing up?

Well, I grew up in South St. Louis, was a middle class family, probably lower middle class, in terms of wealth or whatever. But very close community, very much involved in the church and school, Catholic community. There was, almost all the people on the block were Catholic. We lived, maybe a half a block away from the church and school. So growing up was with a lot of others there, and it was, part of growing up was the priests of the parish. And so that’s why when it came to what was I gonna do, I thought, “Well, that would be interesting to be a Catholic priest.” And so when it came to high school, I went to the seminary, and I was in four years of high school and two years of college, and great guys there. I mean, I’m still friends with the people that I went to school with, they’re very intelligent. I mean, it was difficult, had to study all the time, but that was where I grew up.

What did your parents do?

My father was a painter, he worked for Monsanto Chemical Company, painted buildings and pipes and so forth in the chemical plant, and my mother was a homemaker. And you mentioned the zoo.

I mean, you mentioned that you were gonna go to the seminary, but what are your earliest memories of zoos?

We always went to the zoo, St. Louis Zoo, at least twice a year. My parents didn’t even own a car. We would get on the bus and ride to the zoo. At that time, the zoo’s in Forest Park. We would get off the bus with our jug of Kool-Aid and our picnic basket and find a picnic table in the middle of the park, and set it up there. And we would leave it sit there, and we’d go into the zoo. Come out at lunchtime to have our snack, and then leave it all on the table, and go back in the zoo for the afternoon, and then get on the bus and go home.

And were there any animals that you were drawn to that were favorites of yours, as you recollect, or just, it was an enjoyable day?

Well, we tried to see everything there was to see. There was not necessarily one that was more attractive to me than the others. At that time, the zoo had a three animal shows. We had a chimpanzee show, an elephant show, and a lion or big cat show. And so we made sure we saw all the shows, and we went to all the buildings. Primarily at that time, there was a reptile house. There was a primate house, a monkey house, and bird house, and then the outside antelope yards.

Do you think going to the zoo as you did, drew you to what you have spent your life doing?

Or how did that switch from being and wanting to go into the seminary, when did that take second to something else that you were thinking about?

I always enjoyed the zoo, but it was not something that I thought of as a profession, I guess at that time. I always enjoyed animals. You know, I would collect turtles or various reptiles that we could catch at the park. Had a little squirrel for a while, whatever, but that was the extent of it.

So when did you first start to think about working as a, not necessarily at the zoo, but working as a veterinarian and going to school to do that as opposed to becoming a priest or going to the seminary?

Well, once I left the seminary, when I decided I didn’t want to do that, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I went to the University of Missouri, and I moved around a little bit. I was interested in forestry, I was interested in conservation, I was interested in wildlife. Veterinary medicine was not on the horizon. I didn’t know any veterinarians. I thought of a veterinarian as somebody that grew up on a farm and was familiar more with the farm animals. And while I was at the university, I met a number of other veterinary students, and realized that a lot of the veterinary students didn’t grow up on a farm. They grew up in, you know, a more metropolitan area.

And so I got more interested and applied. I didn’t have all the credits that I needed right away. But after I got my degree, and continued studying at the university, I eventually got into veterinary school. But even when I was in, I wasn’t looking at zoo medicine. I was just open to any avenues that were available.

So you just, you thought being a veterinarian would be, it just appealed to you, it was fun, or you could help?

I mean- and I liked working with them. I probably, I really got interested in farm animals more so when I was in veterinary school. And so I had previous, in high school and early part of college, I worked at Monsanto Chemical Company as a chemical operator during the summertime, ’cause I had to earn my own way to school. And so once I was in veterinary school, after a few years, I said, “Well, I better get a job working with animals somewhere during the summertime.” And so between my second and third year of veterinary school, I started looking around. Well, I gotta work for some veterinarian someplace, and there weren’t any jobs available. I kept looking and looking and nobody had anything. And so I thought, “Well, I’ll try the zoo.” And I went, and at that time, met a veterinarian who was there. He wasn’t the zoo’s veterinarian, but he was doing work for Washington University at the time, Dr. Joel Wallach.

And he was there during the summer and he said, “Oh, we’ve got this program that we can get you on this grant for the summer.” And so that was my first introduction to zoos, and even thinking of zoos as a potential career.

So Dr. Wallach interviewed you for the summer job?

He interviewed me, but it was a pretty much, “Oh my gosh, we’ve got somebody who’s interested, and let’s get him in here.” And so his position was not treating the animals at the zoo. It was a, he was under a research grant that paid him to do pathology on the animals that died at the zoo. And he was looking for actually any animal that might have something that could be used as a comparative pathology to human medicine, of how this animal, any animals could be potential research animals for human medicine. So you were gonna work for him, or- I was working under that grant, doing different things that, assisting with the necropsies or autopsies on the animals here.

Now, at the time, there was a veterinarian at the zoo, aside from Dr. Wallach?

The zoo did not have a full-time veterinarian. The zoo had a part-time veterinarian, Dr. Alfred Mohler, who I never saw, because he never came out to the zoo. It was interesting, the zoo had a contract with him, but he was never there the whole summer. They just didn’t have very much veterinary care at that point, it seemed like. They would occasionally, if they had something, Joel, Dr. Wallach, would make a mention, “Well, we might be able to do this.” So he would give them suggestions as what to do, but that was about it. So this is, now you’re going to the University of Missouri- Correct.

That’s around 1968?

I was in a veterinary school from ’66 to ’70. I got my doctorate in 1970.

And what did Dr. Barry Commoner have to do?

Did he have anything to do with- Dr. Barry Commoner was the professor that actually got the huge grant, a comparative medicine grant. He was with Washington University, and Dr. Wallach was hired as part of that grant, and my summer, I got paid by that grant.

Now you, that was a summer job?

Yes. And then you went back again as soon as- Went back to veterinary school.

Why did you go back again?

What, oh you mean, why did I go back to the zoo?

Well it was a summer job, and I was assisting with the pathology essentially. Under the same grant. The first summer, between second and third year of veterinary school, but then I went back to veterinary school for that, in the fall. And then I had the summer off between third and fourth year, but I wanted to get more practical experience of really treating animals, not just dissecting animals after they’d, you know, passed away. So I got a job that summer working at the Humane Society. Humane Society of Missouri is a big operation in St. Louis, with the 10 or 12 veterinarians that do surgery, treat animals, they have a regular clinic there. And I got very good practical experience of treating animals and doing surgery there. But Joel Wallach had left the St. Louis Zoo, so he was no longer there, and had actually gone to the Brookfield Zoo as an assistant director.

And that meant there was no veterinarian there. Dr. Alfred Mohler was probably still on call, but wasn’t going out to the zoo. So I went to the zoo and I said, “Look, I can get off three afternoons a week and come over, and at least continue doing pathology for you.” And so I did do that.

Who were you talking to?

Who was the, were you talking to the director- Bill Hoff was the director at the time. Actually, Marlin Perkins was the director, but Bill Hoff was the assistant director. And Marlin Perkins was the director, but he was also doing a lot of filming for “Wild Kingdom”, so Bill Hoff kind of was the one that I talked to about doing that.

So did you have, just ’cause you mentioned Marlin, did you ever have the opportunity to meet Marlin?

Did he come out to the base- Oh sure, no, no Marlin was a very, very, a very gentle person. I always enjoyed visiting with him, very humble person. So okay, so now you’re saying, “I can help you couple days a week doing pathology,” and you’re saying this to Bill Hoff.

After that summer doing this, and then you graduate, right?

Were you thinking, “Hey, I wanna work in a zoo,” or were you just trying to get a job somewhere?

No, no, at that point, after being there for those two summers, you know, it kinda got in my blood, I guess. It was like, “Wow, this is really interesting.” You know, it was challenging, it was fun. It was something that, “Yeah, I could do this,” I thought. And so I talked, I said I would be interested, and so Bill Hoff offered me the job. This was before I graduated, you know. He said, “Yeah, we can hire you as our full-time zoo veterinarian.” And then I got to thinking, “Well, you know, I’m just not even outta school yet and they’re offering me the job. There must be something that, you know, this is just unheard of today,” that never happened. I said, “There must be something wrong with this job.

I better check this all out.” So I talked to some other individuals who, you know, in the community, I said, “Well, why aren’t they offering this to somebody with a lot more experience and everything?” And they said, “Well you know, veterinary medicine in zoos, there just weren’t very many zoo veterinarians, and they don’t know a whole lot about it.” At that point, they didn’t have a lot of the anesthetics that today we have, and so, veterinary medicine in the zoo just was at its infancy, you know, it was just starting. You were kind of at the ground level there when you first started.

And that was 1970?

is when I started full time at the zoo.

And do you remember your first day in the job?

(laughing) I always remember the first day, because the Kodiak bears had got into a big fight, and one of them was bleeding and had a huge laceration on its foot, you know. And so that was my first big deal of treating any animals at the zoo. And so you know, in veterinary school they don’t teach you a whole lot about zoo animals, and they don’t teach you anything about using a capture gun. And so I went out behind the hospital and used the capture gun, to make sure I could hit the target, shot at a target for a little while, ’cause I was gonna have to dart the bear, and we got the bear in the back. We always bring the animals out of the exhibit into the back area, to be able to treat it. And of course, since I was new there, the keepers were there who normally take care of them, the curators and even the director came down. Everybody wanted to see how their new veterinarian was going to be on the job, I guess. They were very helpful.

You know, at that time we were using a product called M99 or etorphine to immobilize animals. That was relatively new at the time. It had been used, and used on bears. And so we loaded up the darts with the capture gun, and they were again, very helpful, showing me how to load the darts, and what. And the darts of course come in various sizes. You’d guess about the animal’s weight, and dose of how much you should use on it, and put it in the dart. It goes into the dart, you put a needle on the front, that can be various sizes. Some of them have barbs on them, some of them are just, are straight.

Then you have the plunger behind it and the charge and the tail piece, and all that goes into the gun, and then you dart the animal. Well, I loaded it up, of a dose that we thought oughta work on it, and I used a one-inch needle on it. It had a barb on it. I was able to shoot the bear, hit the bear where I wanted it to, and I know it hit the bear ’cause the dart was still sticking in there. I assumed that the charge went off. However, the bear didn’t get immobilized, he was still walking around. 10 minutes go by, 20 minutes go by, by this time the bear should start seeing some of the effects, but it wasn’t seeing anything. So everybody’s trying to offer advice.

So we loaded up another dart, figured, well maybe it hit him, but maybe it didn’t go off, maybe it didn’t fire. And so this time loaded up a two-inch needle on the end, and again, another dose of the M99 and hit the bear, then again a second time. Oh, within about eight, 10 minutes I guess, the bear goes down, becomes immobilized. And so we can get in there, clean up the wound. I mean it was a, you know, gosh, the whole bottom of the foot was covered with this laceration. Had to be a couple inches deep and bleeding, and got it all closed and sutured up. After we were finished doing that, it cleaned up, looked pretty good, started putting the bandage on there. And you know, because in veterinary school we’re learning, well, you gotta keep that wound clean, and so that’s the only way.

And and of course they, the keepers and so forth were offering me advice and said, “You know, there’s no use putting a bandage on there. He’s gonna tear that off immediately.” Well, I guess I was a little stubborn and I continued to put more gauze and tape on there. Continue, well they just, “You’re wasting your time putting that on there.” And the more they insisted about not doing it, the more bandage, I guess I wrapped on there. So by the time we were finished, we had a good-size bandage on there. Well, after we were done with all that, and I was satisfied that it was clean, had everybody get out of the enclosure. An M99 has a specific antagonist, that you give it intravenously and it reverses the M99 and the bear wakes up, so at least I was hoping it was gonna wake up. And we all got out, I gave it intravenously and got outta there, and the bear kinda got up and walked around a little bit, was still pretty groggy, and moved around. But he was up and moving.

Well, five days later that bandage was still on the bear. They couldn’t believe it, they couldn’t understand why. You know, “Nobody is able to put a bandage on a bear that stays that long.” Well, I didn’t know what happened at the time, but what actually happened, bears have a heavy hair coat, a thick, heavy fat layer. Well, any medication that goes into the fat layer is released very slowly into the system. The first dart that I used was a sharp needle, and so that drug got into the bear, but it was in the fat layer. The second dart with the longer needle went into the muscle and actually immobilized the bear. However, that first one went in there and kept releasing in the fat layer for the next five days, and kept that bear kind of tranquilized a little bit for it, and so some things turn out fairly well. (chuckling) They still think I’m the best guy at putting bandages on an animal. Made your reputation.

Now you’d mentioned the director came down.

Who was that?

Bill Hoff was the director. He was the director. Marlin had retired and Bill Hoff was the director at the time.

Okay, what was the zoo like, that you started there in 1970?

What was the collection like, what type of zoo was it?

It was a zoo, what you would call a taxonomic collection. I mean, we had bears in one area. We had the big cats in another area. The hoofstock were all together, the birds were together. So it was based on taxonomy, but it was a well-rounded collection. We had, you know, a reptile collection, huge reptile house, and primate collection, small primates, great apes. It was a well-represented animal collection. The majority of the keepers were men.

There were only a few women keepers in the children’s area. And a lot of the keepers were old timers, men who’d been there, some of them for years, but really pretty good animal handlers. And it was, in the beginning, you know, I learned a lot from them, and that was my attitude. “I need to learn from them as much as they can learn from me.” And so, you know, when I worked the summers at Monsanto prior to that, at the chemical plant, I was working with a lot of older men at that time. And so I knew how to work fairly well with them, and so it was a good opportunity.

What was your biggest concern when you first started working at the zoo?

Well, it was challenging. I mean, it was difficult, because you didn’t learn about zoo medicine in vet school. I mean, you learned medicine, but you were applying things that you’d learned for domestic animals on different kinda animals, and they weren’t always the same. The anatomy wasn’t always the same. A lot of the physiology’s the same, but the immobilization and anesthesia and restraint were certainly completely different. So you know, when I first went to the zoo, when I took the job I thought, I was gonna make sure I gave a good shot at it. Because I had heard, and I’d seen actually, even with Dr. Wallach or whatever that you know, a lot of the zoo people, they don’t want some veterinarian coming in there and telling them what to do. They’ve been doing all this all their years, and they didn’t want a university educated person coming in and doing all this.

So I was a little skeptical, and was careful about how to deal with that. And like I said, I wanted to learn as much from them, but I thought, “I’m gonna stay at least two years. I’m gonna do, you know, give it a good shot, and see how it works out.” Well, 37 years later I was still there. (laughing) So when you first started, you were the first full-time veterinarian. First full-time veterinarian. And your responsibilities were narrow, or- Yes, it was strictly clinical care of the animals.

Whom did you work with?

Did you have a staff of people in your department who were helping you, or was it just you?

Well, I was the only veterinarian, but since Washington University, who had that grant, you mentioned Barry Commoner, that was still going on. They didn’t hire a veterinarian, but they still had a couple of staff people. There was two technicians that were, one was a histology technician, made the slides for pathology, because that was part of the job too, was also doing the pathology, the necropsies on all the animals, and so there was assistance there. But in terms of the animal division, you know, there were curators who, and keepers.

But from the veterinary standpoint, that division, department, it was you, and you did the pathology also?

Yes, yes, did all the the necropsies on animals. Yes, and made all the reports.

When you first started, were there issues that you were aware of that St. Louis Zoo was facing, or anything that was going on that the zoo was involved with, other than veterinary medicine that touched you, or you were aware of?

Well, I mean I was, as a new recent graduate veterinarian, I was still learning, you know, veterinary medicine. And one other thing that I did continue to do, one thing that I worked out with the director was, I said, “Look, I’m here all, you know, every day, and then I’m available on Saturdays and Sundays,” ’cause I was off on those days. But in veterinary school, you learn the techniques, but your surgery skills are not up to par just yet. You know, you’ve done surgery in class, but to be a good surgeon, you have to have a lot of experience, I think. And I had started doing that at the Humane Society, and they do a lot of surgeries every day. Not only, you know, spays and neuters, but they also had a lot of other types of surgeries there, a lot of orthopedic work, and everything that was done. And I said, “Look, I can go over at least one afternoon a week and hone my sur surgery skills there, and that will be helpful for me, but also helpful for the zoo when surgery has to be done.” And so I continued to do that, and really, I thought, developed my surgical skills over there.

You were on call?

As a veterinarian?

Did they call you at late at night, the zoo?

Did people work at the zoo at night to- Very seldom was there any calls at night, because the keepers weren’t there at nighttime. There were night security, but their responsibilities were not really so much animal care. But, so seldom did I get calls at night, but always on the weekends, there would be something.

Did you start to develop a philosophy of working with the curators and the keepers?

You indicated, you know, sometimes they don’t like the university guy coming in, telling them what to do, but you had a job to do.

Did you start to develop a philosophy about working with all these different groups who you had to depend upon?

Well, I had to depend upon them. Certainly they’re the ones who, you know, are with the animals all day, and they know if their animal isn’t acting properly. And so I, like I said, I tried to learn a lot from them, but I also tried to help them. And you know, if I was doing a necropsy on an animal, I brought the keeper up and I said, “Look, you know, okay here, and this is,” you know, just going through some of the anatomy with them even. You know, and you open up and you see the lungs, and the lungs are all deteriorated, well you know hat that animal must have shown, seen some signs before that.

And talk to the keeper, “Well, was he having difficulty breathing?

You know, did he have any discharge coming out of his nostrils,” or what have you. And so I think that the keepers enjoyed learning more about the animals as well. And I think as a result of that, it did help have a good relationship between the keepers and myself, and they would see things early on that they would not have seen otherwise.

Was that same philosophy of working with the curatorial staff?

Yes, yeah curatorial staff, same way, because they, you know at that time there was a number of young curators, zoologists, different titles to it. But Charlie Hoessle was a curator in charge of all the reptiles, also he oversaw the education department, but he was curator of herps. Bob Frou was curator of mammals and did all hoofstock, but also primates and elephants and so on. And actually a guy named Mike Flieg was curator of birds at the time.

Were there other, among the zookeepers that you learned from, were there any people that you would call characters?

(laughing) Well I don’t know about the curators as much, but you know, the zoo still had three animal shows at the time. And so there was the trainers who did the animal shows. Now at that point, one of the trainers who did the big cats, his name was Jules Jacot, and by that time Jules was getting up in years. And I don’t know that he was absent-minded, but you don’t want somebody who’s taking care of big cats to forget things and forget locks, or whatever. But Jules was a tough old bird that, he was a character. We had a guy who did the chimpanzee shows, and they were all interesting individuals to work with, very knowledgeable of animal behavior to be able to be as good of trainers as they were. But so yeah, there were some interesting individuals.

What experiences might you have had in those formative years that may have changed your notion, if you had one, of what a zoo should be like?

Well, I think at that time zoos were primarily places where people came to be entertained, to have a good time. I don’t think at that point conservation was a high priority for most zoos.

Working with the curators and keepers, it was, you know, what’s best for the animals, how do we take care of them Well, and in some cases, how are we able to reproduce them?

And as you’re doing this job as a veterinarian, did you think you wanted to do more than that, or were you thinking, “I want to be a veterinarian here,” and maybe now you’re thinking, at what time did you think, “I think I wanna stick around here”?

As a veterinarian, and as a veterinarian in really the pioneer days of veterinary medicine in zoos, it was a huge opportunity to learn more. And so besides just treating the animals, and you know, for their medical care, I thought there was a big opportunity for, I don’t know whether you wanna call it research, but certainly learning more about the animals. And so I got really more involved with veterinarians from other, there were very few of us who were full-time veterinarians for zoos.

And it was a group that if you had cases, “Well, how do you take care of this?

How do you take care of that?” And so we communicated a lot, and so I got involved probably a little bit more in some case studies, and publishing some of the events, some of the cases that I saw. And so I got more involved in research activities, and learning more about the animals that we had there. Tell me about the people. You mentioned the zoo veterinarian community was rather small.

Who were some of the people and zoos who had the full-time vets that you were working with?

Well, Chuck Sedgwick was at San Diego Zoo. Earl Schobert was not full-time, but he did Busch Gardens in Florida. The other ones that were, I talked with Paul Chaffee out in California, Gordy Hubble down in Florida. There was a couple of part-time ones. Bud Herzog was part-time veterinarian at the Kansas City Zoo, and fairly close by. Jerry Thiebald was part-time veterinarian at Cincinnati Zoo. Those were ones that I would meet with. And then I always, I got involved in the Zoo Veterinary Medical Association, which was really just at its infancy then.

So how did you communicate these different cases with these veterinarians?

Well, if they were extremely well worked up, I could go, you know, publish them in various journals, referee journals. You know it was interesting, because as you know, university professors and so forth, they talk about publishing all the time, or trying to publish and how difficult it is. It wasn’t that difficult for me, because there was so many new things coming that nobody had ever seen before, or if they had seen them, they hadn’t written about it or published anything about it. So I had the opportunity to publish numerous articles every year in referee journals, which just isn’t heard of very often.

What prompted you, if there was anything, to feel that it was important for you to publish, and tell people about what you’d seen?

I guess I just thought it was part of the duty to share that knowledge and to do it in, you know, a professional manner. Every time I did I, you know, took that opportunity. I also did, you know in the beginning, offered an opportunity for veterinary students who wanted to learn about zoo medicine, almost you know, after being there a year or so, I allowed veterinary students to come and do a, whether you wanna call it a preceptorship or a short-term time with me to learn about it. And I always encouraged them to follow up on it, to keep, you know, information and publish it.

So you’re the veterinarian, and while you were the veterinarian, is that when you started the preceptor, the residency program?

Or was it when you got to the next level and became the senior veterinarian?

Did you start this program as you were the veterinarian at the zoo or after you moved up a little?

As I was the veterinarian at the zoo, I right away allowed veterinary students, I had them sign up, I only took one student at a time, and they were there for two months, and then another student. At that time, the university had started what they called the block system, where they did two months of surgery, then two months of small animal medicine, two months of theriogenology and so forth. So I kind of tied in with that at the university so they could come for two months and do it, and then another student for two months. And so I started taking mostly students from the University of Missouri at first. But as the times went on, they came from all over, the US mostly.

So this was your idea to start the program?

Yes. to the zoo director, and you had to sell it to the university. Well, I had to sell it to the zoo director because it allowed, but these students weren’t getting paid. They were coming to learn. And so in the beginning yes, I had to sell it to the zoo, to allow somebody else to come in that was gonna be following me around, so to speak. And, but you know, they were okay with that. And the university was fine because they didn’t have anybody else who could teach anything about zoo medicine, and so they were okay with it.

Do you think you did it because you never had the opportunity?

(laughing) Maybe, you know?

In a way I did have the opportunity though, because I did get there, it was under a different thing, and it wasn’t doing clinical medicine, it was doing pathology. But it gave me the opportunity, and so maybe that’s why I did it, I don’t know. I just thought it was an important thing to do.

When are you approached to get a different position than just veterinarian and why?

I mean, I don’t know that I was approached to do it. I guess as doing clinical medicine, I was always interested in why something works or doesn’t work I guess, and that’s research in a way. You know, you’re checking into it.

Well, what drugs are we using?

Because essentially as a zoo veterinarian back then, we were doing research. I mean, we were using drugs on animals that had, those drugs had never been used on a lot of those animals. We talk about M99, well the other anesthetic that was used a lot back then was sernaline, and then ketamine came on and well, it hadn’t been used on most zoo animals.

And so we had the opportunity, and you didn’t necessarily know, well, what dose do you use on an alligator?

What dose do you use on, you know, a lemur or whatever?

And trying to figure it out was sometimes a little difficult. But you became senior veterinarian and director of research.

That’s another position, or you just evolved into it?

I just evolved into that, because as we took veterinary students for two-month blocks along, then that evolved into setting up a residency program, which is for a veterinarian who has graduated from veterinary school already, and wants to devote his career to zoo medicine. So that’s something that we started in about 1974. So I was at the zoo for maybe four years by that time. And that I did have to sell to the director and to the university because that was a paid position. It was paid by the zoo to the university. The resident got paid by the university, got their paycheck there, but the zoo deposited that there. We set it up that way. It was the first residency that was zoo-based.

There was a veterinary residency prior to that at University of California, but that was university-based. This had the zoo there, and I wanted it to be part, really the university to be part of it, just like any other resident. If somebody’s doing a residency in ophthalmology or surgery or whatever from the university, they have certain requirements that they have to meet, and certain publishing requirements and so on, and I wanted our resident to do the same. So yeah, that was a bit of, by that time, a different director was there, Bob Briggs was the director. And Bob, when I talked to him about it, was excited to proceed with it. And he and I, and Charlie Hoessle at the time, went down to the university and talked to the dean, and see if we could get that going, and we did. And so we started the residency there.

And that was the first type of thing for the medical school?

First zoo residency for the veterinary school, and also of course, the first one that was zoo-based in the country.

So now you have a resident and yourself, so that made you the senior veterinarian?

Well, (laughing) I guess that would’ve, but essentially the other was a residency, and we went through two or three residents, and they came for two years and then they moved on. The first one went on to Minnesota Zoo, and then the next one went on to another, and then you know, to different zoos. And I mean, I think we trained them well, and then I kinda said, “Well, maybe we need a second veterinarian at the zoo, instead of just a resident.” And so we stopped, we used some of that funding to hire a second veterinarian, and didn’t have the residency program for a while, and then came back to doing that. So I guess that’s when I became senior veterinarian.

So was that again another sell, to say, “We need a full-time vet here”?

Yeah sure, yeah.

And who became the junior to your senior?

Who was the first veterinarian that you hired?

That was Eric Miller. Eric Miller had done a residency, and then was the junior veterinarian, I guess you would’ve call him then.

And you mentioned there was a new director at the time, William, Bill Bridges?

Bill Hoff was the director that I worked under first, and then Bob Briggs was director after Bill Hoff.

Now was Bob Briggs a zoo man?

No, Bob Briggs was, he was a PR guy. At that time, well step back a little bit as far as zoo history, the zoo was part of the city of St. Louis. The St. Louis Zoo has always been completely independent of politics. It’s run by the zoo board, but those board members were appointed by the mayor, so there was still some connection. But the zoo was supported by a mill tax, a property tax, from the city of St. Louis. At that time, back in the early 1970s, the city of St. Louis is surrounded by St. Louis County. It’s two separate entities. And the population was moving, like many metropolitan areas, from the city to the county, and a lot of the wealth was moving with that.

And so property taxes in the city and county were pretty much on an equal level. We had a board member who, actually we had a number of board members that got involved with this, to create what’s called the Zoo Museum District. And the zoo and the art museum, both institutions that are in Forest Park, were supported by a property tax on all the property in the city of St. Louis. Well, they wanted to create a Zoo Museum District to include a property tax not only in the city, but also in St. Louis County, which would if passed, would double the tax base for the zoo and the art museum. So, but there were three institutions, the zoo, the art museum, and the science center. The science center was located in the county, and so that’s why they called it the Zoo Museum District. And so in ’72 we were very active in trying to create this Zoo Museum District. We had a board member who was very high up in, you know, was connected to the Republican Party.

We had one that was connected to the Democratic Party. They worked together with the legislature, ’cause it had to be, this was something now that went to the state legislature to approve it, to create this, and then it had to go on the ballot in the city and the county to be voted on, to see if they would agree to be taxed, the county. Overwhelmingly it passed, and each one is separate. Both the zoo and the art museum and the science center all passed, and so that created this Zoo Museum District. Later on in history, the Botanical Garden and the History Museum also are part of that now. But in the beginning, that created the Zoo Museum District. And at that time there was a PR firm that was hired to do all of the maneuvering for a tax levy like that, and Bob Briggs was the guy that was from the PR firm. And so the zoo was so impressed with him, when Bill Hoff left, they hired Bob Briggs as the new director.

He had no animal experience whatsoever, but he was great at PR and a good manager. And he relied on Charlie Hoessle, who at that point had become general curator, was no longer just curator of reptiles, was general curator, and really has Charlie to run the animal portion of the zoo. He had somebody else who did finance and so on. So he was the director, but relied on the rest of us, and myself for veterinary and research aspects of the zoo.

Did the people at the zoo, the curatorial staff, the veterinary group, did they think, “Hmm, what’s gonna happen here, we don’t have a zoo person?” Or was there any pushback?

I think there might have been a little bit, but since they knew that Charlie was the person in charge of really running the animal portion of the zoo, Charlie didn’t have the title, but he was essentially assistant director. I mean, he was the one who called the shots. Bob Briggs did not try to interfere or manage anything as far as the animal collection was concerned. Charlie ran that.

Now that you’re the senior veterinarian, what was a typical day?

Were you still just treating the animals and, or you had help now. Well, we’re still treating the animals, still doing a lot of the clinical work, but also publishing and trying to do various research, and training I guess always, I was always training people. And you talked about the research initiatives that you’re now responsible for. A job they didn’t give you, but you kinda took it on.

Could you talk about some of those initiatives, like the tissue bank?

The tissue bank was something that actually had been started way back with Joel Wallach, and Barry Commoner, I guess. I mean that was part of the initial grant, which of course by this time had run out. But I felt it was a valuable thing to do, and we continued to do that. And we call it a tissue bank because what we would do, and we would save, when we were necropsing the animals, we would save various tissues, sections, you know, liver, kidneys, spleen, hypothalamus, whatever. And we would put these tissues, we saved them either fixed in formalin or frozen. And then we would put essentially a catalog together, and we would send that out to any researcher, and you know, was available to any university or any research institution. National Cancer Institute, all these places would get the catalog and say, “These tissues are available for free. All you have to do is pay for some of the shipment, and so forth.” We would be doing the collecting and the storing of them, and make them available.

And if you had particular requirements, if you wanted certain things to be saved, looking for answers for medical problems for people. You know, the National Cancer Institute utilized a lot of the tissues there, and we started saving. “Oh, how do you want it saved, what do you want?” Like I mentioned hypothalamus, ’cause that’s a little bit more difficult to be saving that from various species, than just taking a section of liver, kidneys or what have you. And so we would continue to save those tissues and make them available to the research communities.

You did some research also then in reproduction?

We did a lot of reproduction research. Initially, I think zoos are a little bit hesitant to say, “Well, we’re gonna do research on our animals.” I mean, that’s not kinda just accepted, and it’s like, “But well, wait a minute. We’re gonna do research on reproduction so, because there’s a lot of species that are not reproducing and why aren’t they, and what can we do to help that?” And so reproductive research and behavioral research are probably the two easiest things to introduce, you know, if you’re going to be doing any research at all. Or research on, you know, necropsy or pathology, that’s okay too. But, so reproductive research, and at that time we had, when I started doing a lot more of that, we had one of the curators at that point who had joined the staff, was Bruce Reed, and he was a graduate from the University of Missouri Ag School, and was very familiar with a reproductive physiologist at the university who used to come down. So primarily we did reproductive research in terms of a lot of semen collection, and that was probably the biggest thing, and working towards artificial insemination with mostly hoofed animals, but we did it with a lot of other species too.

So the zoo was looking for grants, getting grants, bringing people in, or it was in house?

A lot of it was in house. We would always, if there was grants available, we would work on those. But we didn’t have a whole lot of time to put granting applications together.

And one of your other research things was anesthetics?

What were you doing with that and why?

Well again, the big difference with zoo medicine compared to I think, domestic animal medicine is that you’re usually always anesthetizing the animal. You’re immobilizing the animal, I guess. Difference being immobilizing is keeping it so that you could do something to it. Anesthetizing means that it’s not gonna have any feeling either, it’s not going to feel it, as opposed to an immobilization, well they can’t do anything, but they still feel it. And so, you know again, anesthetics or these various immobilizing drugs hadn’t been used on all species, so figuring out the correct dosage was important. But then there’s, one of the bigger ones was a product called, CI-744 was the experimental name. Parke-Davis was the company at that time that had that available. And so I was able to get the product, it was not marketed yet at that time.

And so CI-744 was, today it’s on the market as a product called Tilazol. But at that time it was extremely valuable immobilizing so many different species that really went down well, and after you were finished with your procedure, recovered well. So it did not have a specific antagonist, but it gave a good plane of anesthesia. So you were using this new drug on your zoo subjects as you needed to. Yes.

And publishing those details, or doing, what was going on then? You were?

Well yes, part of the arrangement with the drug company, they provided the drug, but I had to always provide a sheet, you know, “Well, how long did it take to become immobilized?

What was the plane of anesthesia?

How much, what dosage did you use?” And so forth. And that had to get sent back to the company all the time to get more of the product. Maybe what you’re referring to is, at one point, it just was such a fabulous drug, except I used it on one species and it didn’t work so well, and that was on a tiger. For whatever reason, CI-744 is not a good immobilizing drug to use on tigers. And so the tiger became immobilized fine, but it didn’t recover real well. And so when that happened the first time, you know again, when you’re immobilizing a tiger, you’re with a dart gun. There can be other problems with it.

You know, why didn’t the animal, why is the animal now having ataxia?

It’s not using its hind legs very well. I thought, well maybe the dart hit, kinda on a spinal column, or up there, and it you know, caused some difficulty there, and why it’s having difficulty in the back legs. And so I thought, “Well, we’d better go in and immobilize that animal again. So again, I used CI-744 again and I had, we just had difficulty with the tigers. And so I started contacting other veterinarians that I knew at the time who were using the CI-744. “Was there a problem with it? Was there,” you know, and some of them, one another who had used it on tiger said, “Yeah, the tiger just didn’t do as well as everything else.” And it was really interesting, because I had difficulty then getting any more of the product from Parke-Davis Company. They weren’t sending it to me. And I realized that probably they weren’t sending it to me because they knew I had had some issues with it, with tigers, and they thought maybe I was gonna publish something about it.

And, you know, I told them, “Look, I don’t wanna publish anything about the tigers, the drug is fabulous.” And at that time they were getting ready to put it on the market for use in dogs and cats, not in, obviously the zoo market is not a big place for them to sell a whole lot of product, and they didn’t want anything come out that would be detrimental to the drug. And so I at that point said I would not publish anything about tigers. And it was kind of at that point for me, it was like, “Hmm that’s,” I thought it was important to do it. And later on somebody else did publish about it, that you shouldn’t use it in tigers. But I continued to get the drug, and it was a fabulous product. Were you still using the Palmer- Capture gun. Or were those also evolving into different- Well the Palmer capture gun, which is the one that I talked about, that has the various needles and various things, and uses a little charge that forces the plunger down the tube, allows you to project any liquid medication into the animal. Whether you’re anesthetizing the animal, whether you’re just giving it antibiotics, whether you’re giving it a vaccine, any liquid medication can be delivered intermuscularly into the animal.

However, the dart’s a pretty good size, and it hits with some impact. It’s fine for a large animal, but a small animal, it’s a little bit, can be tough. At the time we made some darts, we’d seen some that somebody had had put together using the plastic disposable syringes, using a needle. And so we did a lot of stuff trying to make our own needles, our own darts, that instead of firing out of a gun, we used a blow pipe, and we could take a plastic syringe, modify it in such a way that you would have a plunger on it. And in the beginning, what we would fill in the back was butane from butane lighters, and then we would put the liquid in the front, and then we’d put a needle on it and we would modify that needle by plugging up the front, putting a hole in the side of the needle and putting something on there, so that when that slid down, the medication would be injected into the animal. And so yeah, we played around with a lot of that, and used blow pipes to project those in. Today that whole product, I guess you’d call it, Teal Inject is a company that makes those for you now that allows you to use, and it’s a much lighter dart, so you can hit an animal that’s, you know, five, 10 pounds and you’re not gonna damage it with the Palmer capture darts, you know, can cause some trouble with them.

Were you, or were you in St. Louis, one of the leaders in doing this kind of research?

Or were this being done in other zoos also?

Oh, I think this was being done in other zoos too.

Yeah, everybody was looking at, you know, what can we do that that is better?

Now you have, we talked about publishing extensively and you have published extensively. Can you relate how you came to be the co-author with the gentleman you talked about earlier, Dr. Joel Wallach, with a book called “Diseases of Exotic Animals”, which is a pretty heavy tome.

How did that come about?

I got called by Saunders Publishing Company, wanted me to be co-author of this book, and it had been in the works for several years. They had put a team together of about 20 or 30 different authors, each of them had different sections to do. One of them would be doing elephants, one would be doing hoofstock, one would be doing primates, one would be doing marsupials and so forth. And all of these authors were to do their section for Saunders because there were no, really any texts on zoo medicine. And one by one the authors, these were usually veterinarians or in zoos or others of university, whatever. One by one the authors wouldn’t meet their deadlines, and they, you know, would kinda drop out. And at each time, Joel Wallach was doing more of it. He said, “Well, I can do that also.

I’ll do marsupials as well as doing primates, and I’ll do this,” and so forth. And one by one it got down to where there was only three authors left. Joel Wallach doing all of mammals, Bob Altman doing birds, and then I’ll think of his name, who did reptiles. So there were three of them left, and they were putting it all together. Well, they would each put their chapters together, and then they would send the galleys or texts to the other authors to review, and kind of go back and forth. Well, there’s a way of being an editor, of looking at somebody’s writings and saying, “Well you know, I don’t agree with this,” or you know, “Can this be worded in a different way or something,” as opposed to saying, you know, “This is a pile of crap.

This is no good, you know, this is terrible,” you know?

And so apparently the three together were having all kinds of difficulties. And Saunders, who published all kinds of medical textbooks, realized this just wasn’t gonna work. And at that point, Bob Altman said, “The heck with it, I’m going to publish my, I can do books by myself,” and same happened with the reptiles, and he went and published it separately, and so it was just Joel Wallach left. And at that point, Joel was no longer in the zoo business, and so they felt he didn’t have the, I guess credentials to be able to do it. And they talked, but he really was a brilliant person and very good, published a lot of stuff. And they went to Joel and said, “You have to have another co-author, and who would you be able to work with?” And Joel is a brilliant individual, but maybe doesn’t have the best personal skills sometimes. And so he, for whatever reason, he had worked with me when I was a student and he put my name down. And I hesitated a lot.

Again, I went to a lot of other individuals asked, “Well, what do you think about me doing this?” ‘Cause this was 1983, and I was, you know, well known in the zoo business at that point, and knew a lot of people to talk to. And everybody said, “You’ll never be able to do it. You won’t be able to work with Joel. I mean he’s just, you know, you can’t.” Says, “He’s brilliant, he’s the smartest guy almost, you know, around. But you just aren’t gonna be able to do it.” And I, “Well, I’ll see.” I knew that I knew Joel and I like him, and I thought, “Well, I can work with Joel.” And so I went, I said to Saunders, I said, “Let me see a couple of them.” And so they had a couple of the chapters already started, and I went through them, and there was a lot of stuff in there. For instance, the one on primates. Joel must have a photographic memory because he just, he knows, I mean he is just very bright, but maybe doesn’t, it’s all in there, but he doesn’t have it very well organized. So when he was talking about anesthetizing or immobilizing primates, he had a whole section using ketamine, which is the drug of choice for immobilizing primates at that time.

I guess maybe Tilazol maybe is better now, I don’t know. But ketamine, he had that, he had, you know, a page on that, and then he had a whole page on using M99, and then a whole page on using, you know, various other inhalant anesthetics and so forth. Well, this text is supposed to be for people, especially veterinarians to use, you wanna pinpoint the drug of choice, which is ketamine. And so I took what he had written about ketamine and elaborated about that, and went into much more detail about using ketamine, because it is certainly the drug of choice. And then, yes, mention M99 and talk about that. There may be some applications where you need to immediately wake up the animal, because ketamine, they wake up slowly. And if you’re gonna put it back into the wild where other animals could hurt it, or if this was in a cage or enclosure, where you had other animals in with it, you may need to have, so there may be some cases where M09 would be used, but I would say, better than 90% of the times you want to use ketamine. You don’t want to be using M99 on it.

I mean, I mentioned earlier my experience with the M99 with the bears, it’s not the drug of choice for bears at all, but that’s what was used back then.

And so I was able to take what Joel had put together and modify it and make it really useful for the practicing veterinarian, and I was able to do it in a way that I think Joel was accepting of it, instead of, “Well, you’re changing what I put down,” you know?

And so it worked out, and we were able to put it together.

Is that, if you know, do you think it’s still being used today?

I think it is still being used today. I think it was a very worthwhile text. I know it was used in veterinary schools. I will say for me, it was a, I don’t like writing. You know I published a bunch, but I don’t like doing it. And it was so taxing on me, I have hardly published anything since then. You know it just was, it took it all outta me at that time. Now, during your time as veterinarian, slash senior veterinarian, I would suspect that there are some memorable events, such as animal escapes, that you had to deal with.

And can you talk about some, so for example, like the rhinoceros escape?

The rhinoceros escape, and most animal escapes, people think of animal escapes as getting out and running around the city, or whatever. They get out of their enclosure, but they’re not out of their building usually, and they’re not out of their, you know, usually. The rhino, I assume that the keeper must have left the lock off the front of the enclosure. The rhino area, there’s outside yards, there’s inside enclosure, and that inside building is open to the public, so there’s a rail that keeps the public back from the bars of the enclosure. And the rhino had gotten out of his enclosure, but was between the enclosures and the front rail that keeps the people back. A little space, maybe four, five feet wide. And it had gotten out of there and was still behind that little rail, only three foot high, and just sleeping in that area in the middle of the night. The security guard of course saw that and immediately called, and the curators are there, keepers, and of course I was in.

It was about 3:00 in the morning, And, what are we gonna do, you know,?

We can dart it. I mean, it’s just sleeping there. I could even almost reach over and just give it a hand injection of something.

But now, how are we gonna pick up this, you know, three, 4000-pound animal and get it back in its enclosure?

We can’t get a forklift in there. We can’t get anything in there, and what do we, so fortunately there was a trash dumpster that was right next to it. We’d kinda wake the rhino up and behind the trash dumpster, push, push, get him a little bit further, and he’d go back to sleep. And you know, it took us about three hours, but we got him all the way back to where the only way he could turn would be back into his enclosure. So we didn’t have to immobilize him or do anything to get him back in. But you know, it was something that you’d think, you know, we certainly didn’t wanna anesthetize him at that point, and try to get him back in. But you have had other escapes, that as veterinarian you’ve had to deal with. Fortunately, none of them real serious.

We had one Barbary sheep that actually did get out of the zoo grounds, and was running around Forest Park, a large 2000-acre park, which our security was following, or was going, and I was in their truck, you know, chasing it all across the golf courses and so forth. And really probably should not have been driving across some of the greens or whatever, but we eventually were able to dart that animal, and get it back to the zoo.

Do these things sometimes happen late at night, or mostly during when keepers are there?

Well, that one was during the day. I think most of them were during the day, not late at night.

Did you ever have anybody call you with an animal escape where your reaction was, “Oh my God”?

Fortunately we have not had any, you know, serious. I mean like that Barbary sheep out, you know, it’s not gonna injure anybody. It’s not like a big cat or you know, a bear or something that could, or some of the primates, that could be potential damage to visitors or to people. We’ve not had to deal with that, we’ve been very lucky. You mentioned before that you were a charter member of the American College of Zoological Medicine.

Could you tell us a little more about getting that process off the ground, and what does board certification mean?

To be board certified in a particular specialty of, whether it’s human medicine or veterinary medicine, you know, you’re board certified as a ophthalmologist, as a obstetrician, as a you know, surgeon, whatever. And so there was no board certification for zoo medicine, and that was something that had to be put together to the American Veterinary Medical Association.

And Murray Fowler was the one who really spearheaded that, and was most instrumental in getting that off the ground, and starting way back in about 1980, was gathering who would the professionals be, who would be considered the chart of diplomats?

And then once that’s done, others could become board certified by meeting certain qualifications and then going through testing to do that. And so I was fortunate to be one of the original board certified people, and it was, I think partly because of my publications that I was able to be selected. Now you were also involved, while you were veterinarian, in building the endangered species research center in the hospital.

When did that happen, how did it come about?

How did you get involved?

Were there issues, problems, getting it all finalized?

(chuckling) It’s interesting, ’cause you know, as a side, I guess I have always been interested in construction and architecture and design. And so that’s sort of, I don’t know, one of my hobbies I guess, and I love construction. I love physically doing it myself. And when it came about that we were building a new hospital at the zoo, the architects that were hired came up with a preliminary design, and when I looked at it, it was terrible. It just didn’t have what, you know, things were not juxtapositioned correctly against each other. And so that night I took the whole thing that they’d put together and started cutting it up and putting it together the way it should be. And I was very scared after doing that, to fit into the site that it had, that they were gonna really be upset. Because here’s a guy who, you know, doesn’t have any background in architecture or design, and he’s trying to, so.

But when I presented it to them, they said, “Oh, that’s what you want? Oh, we can do that.” And so I really started with the hospital at the zoo, helping out with the design and the construction and the, on the staff at the zoo we had somebody who was in charge of outside contractors, and dealt with the architects and all that. And Charlie was the director at the time, and he talked to Charlie, he says, “You know, Bill knows more than the architects about some of this stuff, you know?” ‘Cause they couldn’t come up with an answer. I’m, “Well, why don’t you just do it this way?” And so they would follow it. And so I got much more involved with the rest of the zoo then, after that was built of the design. And you know, the River’s Edge, Penguin Puffin Coast and so forth, I was intimately involved in all those, and just enjoyed doing it. It was something that I had a certain skill in doing, and so took on that opportunity. You mentioned, we were talking about the hospital that you helped put together.

When you first started, there wasn’t a hospital there, was there?

No, we had a building there, that was not much of a hospital, but yeah, we had a building that, you know, we had some cages, and we had a room that we did all of the necropsies in. You know, we had labs there, so there was a facility there. And later on I did also, when Disney was building their new Animal Kingdom down there, I was consulted on on the design of their hospital down there, how it should be built. So that was kinda interesting too. Now you are the senior veterinarian, but then something happens where you move out of the senior veterinarian position into a new position, from being senior veterinarian and research.

You become the Director of Zoological Operations in 1993?

Somewhere around then, okay. Now you’re moving from veterinary medicine to more of an administration position.

How did that happen, why did it happen?

Were you aiming for this, or what was going on?

Well you know, when you work for any organization, you have your role and I was in my role, but you know how the rest of the zoo is operating too. And so you get involved in the other parts when when you have an opportunity, if you have something to add. And at that point, Charlie was the director at the time, and was, I think, there were a number of people that reported to Charlie, and he needed to streamline his flow chart I guess, of people who reported to him, and wanted others to take over various responsibilities. And so Director of Zoo Operations meant the animal division primarily, education also. But it was taking over not only overseeing veterinary care and research, but also the whole curatorial staff and keeper staff, and education department. So it was, I’d taken on more responsibilities, but it was something that I kind of, you know, had a knack in, I guess. And you said this was through the director then who wanted you to do this, Charlie Hoessle. Now did, you had mentioned before, the last director that we talked about was Bridges.

Did Charlie come after him?

No, Bill Hoff was the first, I mean, Marlin Perkins way back when I was a student, then Bill Hoff, then Bob Briggs was there for several years. After Bob was Dick Schultz. Dick Schultz was a finance person. And it’s interesting, because Bob Briggs was, you know PR, and brought some really good PR, I mean, to the zoo. I mean, Marlin Perkins was a super PR person with “Wild Kingdom” and everything. So each person brought something different. Dick Schultz was finance, and really got things together there. Charlie Hoessle, of course was an animal person.

And so Charlie was there about 20 of the years that I worked under Charlie as director. And each person brought something different to the table.

Did you ever, of all of these various directors that you’re talking about during your career, did you ever run afoul of any of them?

(laughing) I don’t know that I ever ran afoul of any of them, but I remember, oh early on, and Bill Hoff was the director and it was, oh, had to be in the first year that I was there. I mean, maybe even the first month or so. And we were gonna be vaccinating some animals in the children’s zoo, and I don’t remember, some kind of mustelid was there that, and Bill Hoff said, “Well, you need to vaccinate it with, da da da da, such and such.” And that kinda bothered me, and I thought, “You know, I’m the veterinarian, I’m the guy, you know?” You know, you don’t take your dog to the veterinarian, and then say, “Well you know, which particular vaccine are you gonna give for distemper?” You know, and so I got to think about it. “Well, I don’t wanna, how am I gonna approach this?” And so what I did was I asked his secretary, “When’s he gonna be gone to lunch?” And so he was gone and you know, there’s all kinds of different vaccines for dogs and cats that can be used on zoo animals. And there’s a lot of different companies that make them. There’s killed vaccines, there’s modified live vaccines, and so forth for the various things. And so I went to his desk and I opened up all these catalogs, I probably had 10 different catalogs opened up to the various pages where the vaccines were there. And I had them all sitting on his desk during the lunchtime.

And when he came back from lunch, I came in, you know I said, “Okay, here’s the vaccine. What do you want me to use to vaccinate these mustelids?” And he started looking at them and he looked at one, you know, and he started reading the other one, and looked at all of them.

And you know he said, “Use what you think is the right thing.” You know, he never again ever made any comments of what drug I oughta use, or what dose oughta use, or what medication, you know?

He realized that he was going beyond what he should. Now, Bill had a lot of experience in zoos before, and he probably had some experience with other veterinarians that didn’t work out so good. But that was the only time that ever, you know, I will say all of the directors that I worked for, never, you know, made suggestions or told me how to practice veterinary medicine.

Now, when you received this promotion, to more things under your portfolio, were people jealous of you?

Or were they “Oh, now he’s above us and he’s our boss,” and- I don’t know that they were jealous of me. You know, I- Or upset You got the position or- I don’t know if anybody was upset. I mean, I always tried to work with everybody that, you know, it didn’t make any difference what level they were at, you know, in the organization or zoo, I treated everybody well. You were, now it’s taking you away from your daily medical responsibilities.

Was it hard to leave this, the position of being veterinarian, senior veterinarian, doing the research or coordinating all that?

‘Cause now you had a lot more. I will say this, that, you know, I always enjoyed the clinical work. One of the neat things, that I was very fortunate to be at the same institution for 37 years, the same organization for 37 years, but I got to do a lot of different things. And with my personality, that probably worked well, because after I do something for a while, you kind of get really accomplished in it. And not that you get bored, but you wanna move on to something else, something more challenging. And while clinical medicine was really challenging, you know, I was able to then get into a little bit of teaching, a little bit of research and publishing. And then I got into more managing people and administration, got into design and construction and architecture. And then eventually into, you know, manage the construction budgets and financing.

And so I was able to do a lot of different things, and stay at the same place. So that was a really great opportunity for me. Now you weren’t Director of Zoological Operations for a very, very long time because unless it morphs in, you then became the Assistant Director. In 1996, you become assistant director of the zoo.

How did you get this new job?

How did it come to pass, and why did you get the job?

It seems like, you know, as time was going by, I was doing more and more and getting more involved in different activities, of some of which I just took on, and eventually later got the title that matched what I was doing already. But I mean, at the time you become assistant director, the director is- Charlie Hoessle.

Does he come to you?

It doesn’t sound like you’re asking for these positions, but does somebody come to you and say, “How would you like to take on this position?” I mean- I think I was already doing a lot of the activities.

And Charlie once told me the reason that he, I guess promoted me and relied on me was, you know, he had certain things that he needed to accomplish and he would give the tasks to various staff members and I always came through with it, you know?

I always did it and I did it in the time, you know, that he needed it. Where others, I guess failed him at times, and you know, so it was, you know, he knew that if he gave me something to do, it was gonna get done. Talk about your new responsibilities, if you had any. Well you know, I guess finance and HR came into that, where I was overseeing both of those, which I had not overseen before, even though I was, you know one of the things with the outside contractors, and so forth, especially, we were doing a lot of new construction. River’s Edge, Penguin Puffin Coast, some of those things were, just the whole zoo was being redone. And one of the things that I did was, you know, keep us within budget on those. They can easily have a lot of overruns, a lot of change orders. And one of the biggest things, you know, with dealing with outside construction was taking those plans to all of the people involved, all of the keepers involved and what, “Is this gonna work?” And sometimes explaining to them what they have, and what, you know, because not everybody can read the blueprints and you know, “Well I want you, you know, ’cause this is the way it’s gonna be built.

We don’t want you to be in the construction phases and now change this, because it’s too expensive to change then. It’s a lot easier with an eraser and pen to change those things than once it’s constructed, and let’s make sure it’s gonna be built what you need.” And so I was pretty insistent upon that, and you know we, I guess I got involved with more of the construction and the finance part of it, and the HR part of it. And it was again, it was new things for me.

Did you have to leave, or continue to leave the zoo medicine behind or not?

(sighing) I guess I did leave a lot of it behind. I had some good people there. Eric Miller was still there, stayed the rest of his career, and we had another full-time veterinarian, Randy Yungy, who was there at the time. And so we had some good other clinical people that I could rely on and know that the job was, that part of it was well taken care of.

As a quick aside, when you were veterinarian, did you ever work or have a regular physician’s group that came and helped you with unusual or new things?

And if you did, did you develop it, it was already there, or?

I developed it. I called it our consultants group, and I used it as part of our residency program because, we probably had 40 to 50 consultants in that group. And one of the things that I required the residents to do was to make regular presentations to this group. And this group was made up of physicians, dentists, zoologists, veterinarians, people from the university, people from the either Washington University, Purina, there were nutritionists on it. And they would come and the resident would have to present two or three cases, you know, at it. And it was always interesting, because these were people who had their own skills and backgrounds, and they were willing to help us. I mean you know, when we had a, you know an animal that needed some dentistry work, I mean, the dentists loved to come in and take impressions, you know, to make a crown for a mountain lion or something like that. When we had a cheetah that had cataracts, we had three different ophthalmologists who were there.

You know, two human ophthalmologists and one veterinary ophthalmologist, and all wanted to work on the cheetah, and so they were happy to donate their time.

And I had one intern as to, “You know Bill, are you guys upset with me?

You haven’t called me for over a year to come and treat any of the animals,” you know?

And so we had this consultant group that was very helpful to us. And we, like I said, we had regular meetings. I know we had one, it was primarily on nutrition, and I would lead part of it too. And we had Mark Morris there, who’s developed all kinds of animal diets. We had several people from Ralston Purina there.

We had you know, and I says, “Okay, how should we put a diet together?

I mean, what should we do?

What kind of diet should we have for a pangolin?” And I chose a species that nobody would be familiar with, you know?

“Oh it’s easy, you know?” The dentist said, “You know, well let’s look at his teeth and see what kind of teeth he has, and we’ll be able to figure it out,” you know?

And you know, the nutritionist, “Well, it has to be so much balance between proteins and fats and you know, what mineral content and so on.” And the behaviorist said, “Well, you go to the wild and you collect the feces from them, and you know, you sacrifice a few of them and see what they’ve been eating, and that’s how you would figure out their diet.” Veterinarian’s kinda going, “Well, what’s he doing?

Is he losing weight, is he getting,” you know?

And so everybody is finally, it’s coming to everybody’s sight, “Well, we all have an input in this. There’s all, everybody has something to add to it, and you know, and we can come up with something.” And so the consultants group was a really neat group of people that, a lot of them even also became donors to the zoo too, because it was something that they could come to the zoo and and participate, and we used them. One of them was a TB specialist, and I don’t know if you wanna ask about that later, but when we had a problem with TB and elephants, we brought him in.

Now did you feel then that as the assistant director, you were having a major input in starting to shape the direction of the zoo?

Or were you just kinda following what the director wanted to do?

Well, it’s fun. Charlie was a great guy to work for. He was a taskmaster, you better do what he asked. But he really was, really great. Now, I remember one incidence where we were going to do something, we were gonna add to the zoo. Now the zoo is in Forest Park. We have our 93 acres and that’s it. I mean, there’s no chance for expansion into other parts of the park.

But there was this other area that wasn’t being utilized. And our our chairman of the board, very powerful individual in St. Louis, Bob Hyland, he ran the city in a way, because he ran KMOX, powerful radio station. Everybody that advertised anything happened through him, and he was the chairman of the commission. And he had gotten in, and then Ralston Purina was gonna donate, and we were gonna do this, It was kind of a farm in the zoo, so to speak. I know other zoos have done this, but this was going to be different. It was gonna annex about five acres and there was some, all kinds of political problems with that but, and Purina was gonna pay for it. And they put it all together, just some preliminary stuff. And I kind of responded to Charlie, I wrote this whole long thing, because they were gonna have, I guess what we consider, you know, modern farming.

They were gonna have chickens in layer cages, where the legs would come out and so forth. But they’re all in small cages. They were going to have hogs and that on slatted floors, and so forth. And then they were gonna have an area where they would be taking the manure and transforming it into usable energy, and so on. And so I kinda wrote something just to Charlie. I said, “Charlie, you know this is neat, and this is the way things are going, and I have no problem with any of what it is, you know, as far as,” and I already had owned my farm at that time, and was raising cattle. And I said, “You know, this is great. However, there’s a lot of people that are gonna object to this.

While we don’t have, I think we have a great relationship with the Humane Society and that, there are certain animal rights people that don’t necessarily agree with some of the modern farming.” And I said something like, “And this manure transforming, this is a crock of shit. You know, this just isn’t gonna work.” And you know, and I sent it to Charlie. And Charlie didn’t respond in any kind of, you know, he was upset with me. And you know, “I can’t do this,” you know, and so forth. And it really bugged me, because I’d never had that from Charlie before.

And it was like, “Oh shoot, here I’m doing, I was offering some advice, you know?

Oh, maybe I’ll just keep my mouth shut.” You know, it was like that.

Didn’t realize that Charlie felt the exact same way, but he just couldn’t say that to Bob Hyland, who was pushing this farming thing with Purina Mills, you know, down Charlie’s throat, you know?

And it wasn’t until a week later when they were gonna go, the architect that they’d chosen was from, I’ve forgotten where, someplace in Minnesota or whatever. And we were gonna fly, and so here we took Ralston Purina’s private jet on air, and Charlie says, “Well, I want you to go along too.” You know, ’cause he knew that I was going to tell exactly how I felt, which I don’t normally do, but you know, but that’s how he felt. And so I could do it without, you know, and then he wouldn’t have to do it. And so you know, so I guess I did have some influence, but Charlie and I thought a lot alike. And so it was a good relationship when I was his assistant director.

Now during the time you were assistant director, wasn’t there another proposal made to people about a breeding farm?

Charlie and I and a couple of others on the staff, we had always, were interested in acquiring some other property because we were limited as to what we could do within our own, you know, part of Forest Park. And we went and looked at quite a number of different parcels of property, places that, there was one place that they were willing to lease us their property for a dollar a year, you know, for a long period of time. There was another one that was, we looked at a number of them, and because of my experience in owning my own farm and that, I said, “Charlie you know,” the land at this one was very nice, but I said that, “You know, we’re gonna have, our infrastructure that we’re gonna have to put in there is much more expensive than the land itself.” I said, “We don’t wanna be on leased property forever, you know, and put in all this money. We wanna own the whole thing, if we’re gonna do that.” We eventually did get a 350-acre breeding farm donated to the zoo by Mrs. Layman, and that one is still owned by the zoo. Initially about all we did was get the perimeter fence in, and really explored a lot of, whether we brought that about or not. Now it is being used by Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Wild Kingdom Center for Mexican wolves. And so it’s being used as a breeding facility for Mexican wolves, that will potentially be released back into the wild.

But was the original intent to have aurochs, or other animals from the zoo having an ancillary breeding area?

Yes. But that never came to fruition. We never did put animals out there, just because before you do that, you know, you have to have somebody staying there all the time. You have to have security there all the time. It just, the cost of it kinda, it was always on hold.

Now while you’re assistant director doing these kinda things and involved in these various projects, in the back of your mind, did you think about the position of director?

Yeah, I guess that was always, you know thinking, “Well you know, Charlie’s, you know, 10 to 15 years older than me.

When Charlie retires, would I wanna be director?” You know and, “Yeah, I think so,” and- Did you have those conversations with him?

Certainly with him. Oh, well Charlie stayed on. You know Charlie thought, well, he’d retire at 65, and he didn’t, and then he, well a little bit more. He’s got this project to do, and so forth. And so then when Charlie did retire, I was a candidate to take over after he retired.

But had you and Charlie talked about that, did he know your thought process?

By the time he was ready to retire, yes. Yeah, we talked about that. Was he in favor of it, or- He wrote all kinds of letters of recommendation for me to follow him. So they did a big search. When Charlie was about to retire, they did a national search, of you know, anyone and everyone I guess. And Steve Shankman was the chairman of the commission at the time, and he pursued most of that, but he had a whole committee that did it all, and it was a decision of the commission. There’s a 10-member commission that governs the zoo, and they make the decision. And I interviewed with the search firm that they had hired and went on to, you know, proceed with that.

And then Steve came with me, came to me and he says, you know, and we had lunch together and he said, “We wanna make you director of the zoo, but we wanna bring somebody else in as president and CEO over you. Well what do you think about that?” I said, “Well, I don’t know, you know?” I hadn’t even thought about that. I said, “It really would depend upon who that person is.” I said, “I worked for many years with Charlie, and had a great relationship.

If this is a guy I can work with, yeah I’ll probably, that’ll be fine,” you know?

And so that’s what came about, and they hired Jeff Bonner as the president and CEO, and I was the director and COO, director of operations. So when Jeff and I first got together, and Jeff and I worked it out. And it’s like Jeff said, “Okay, I want you to manage the veterinary care, the research, the animal collection, education, finance, HR, construction, maintenance, grounds, everything else.” And he said, he’ll take care of development and PR, and I’ll take care of everything else. And I said, “I can do that,” and so that’s how we did. And so I, and the commission offered me a contract. They knew they needed me to stay, ’cause I knew all of the operation, and everything of the zoo, and Jeff didn’t. And so, and I stayed on for another five years after Charlie retired. Now this was a change, in all the time you’ve worked at the zoo under the various directors, this was a major shift in governance to bring in a CEO over a director, over the zoo.

I guess I wanna ask two questions. In your opinion, obviously it worked out.

In your opinion, why do you think they wanted this change in governance from everything else that had happened?

And two, can you tell me about the governance in general of the St. Louis Zoo?

Yeah, when I speak of the governance, I think of our commission, which is the ruling body that really makes the decisions. The biggest decision, of course was, “Okay, well who is gonna be director or president there?” But they do oversee major things. I mean you know, they go over the budget once a year, and then you know, capital improvements, and things like that that are huge. But they don’t get involved with, you know, the day-to-day operations of the zoo. They leave that up to the director. And over the years that I’d been there at the zoo, times had changed. When I started we didn’t have any HR department, we didn’t have any development department, we didn’t have a PR department. The curators and a veterinarian, we did all of that stuff.

If we needed to hire somebody, we were the HR department.

If we needed to raise money, we had to get it, you know?

And over the years now, all those people have been added to the zoo. And so development is a big operation. And I talked about before, the Zoo Museum District that got established in 1972, which changed the zoo from just being supported by the city of St. Louis to the city and county. It doubled our budget right then and there. So, and that was the tax support. The zoo continued to always generate money at the zoo itself, through our refreshments, we have a railroad that goes around, our business operations. We charge for parking, even though the zoo itself is free. You can come to the zoo and have a great day and not pay a penny.

You don’t have to park on our parking lot, there’s street parking, come in for free. You don’t have to buy refreshments at the zoo. All of that you can do and not have to spend a penny. But you can also, and so back then, about half of our operations were funded by the taxes. The other half by money that we generate. By this time, by the time I became director, a third of our money came from taxes, a third from money that we generated, and a third from philanthropy. Our development department raises that money, by you know, our zoo friends, our, what we call the Marlin Perkins Society. Marlin Perkins Society are people who donate at least $1000 a year, and so now there are more than 1000 members in the Marlin Perkins Society, that each give $1000 a year.

So development and fundraising has become a huge part of running the zoo, and so it makes sense to have a president whose primary responsibilities are fundraising. And then as director I did what, ran the zoo. You had, again just a quick question. You indicated the person they hired as the CEO- And president. Was, you had never worked with this person. So you had a comfort level when you first got together and yeah, you- Well, I don’t know if it was a comfort level at first. I mean, you know, you have to work with somebody for a while before you get to that comfort level, but it was something that, you know in talking with him, it was something that I thought, we would be able to work it out.

You’re now the director of the zoo, 2002?

2002, correct. And you’ve gone from the first full-time veterinarian of the zoo to now the director of the zoo. We won’t say it was a meteoric rise, ’cause you moved steadily. Sure.

What was your management style?

How would you describe it?

Well, I like to let people, I don’t think I try to micromanage. I like them to use their talents, and I think I’ve realized that people are best at the things that they like to do. And if I can give somebody the stuff that they like to do, and get somebody else to do some of the rest, that’s the best thing. And even you know, well one time we were redoing some of our maintenance areas.

We had some difficulties there, our manager wasn’t very good and I went in there and I, “All right, I wanna know, what do you like to do?

‘Cause I mean, you’re doing a lot of painting, and somebody else is doing tiling. You know, somebody else is working on masonry work. Do you really like painting, or would you rather be doing this or that?” And give the person the stuff that they like to do, and if they’re good at it, give them as much of that as possible. And you know, I used to think when I was training veterinarians for, you know, on the residency, well you gotta work on their weak points. If they’re not a good speaker, well let’s see if they can do better at that. ‘Cause some of them were good already, you know, and they didn’t need that. Somebody else might not be very good at publishing, and well, “You need to get,” and so I would concentrate more on their weak points with that. And I realized that I think in terms of management, you’re better off to just concentrate on people’s abilities and their great points.

And if they’re good at something, make them do that all the time, and it’s usually the stuff that they like to do. Just to go back a minute, you said that you believed in publishing, you published a lot.

When you were doing, working with your veterinarians that were full-time when you were director or assistant director, or even your residents, did you instill in them or want to instill in them the idea that publishing was important?

Or that wasn’t, you didn’t- No, I wanted to instill on them that that was important. You know, part of the residency program is I expected them to get at least two publications in, you know, while they were doing their residency.

And was it the same for your full-time veterinarians?

I did not require that of any of the full-time veterinarians, but most of them did it. ‘Cause they know how you felt- Yeah. Well I don’t know if, because I think they, not what I felt, but I think they felt that way. You know, Eric Miller has published, you know, as much as I have. And so you know, Randy has done some, and others who were there, I’m not sure that they still do that, but it was. You weren’t making them. You were trying to instill in them. Yeah.

We talked about your management style.

Would you say you had any tricks of the trade for managing people that you developed or evolved?

I don’t know about tricks of the trade.

I would never ask somebody to do something that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself, you know?

I don’t know say how to say this in a good way but, especially, you know, for the veterinarians, you have a certain amount of skill, whether it be surgical skills or diagnostic skills, or whatever, that just come natural to you. I don’t know that you can, you know somebody, to be a good surgeon, you better have good hand, you know, you better be pretty good at that, and everybody isn’t. And so sometimes it was hard for me to let somebody else do something when I know I could have done that, (chuckling) you know, half the time or whatever. And sometimes early on I had to maybe jump in a little bit more, because if you have an animal immobilized or anesthetized, you don’t want them down for a long period of time. And so there I occasionally I had to, you know, “Okay, let’s get this done, and we can’t take too much time here.” But most of the time it was, you know, I guess it was part of my management skill to be able to step back and let them do something, and sometimes let them not necessarily fail, but try something different. I mean, you know, after you’ve, well if you want to de-worm the bears for instance, and I knew what I’d use, and what product I’d use, and what I’d mix, you know, ’cause you gotta figure out, “Well, what am I gonna mix this with that I can get them to consume it,” or whatever. And well let them try something. They wanted to try something, you know I didn’t necessarily, let them try, figure out on their own.

And sometimes they figured out better than what I had done, you know?

And so I was surprised, you know.

Now when you were director, who was your animal, at the curatorial level, who were some of the names of the people that worked for you?

Well, Ron Gilner was general curator for much of the time. Jack Grisham, we brought in. Jeff Etling was involved with reptiles, Mike Masick with birds. Bill Halston was involved with, it was kind of assistant general curator. Martha Fisher was involved with the hoofstock. Those were most of the curatorial staff.

And if I talked to them, what would they say about your management style?

Golly.

What do you think they’d say?

(laughing) I don’t know, I think they would say that I would always listen to their, you know, I don’t think I was over demanding, you know?

I think I let them run their own shop, so to speak. And if they were doing a good job of it, great.

When you took over the helm as director, what major management issues did you have to deal with, kinda right away?

Or was it all just great?

Well, I don’t know if it was all just great, but I had been there, you know, for all those years. And I had worked with, our CFO was still the same guy. Our head of HR was still the same guy. And so they knew me, and we worked together fine. And so it was kind of almost, we’re all learning who this new president is, and what changes might take place with that, so. You know, Wendell Hill was in charge of HR, did a great job there. And Steve Barth was finance CFO and did wonders. So it was a good, good group to work with.

How many reports did you have in supervising the day-to-day operations of the zoo?

Well HR, construction and maintenance was all under one. Finance was under one. General curator was all the animal division, and then veterinary, so five. Veterinary was separate from the animal- Yes. It was separate at that time. Okay, now you mentioned you were the director there with CO.

Did you have annual regular meetings with the president or was it one on one, was it him meeting with his direct reports?

The only other direct reports was the head of, well which later became, what was it?

Outside affairs or something, which included development and PR. And so those were the only additional management kinda positions. But the president CEO, he met with you- He and I would meet- Both. Both, yeah we would meet together, the two of us, discuss various things, but also as a management group we would meet once a week too. Now you said that you’d been there, obviously a while, knew what was going on.

What were the major issues that existed at the St. Louis Zoo?

Well, one of the biggest things that was changing at that time was, I mean we were always interested in conservation, but we changed a little bit in setting up, Wild Care Institute, we called it, which was a lot of conservation activities in other parts of the world, and so we had a whole group of those. And Eric Miller eventually took over running all of that part.

Was that something you developed?

It was something that was, I would say, Jeff Bonner was responsible there, Charlie Hoessle was responsible there, I was responsible there, and the curators were responsible there. We all felt the importance, and were involved with conservation activities. It was just that that kind of formalized it.

And how involved were you, or what direction did you play, in the future planning of the zoo?

Well- Well of course we were always, it seemed like we were always involved in various master plans. Both physical master plans of the facilities themselves, but also master planning of the whole operation of the zoo. St. Louis is a union town. I presume you had union employees in the keeper staff, or in other areas, but certainly- We are an open shop, meaning that you can belong to the union if you wish, but you don’t have to. I don’t know what the percentage is now, but probably 10 to 15% of the employees were members of the union. I don’t know if any of the keepers were part of the union. The majority of the union members were either custodial or maintenance.

Well, ’cause my question though, was how did that affect the zoo’s development and running?

It didn’t. I mean it was essentially, we had a union, we listened to the union, but it really had very little control. I mean, in terms of budgets, in terms of raises, in terms of pay scale, in terms of everything that we did, we did you know, for everybody, and then we told the union what we were gonna do. I am told that you could be the assistant director for many, many, many years, but when you become director, it’s different.

What surprised you about the position of director in a good way and a bad way?

Well I mean, I was still doing the same stuff that I did when I was assistant director. In a way, I was doing, I kinda oversaw development a little bit when, I mean, as assistant director I was over that, and I was no longer over that, which was not a, I mean, I can schmooze with the donors and everything, and I mean, you become friends with them. And so it was not, you know, a difficult thing, but to not do it was not a problem for me either. And, and because I did have, sometimes there was, differences of opinion, I guess. I did not come from a wealthy background, and so donating large amounts of money was not ever part of my family upbringing.

And so when we would have various events at the zoo, sometimes I did have disagreements with maybe our development people in the sense of, “Well, why do we have to pay for all these special tablecloths?

And man, those centerpieces are more than $100 a piece, and you know, we got 30 of them here, and gee whizz, you know?” And, “Oh, that recognition plaque’s, gosh, couldn’t we have gotten by with something a little less?” You know, I don’t know. You know, all I can say is that they’ve been very successful in raising money and, you know, maybe they were able to get a million dollars out of somebody that they’d only gotten 100,000 if we didn’t have that kind of tablecloth and centerpiece. I don’t know. I know that, you know, that Jeff Bonner did a great job of raising money during the time he was there, and after I was retired too, continued to.

Were there situations as director where you learned something new?

Well, I knew that, I would say that the president was very good at promoting the zoo, and very good at promoting himself also. And when he did, he always brought me along, and I’m not often as much of a self promoter, and he was able, you know, to do that, which helped me too. Some directors have said that they hate budgeting.

Did you enjoy budgeting, or was it just something you had to do?

I enjoyed budgeting. I mean I’ve always, you know, been able to keep things within budget, and control the finances fairly well. So yeah, I probably enjoyed that part of it. Through your time at the zoo, specifically maybe as director, some new things coming at you, some old things you gotta do.

Was there ever, did you have a mentor, someone you could reach out to and talk to when you had issues or questions, either inside the zoo or outside?

Hmm, shoo boy. In terms of a mentor, I guess early on Charlie, you know, was certainly a mentor. I mean, I learned a lot from Charlie. Other, Murray Fowler was certainly somebody that I looked up to as a veterinarian. I mean when I was in school, the professors and so forth in veterinary school, In terms of veterinary medicine.

I mean when you had, okay, when you had something going on that was bothering you or you weren’t sure, did you as director, did you reach out to Charlie, ’cause he was the former director?

Did you have that kind of relationship to say, “Look, I got an issue here,” and that kinda thing?

Or you didn’t, that never came up?

No, no, I would, would talk with Charlie, you know when, after he was retired, and still friends with Charlie.

Were there policies that you developed, that you developed that helped change the zoo?

I don’t know about policies. I think whether they were mine or Charlie’s, I think we, it was just, we had a lot of the same backgrounds. We both had grown up very similarly in South St. Louis, and it was funny how much we thought alike. So whether I brought them, or Charlie brought them, or together we brought them, I think that one of the things that we’ve always enjoyed is a great relationship with all of the employees.

It you know, you know that you know everybody, you know?

And everybody’s important, whether they’re the custodial staff or the, you know, head of of finance or HR, they’re important people, they’re employees of the zoo.

And gosh, you know, even today, 15 years after I’ve retired, I go there and you know, some of those people are still there and it just feels good to you know, “Oh, how you doing,” you know?

You talked about a master plan for the zoo and said, I guess there was a couple of master plans through the ages.

What, as part of the master plan, what did you design or aid in planning of new exhibits when you were there?

Or maybe a little before you, were you able to complete some projects that had started, or you wanted to do, or you thought should happen?

Those kind of things that might have been part of a master plan, or you added to a master plan?

Well, I mean, after you’re there a while, you know what works and doesn’t. Part of the original master plans early on, I’m talking way back, was saving some of the old structures, some of the old architecture. I mean we had some really neat architecture in our herpatarium.

It’s changed, it used to be called the snake house, then it was the reptile house, now it’s the herpatarium, you know?

But it’s the same building, and that building is just fabulous architecturally. And the primate house, the bird house, and what we call the antelope areas, big rocks area, red rocks area, it’s some really, and our bear pits, were all historical structures that were built, I mean, the bear pits, for people who don’t know, I remember as a kid coming to the zoo and thinking, “Oh, well that’s why they built the zoo there, because they had these rock bluffs.” Well, those weren’t there naturally. Back in 1919 through 1921, they went down to the Mississippi River Bluffs and actually took molds of the bluffs, came back and reconstructed those bluffs, the molds, there at the zoo, and poured the concrete behind that to make those bear pits. And the big rock areas where the antelope are, it looks like granite boulders. And for most people who come there they go, “It’s kind of weird,” but it’s very similar to an area called Elephant Rocks about an hour and a half south of St. Louis, which is these big granite boulders that look just like that, and when they built those, they used granite in there. And so saving some of the old structures that have historical value was important in any master plan. And then there are some areas that, gosh, there isn’t anything worth saving here in our old lion house, and we built Big Cat Country. And building River’s Edge was taking a different view of exhibitry, in the sense of an immersion exhibit where the visitor is looking through a certain area or window of opportunity to see this particular animal in its natural state, as opposed to say, where in other areas where it’s all open, and you have that.

So you know, I guess I got really involved in a lot of the construction and various exhibitry. So you had ideas about the ideal zoo exhibit type of design.

What components to you, that you were talking to people about as director, were important in exhibit design?

Well, I think you wanna see the animal in, you know, of course exhibit design has evolved in zoos over the years, from the sterile cage that from a veterinary standpoint, you might be able to sterilize this thing and keep anything away. It’s a lot different if they’re out there grubbing in the dirt, in the grass and everything. But it’s a much better exhibit, making it, putting in the natural. And just some of the things in terms of designing it, you know, I always particularly, I always wanted things to become more intimate with the visitor, the animal as close as possible, and yet not have what kind of, you have to have some kind of barrier to keep the people away from the animal and the animal away from the people. But what can you eliminate that as much as possible. And whenever, you know, open is better, if you have to use glass, make sure that there’s not a, you know, reflection. You have to have the exhibit in a much brighter area than the visitor who’s watching it, Because otherwise all the visitor sees is his own reflection in the glass. And it’s just silly little things like that, that make all the difference in the world of how an exhibit turns out.

What exhibits are you really proud of?

Well some of them, I mean, River’s Edge was one that the landscaping has really made the difference.

And I mean, we would always go to other zoos, and I always went to lots of other zoos to get ideas, and try to find out what worked and what didn’t work, why it worked, you know?

And a lot of them had some really interesting stuff. I mean, when we were building the River’s Edge, where we had underwater viewing of hippos, you gotta have a super filtration system to keep that clean. And again, we looked at a couple of really good ones. Busch Gardens in Tampa has a very good underwater viewing, and so does Disney, had one. And we went to them and talked with their architects and so forth.

Well, how did they position it, you know?

Where’s the sun gonna come?

Where are you gonna get this reflection off?

Where are you gonna be, you know?

And, “Oh my gosh,” the architect, “we didn’t even think about that.

We just built it where it fit,” you know?

And, but we looked at all kinds of things as far as that was concerned, for the hippos. But the Penguin Puffin, we had an old penguin facility that was behind glass, and it just doesn’t, our new Penguin Puffin, you know, it’s open.

It’s 40 degrees in there, and so the visitor comes in, they’re immediately impressed by how cold it is, you know?

And it’s open. You know unfortunately, we’ve had to have somebody monitoring the area all the time, because people were putting their hands in with, you know, they could grab a penguin if they wanted to. And so it makes for a much more intimate experience, I think, for the visitor.

In the employees that were taking care of the animals, how diverse were your employees?

You mentioned really early on there were women keepers, but that was in the children’s zoo.

Were there women, when did women keepers start to come, or African American keepers?

How diverse was your workforce?

Well one of the things, most when I first started, it was almost all men, with only a few women. We had a fairly, a good representation of minorities, in St. Louis, African Americans. I always figure if you can kinda mimic what the general population is, and we had that, at least that many. We had a number of African American keepers at the zoo. We had, I would say a fairly good mixture as far as age. There were some younger keepers, but there were more older keepers. As time went on, we ended up with a lot more younger ones coming in. To this day, we’ve always had a good representation, I think, of minorities in our keeper force.

Women certainly much more represented today. It’s gotta be, maybe more than 50% now of women keepers in the zoo. And it’s just times have changed. In terms of veterinary medicine, when I was in veterinary school, we had 60 students, three women, 57 men. Today, 80% of veterinary students are women. It’s just changed. And you know, and some people say it’s for the better or the worse or whatever, I don’t know, it’s just different. Women bring different qualities than men sometimes, and it’s good to have diversity in it.

Other diversity I think in, you know, we used to have a lot of people that kinda grew up on a farm and maybe knew more animal management, but very few of those anymore. I think we have a fairly good representative of what the metropolitan area is in St. Louis. You had talked about conservation at the zoo internationally.

What input did you as director have in directing the type of international conservation that the zoo would be doing?

Or was it, “What we’re doing, we’re doing.” I guess I relied more on the people involved in that as to how that went, rather than dictating which way they should go. I know again, we went into the areas of their interest more so than anything else.

And as you were director, were you able to travel, I assume, to other zoos, and were you able to see things at other zoos that maybe you wanted to apply at St. Louis?

You know from the beginning, way before I was even director, I always took the opportunity to, you know, the zoo from the beginning always sent me to usually two conferences a year. One of them being the Zoo Veterinary Conference, the other being one of AZA’s, the Zoo and Aquarium Association’s things. Not necessarily their main one, but one of them. And when I would do that, I would spend the time visiting the zoo, visiting, you know, and seeing the exhibits, but also visiting with their veterinarians, visiting you know, whatever. And just taking it in, I guess, and seeing what worked and what didn’t.

And I wanted to know the operations of how, what was good about it, you know?

And you’d see some good exhibits at different places, and you know think, “Well, yeah, we could incorporate some of that.” When you were, did any of them jump out at you like, “Wow, I was at the same,” oh, did you go always when, even where you were director, did you go to the Vets Association?

I continued to go to the Veterinary Association while I was assistant director, but once I became director, I went more towards the AZA than Zoo Veterinarians.

And, so were there things with the exhibits that you saw at other zoos that you said, “Gee, I gotta bring this back,” Any that jumped to your mind that exhibitry, you said, “I think we could do that better,” or, “Boy, that’s a good idea we haven’t done here”?

You know, there are some exhibits in more, in California or Florida where the climate is quite a bit different than St. Louis. And I wish we could do those in St. Louis, but realize that we have to have enclosures or buildings that they didn’t even need buildings anymore, you know, because of their climate. And so you know, in a way it’s kind of envious of what they could do that we couldn’t. I guess the same thing, you know, going to some of the European zoos, or our other international zoos, where their barriers were different. That we had to have, you know, not where the animals were gonna get out, but that people could get in, and well, we had to have something. I remember one exhibit where it was the prairie dog exhibit, and it was probably about a foot high or whatever, or maybe a little more. And the prairie dogs couldn’t get out, but people could just step in there or whatever, at some other zoo.

Well we can’t do that, you know?

You know and again, trying to get the visitor and the animal as close as possible, they could do some of those things in Europe that we couldn’t do, because of the litigious society that we live in. The zoo ultimately revolves around animals.

Let’s talk about, do you have a favorite animal?

(laughing) People always ask that question. That’s kinda tough because I like them all. I will have to say that I lean more towards, not a favorite animal, but certainly mammals more so than birds or reptiles. And that’s probably ’cause of a veterinary issue. Mammals, everything we learn in veterinary school is pretty much mammals, and so you can apply your techniques and everything there. I found the birds very difficult to treat, just because they’re much more delicate. You can’t draw, you know, five CC’s of blood from you know, some birds, that’s all they got. And so birds were more delicate, I thought.

Reptiles were a little slower, and so you could do a lot of stuff with reptiles, but mammals were probably my favorite. And you know yeah, there’s some favorite animals that, you know, that you dealt with. I mean, gosh darn, gorillas are impressive animals.

You know, we had a walrus that was such an interesting animal to work with, you know?

Just some stories, he would have these tusk infections and we’d have to give it, you know, some antibiotics to stop it. Well, if he was eating, that’s fine. You know, we’d just put it in his food. We’d give him something special, give him squid today or something, and you know. But if he stopped eating, well then you’d have to give him an injection. And so we had one time he just would stop eating and he was in his pool.

Well, the only way we could get to him to give him, you know, once he’s outta the water, he’s not very fast, he can’t come after you, you know?

But in the water, I mean you know, so we’d have to drain the pool. So we’d, you know, get there. Okay, you know, “Be there at 3:00, we’ll give the antibiotics.” You know, “Okay,” they’ll start draining the pool. So there he’d be sitting on the bottom. I could climb in there, you know, give him an injection. By the time he’d turn around and chase after me, I’d be outta there. Well, that worked fine for a couple of days. That walrus was so smart, he realized what was happening.

He’d go down to the bottom of the pool and lay on top of the grate so they couldn’t drain the pool. You know, it’d take hours to drain the pool. I mean, it was just such a neat animal to work with. So just different things like that kinda gets you, you know, attached to some of them.

What animal species, if any, would you consider to be the most significant that you acquired during your career, or had input in acquiring?

Oh well, the zoo acquired, you know, we were centers for reproduction of some. Speke’s gazelle was one that we did a lot of, and we had, at one point I think, all but two of the Speke’s gazelles in captivity, and was getting down to the, you know. So we did a lot of work, and we were fortunate that we were successful with artificial insemination with the Speke’s gazelle, and it was like, “Wow, that was,” you know. And you know, the keepers and the curators and veterinary staff, everybody was involved in that. It wasn’t a one-person thing. That was one of the highlights. The zoo has done a lot of stuff with hellbenders, and now releasing back into the wild with so many of them. But the zoo has continued to always have a well-rounded collection representing all, you know, of the animal kingdom, I think.

So I don’t know that we have acquired new things over the years, that many new species. We’re always changing a little bit, but it’s dependent mostly on, you know, endangered species. We don’t deal too much with the, you know, you gotta have some things there, but we concentrate on the endangered ones.

Just a quick, can you explain what a hellbender is?

Oh, a hellbender is a salamander. It’s a large, you know, salamander, and it’s the Ozark hellbender that we’re talking about, that is, you know, I’m not sure what its status is, whether it’s threatened, endangered, or what, the Ozark hellbender in Missouri streams. And it was certainly less and less, and it’s a huge project with the zoo and the Missouri Department of Conservation in working on these, and we’ve been extremely successful now in reproducing them. Had the first ones born in captivity and now, and those were from ones that came from the wild, and now even been successful in breeding, ones that were born in captivity, and you know, releasing them back into the wild is happening all the time. Thousands of them have been released back. I wanted to ask you some questions about working with some of the animals that may stand out to you, and possibly some of your favorite stories.

There was an accident at the university?

Oh, well the accident was not at the university. It was in my own, when I, in the first years there, I mean, I guess I’m a workaholic, ’cause I would work late all the time. And when I first there, I was learning everything, and just getting, as the first veterinarian, I’m putting together the animal records system, the whole bit, or the veterinary records part of it. And so on the weekends I’d often go back to the university, and I had some animals that I hadn’t completed the necropsies on, so I had them in the trunk of my car. And it was late on Friday evening and I was tired, and I was falling asleep on the highway. You know, I probably shouldn’t have been driving, but I was still driving, and it was like 10:00 at night. And once you get up into, the University of Missouri’s Veterinary school’s in Columbia, Missouri, and you get there and you get off the highway, and I’m on the street going towards the, you know. And at that point, the utility poles, telephone poles, are right next to the road.

I was already falling asleep on the highway. Well, then you just end up on the shoulder. Well, here I fell asleep again, ran into this telephone pole, knocked out the power, all the houses around, I don’t know how many miles, but certainly all around there. Make a loud noise, and you know, the telephone pole breaks in half. My car, I’m rolling over in the car. And you know, and I get out of the, I end up, the car is on its side, and I climb out the top, and the first person come by, came to the scene, everybody’s coming out of their house ’cause they don’t have electric anymore, and the fire engines are running and everything else. First one happened to be one of the professors from the veterinary school and he came over.

“Bill, Bill,” he says, “did you see what happened?

Did anybody get hurt?” I says, “Well no, I didn’t see what happened.

I don’t think anybody got hurt, ’cause I’m the only one that was in the car,” you know?

Anyway, so then finally they’re turning it over, and the police are there and the people are all around. And you know, they’re gonna tow the car away, so I gotta get my stuff out of there. Open up the trunk.

Well, here’s a peacock in the trunk, you know?

A full peacock that was supposed to get, I was taking it to the vet school to do the necropsies and so forth.

And then we had a snow leopard in there, you know?

Now these things are in plastic bags, but they were clear plastic, so you could see through them. But they’re in bags, and you could hear people.

“Oh, did that die in the, you know, in the crash?

What happened to the,” you know?

They were dead animals. But so you know, it was quite the scene there for a little while.

There was a chimp and gorilla in a plane?

Oh no we, of course all the time were shipping animals, and taking animals in, and different times, well we worked with whatever the zoo was. One of the gorillas, I accompanied the gorilla to, we were shipping it, I think that was onbound to the San Diego Zoo. And so it had to go in a cargo plane. We had it in a cage, but I accompanied it. And it was this huge cargo plane, and it had a stopover at O’Hare. And of course they unload all the stuff there. And it’s out on the runway for a couple hours. And you know, everybody and all the employees for O’Hare are, you know, running their little trucks by to see the gorilla, so you had to take care of it.

But you know, and then you’re talking with the pilots, you know, because you’re sitting there. I mean, there’s nobody else on the plane but the pilots and a few other airline people. But you know, so that was more interesting. But then we shipped another gorilla to the Dallas Zoo, where the Dallas zoo sent a private plane up, along with their veterinarian and a couple of their staff. And so we anesthetized the gorilla and loaded it in the plane, laying on the floor. No crate, no anything else, but just with an IV in there. And it went off, and I did not accompany that one. But we did the same thing with a chimp, and that was a, it was a private plane, but it was a little one.

It wasn’t like a big plane that if something happened, you could work on it. It would’ve been, if that thing would’ve woke up on the process, that would’ve been a little bit more difficult to mess with.

Well, now wasn’t a zookeeper, survived a bear attack?

We’ve had several, you know in my career there, we’ve had several injuries to individuals. We had one keeper who thought that he had, you know, turned the little sun bears out. I mean, these are small bears, but they’re still can be, do a lot of damage. They’re a couple hundred pounds or so. And he had thought he had, he had opened the door, the guillotine door, to let the bear out. The bear went out, but must have come back in before he, you know, realized that it had, and he went inside to clean that cage, and the bear got him. Fortunately he was able to knock it down and get outta there and get the door closed. But that was a pretty serious incident.

And anytime you have an incident, we, you know, evaluate the whole thing. And you know, one of the things that we did change, was we surely changed the lighting in that enclosure that, you know it was, those bears are dark black color and the area was not as bright as it could have been, and we did some others. Another incident with, more dramatic, was Bruce Reed was our curator of hoofstock. And we had a zebra incident where the male zebra, A Grevy zebra, not a common, more aggressive zebra type, he wouldn’t come in from the yard into the, we bring them into the stalls inside at nighttime, and they come in to feed or whatever. Well all the mares were in, but this male wouldn’t come in. And Bruce knew that if he walked out into the yard with it, that that animal would come in, and he thought he could run faster than the zebra and it would come in. Well he wasn’t, and the zebra got him, and the zebra grabbed him by the ankle and was carrying him, you know, around in the yard. And of course, one of our security guards was right outside, and keeper was inside, and Bruce was hollering.

And the security guard, our security guards carry guns, .38s, and you know he wanted to shoot, but you know, he didn’t wanna hit Bruce. And so he shot the zebra in the abdomen, which didn’t do anything, you know, to stop the zebra. And the other keeper who was in there came running out with a big shovel, you know, really kinda daring to try to help Bruce, and got the gun from the security guard and emptied it in the skull of the zebra, the head of the zebra and the zebra let go, and Bruce got, I mean, they hauled Bruce out. And Bruce got injured fairly seriously, that he ended up using a cane pretty much the rest of his life, because it damaged a lot of stuff in the ankle.

What lessons were learned from that?

Well, yeah he should not have been in the yard there. Interestingly, the zebra got up afterwards and we immobilized it. We got radiographs with the slugs in the skull, but the zebra survived. The zebra was okay the next day. And the zebra lived for about six months after that. When the zebra died, I don’t know if Bruce was happy at that point, but the zebra died, and we necropsied the zebra, and it died from an impaction. Zebras are like horses, they have a colon, they don’t have a ruminant, they have a colon. And when you have an impaction, that means that the digestive tract, it didn’t, sorta like a intense constipation, I guess you’d say.

And that bullet that went through into the abdomen that they had shot, actually didn’t penetrate the digestive tract, but grazed it enough that there was a huge amount of scar tissue around it, and it constricted the digestive tract, and that zebra died from the impaction six months later.

Now, were there significant changes that you made in the day-to-day care of the animals?

When you were you were able to implement things, did you see things that you needed to kind of change on animal management in any area that you observed, and now you had the power to change or to direct?

Well, you know the management was, I think over the years as we would see things, you change it right away, when you have something that you can do something differently. I mean, I mentioned the bear thing.

“Well, why can’t we add more lights here, you know?

Will that prevent something from happening again?” Every time there’s an incident you go over it, and try to figure out what would be better.

Certainly for an animal escape, an animal injury, whether it’s a personnel injury or whether it’s two animals, you know, fighting themselves and and injuring each other, or what can you do to improve it?

We always would try to discuss that. And you mentioned, you know, injuries. Probably one of the more, well certainly the most serious injury that I dealt with was not caused by animals and it was not a keeper. But we have a train that rides around the zoo, and it’s a Chance train that we had the engineer, we had a train crash, overturned it, and killed the engineer. The train goes, we have five different stations that it stops at, and this one, it comes down a hill and stops at a station, and then picks up passengers there. It was the first train of the, first one of the day. So it had not been on the track before, or you know, it was the first run of the day. So there were only three or four passengers on there.

Normally there could be as many as 100 people on there, ’cause there’s a lot of cars. It came down and instead of, normally, that’s the only hill going downhill, and normally they’re braking down there, braking on it on the way down, and then stop at the station there. The engineer didn’t put on any brakes, and ran right through the station, and there’s a pretty sharp turn afterwards, and it flipped the thing over and crushed him between the engine and the brick wall that was there, and killed him. And you know, he was the only injury on it. The rest of it didn’t come off, but that was most severe.

In the history of the zoo, has that been the only death that has occurred at St. Louis that you’re aware of?

(coughing) Excuse me. There was another death some years later, actually right outside the zoo, which was pretty traumatic. It was a summer afternoon, there was a number of visitors standing outside waiting either to go to their vehicles or to be picked up or whatever. And on the street there, I don’t know whether he was intoxicated or what, but a driver come speeding, and jumped the curb and ran into this crowd of people and killed a young boy. And both were things that I was assistant director at the time, and Charlie was out of town on both of them.

And so I had to deal with the press, and how do you deal with that?

And sometimes, you know the press can be kinda tough to deal with.

Especially for instance, in the case of the engineer that passed away, they wanted to know who he was, what was his name, you know?

Well I knew his name, but I knew that they were still trying to reach his next of kin, you know?

And his wife, you know?

I wasn’t gonna say anything on the air, you know, who he was. And I’d say, “Well, he’s been an engineer for quite some time here, he’s,” you know, and kept avoiding their questions. But it was yeah, a couple of things that you have to deal with that you don’t expect to. You in your career, certainly as director, had to acquire animals from other zoos and from animal dealers. Can you talk a little about animal dealers, and the relationship with St. Louis Zoo and you- Well- Fred Zeehandelaar, and explain who he is, and what your relationship was. Well over the years, I myself was not so much involved in either the purchasing or selling or what of the animals. The curators usually took care of that. Even when I was over them, they still took care of that.

But early on in my career, we dealt with a lot of animal dealers, that’s the way it was done. You sold and traded animals individually with the other zoos also, but a lot of times animal dealers were involved. And we had a Malayan tapir that we had on our surplus list, and Fred Zeehandelaar who was a animal dealer at the time, there were a number of them, and Fred had a lot of contacts in Europe. And so he bought this Malayan tapir to go to one of, I think it was the Frankfurt Zoo. It was one of the German zoos. And so I was veterinarian, this was early on in my career. I think I’d been there maybe a couple of years. Well Bill Hoff was director, so it had to be in the first two years that I was there.

And one of the things, when an animal goes out, it has to have a health certificate signed by the veterinarian, that you looked at it and checked it out, and I had, and it was in good shape. We had it in a crate. I signed the health certificate, and I had started a pretty good medical records program at the zoo. We kept track, and every time I treated an animal, it went into the records. Every time anything happened to, you know, it’s just, I mean it wasn’t done years ago, and it just seems natural that it should have been done, but it wasn’t, and so I started all of that. And so when when I signed the health certificate, I attached its medical records to it, and everything that that animal had, what had happened to that animal, and what we had treated it with and so forth. Well the animal got shipped, and it went to a European zoo and when it got there, it had a discharge coming out of the nose, the nostrils. It was you know, and pretty much.

And they looked through all the animal records and they said, “Oh my gosh, it’s had this in the past. It’s had you know, nasal discharge, you know, several times,” and what I had treated it with, and so on. Well they saw that and they said, “Oh, this is a chronic respiratory problem. We refuse payment to Fred Zeehandelaar.” And Fred Zeehandelaar of course, had already paid the St. Louis Zoo for it. Well, he was not too happy, and he was really upset. And he called the director, says, “Your veterinarian has no right to send any animal records along. He’s supposed to sign the health certificate and that’s it.” You know, and Fred was really rough on him. And Bill Hoff came to me and said, “Well, you just can’t send animal records anymore.

You know, you can only sign the health certificate.” And I said, “Well okay, but all of its animal records is gonna go on that health certificate, I can tell you that,” you know, ’cause there’s spot to put it all in there. And the end of the story was, you know, it turned out okay because at the Frankfurt Zoo, they treated it with the same thing that I had been successful and treating it with, and it cleared it up and the animal did fine. And so Fred eventually got paid for it, but he wasn’t any too happy in the process. Today, if you get an animal from another zoo or you ship, you better have all of the animal records with it, it’s required. You had indicated that previously one of the things in your portfolio was graphics, the graphics department, sign making and so forth. And over the years, zoos have dealt with this issue of people looking at signs.

Do you have any secret about getting people to read educational messages in the zoo?

I don’t know that I have any answers to what’s the best thing. You know, there’s some people that go and read everything, and there’s others who don’t read anything. I do think that, you know, you wanna have interesting information on there. A lot of times all you have is, you know, where the animal came from, you know, what’s its normal distribution, stuff like that. I think if you can have some things, and something short, and if it’s real long, people aren’t gonna read it. It’s just, I don’t have any real good answers for you, I guess, in what’s the best way to do that. You know, you certainly want to educate the people. I think what has helped the best, more so than graphics, is we’ve gone to a huge program, whether you call it docents or whatever, or animal ambassadors, or whatever.

But we have a lot of volunteers who are in front of the enclosures and talking about the animals. One of the things, I remember one time going to a zoo, it might have even been Disney, and it was a huge flight cage. And I was going through, was actually going through with a couple of architects, because we were using these architects to help us with the River’s Edge. And we were going through and, ’cause I liked the exhibit. It was well-planted in the barriers and the screens, and you walk through, like a big flight cage. And the architect was saying, “Yeah, but you don’t see very many birds in here.” And you know, and they had a docent there who overheard the architect saying that. And she was very nice about it. She just got up and kinda walked along and said, “Oh, did you see that there, and this one there?” And pointed out all the stuff that was in there that he was missing, and she did it in such a nice way and helped, and it showed me that, you know, if you have that personal contact there, those visitors.

So one of the things that, I guess I did implement that. You know, but our education department was happy to do it too was, we have a whole cadre of volunteers. And not only volunteers, some of them are paid, who just do that. They’re there to engage the visitor, and engage them along with the animals.

A couple of questions about zoo medicine that you were involved with, possibly as director or when you were veterinarian, hoisting elephants?

That happened even early on. When an elephant goes down, it’s a big deal. And we had a A-frame, huge girders made, and then were able to hoist an elephant, get it up and standing. So an animal then would have time to recover and get back into good shape, that it could stand up on it’s own. And sometimes it’d have to be in a sling for a period of time, but we could hoist an elephant. And we did that on numerous occasions.

Successfully?

One time unsuccessfully I guess, or we were successful in hoisting it and keeping it, but it continued to go downhill and eventually died. And that elephant, and we’re doing a necropsy on it, an elephant is not something that one person to do a necropsy. We had four or five people there with hoses, chainsaws and whatever, ’cause we’re knocking this elephant up into small pieces to put it into 55-gallon drums, that we can get it on the truck, and go either to the render, you know, to dispose of it. And here we’re all in there and I’m opening up, I have already had the abdomen open, and I usually go that way and then go into the thoracic cavity. And I’m cutting through the diaphragm to get in there, and I see these nodules in the lungs, and it looks like TB. And I mentioned earlier about one of our consultants, Dr. Seria, who is a TB expert, human TBs. And he’d been working with us for years. He’d come out every year and TB test all of our employees.

Well, all of our employees that work with elephants, hoofstock, primates and that, not the office staff or that. But we tested everybody annually.

And so he came out, and right away he’s on my case because none of us had masks on, you know?

And so right away we had to all get masks.

Well of course that was way before COVID, you know?

Nobody knew about masks. But we TB tested then all of those employees that were involved with the necropsy, even though they had been TB tested earlier, but we had two people that converted from negative TB test to positive TB test, just from the exposure at that necropsy, to mycobacterium hominis, human TB, not elephant TB, not bovine TB, it’s human TB that that elephant had, and those two employees converted to positive reaction. They immediately got medical attention. Dr. Seria made sure he followed up on them. They got treated with isoniazid for a period of time, and then, and recovered fine. Never did get TB, they just had the exposure though. I didn’t convert to positive, I was still negative, even though I was the most intimately involved there. And the other interesting thing is, the keepers who took care of this animal, this animal had been at the zoo for 20, 30 years.

And it had been part of when we used to have an elephant show, and none of them were positive reactors. They were always negative. But the exposure during a necropsy was far more than than day-in, day-out care of that animal. We’re talking medical things that you’ve been involved with that have been a bit unusual, or lessons learned.

Am I correct, you actually had to deliver a antelope in a tuxedo?

(laughing) Yeah, every year we have a big dinner, dance bash at the zoo with some big name entertainment, and all of our big donors come to that. And it’s a black tie affair, so everybody’s, you know, dressed up. And here we’re at this event and we get a call, the antelope house, that they, I don’t remember whether it was, I think it was an aurochs or a kudu was delivering, and was gonna have difficulty. At this point I was was assistant director, so I wasn’t as much involved in the day-to-day veterinary work. Eric Miller was at the same event, and we were actually talking and Jay Marshall, who was one of our consultants, he’s an MD, he’s an internist and his wife is also a physician. They were also at this big hullabaloo event. And so Eric says, “Well, I gotta go up and deliver, you know, help with this kudu delivering.” And Jay says, “Well, I wanna go along, you know?” And so I, “Well, I guess I’ll go along too.” So here we are up there and Eric and Jay and Jay’s wife, as I said, also a physician.

So they’re all, got the animal immobilized and they’re, and nobody, they can’t, you know, they’re not, and you asked before about my management style, I usually let them go and get it done, you know?

Okay, I’m just kinda standing back watching. And he’s having more difficulty getting that little one out of it. It’s got a breech birth and, and it just didn’t come.

And he’s working and working and nothing, you know?

Of course I have a cattle farm, and I’ve delivered a lot of calves, and there’s just a technique sometimes if, you know, if they’re not in the right position and that, you don’t keep working on it.

You push them all the way back in, reposition it and get it out, you know?

And so after watching for, I don’t know, at least a half an hour to more work, and we’re all in tuxedos still, and I said, “Well, let me have a shot at it.” And I went in and within, you know, three or four minutes had the thing delivered. So it was, I didn’t wanna do that to Eric in front of Jay and everybody, but we got the thing out.

And then went back to the party?

And then went back to the rest of the party, went dancing. (chuckling) Tuxedo looked the same?

I think I probably took the coat off or whatever. (laughing) Can you explain what Johne’s disease is, and how it affected the zoo, and what kind of press it garnered?

Yeah, Johne’s disease is a paratuberculosis, it’s an intestinal virus, I guess. It’s a disease that, we had this whole herd of Barbary sheep, mouflon too. We had mouflon and Barbary sheep that both had it. And what would happen with it is, they would deteriorate, get thinner and thinner and eventually die. They’d develop a diarrhea and, and die from it. Well, you would lose one, you know, eh, maybe eight months later we’d lose another. We had about 30 animals in this group, huge group that used to climb up on the rocks in the central part of the zoo. And, you know, okay, well we know we got it in the herd.

Well, the traditional way of dealing with Johne’s disease is you can test all of the animals, do a testing on all of them. Those that are positive, in terms of livestock, you send them to slaughter.

Those that are negative, you keep, okay?

Every year then, or every six months or every year, you test them again. Again, any of them that are positive, you get rid of, you keep the negative. After two years of all negative tests, you can assume you’re fairly clean of Johne’s disease.

Well in a zoo, how do you do that?

I mean again, yeah, we can go ahead and sacrifice the ones that are positive, ’cause they’re gonna die anyway, and probably better to go ahead and put them to sleep than to go through, you know, deteriorating and emaciation and eventual death. But I went to the director, and Bob Briggs was the director at that time. He was the PR guy. And I said, “Bob, here’s our problem. We can go ahead, these have Johne’s disease, mouflon and Barbary sheep, aoudads, they’re not in danger. They’re, (scoffing) they’re a dime a dozen. I mean, you can get a lot of them all over the place.” And you know I said, “But if this starts to spread to all the aurochs and kudu and giraffe and okapi and everything else that we have at the zoo,” which they’re all in the same, close to the same area, and they kinda drain together. I said, “Our best approach is just to eliminate that whole herd of, you know, 30 animals.

They’re not endangered at all. They’re pretty plentiful. There’s a lot of them in Texas, and all over.” And so Bob says, “Okay, so we’re gonna sacrifice that whole group and keep that area empty of any hoofstock for a year.

We can put ostrich in there or something else.” I says, “Yeah, we’re gonna do that.” He says, “Okay, that’s the recommendation,” and I confirmed that with the Veterinary’s College and everything, “Yeah, that’s the way to go.” He says, “Okay, we’re gonna call the newspaper in tomorrow morning and we’re going to tell them what we’re going to do.” Oh my god, you know are we gonna, it’s bad enough that we gotta do it, but now we’re gonna call the press in and tell them what we’re gonna do, you know?

So the next, we brought them in, the next day it hits the front page, huge title on there, you know, “The Zoo Puts 36 Animals to Sleep”, or whatever and so on.

I mean, it’s a terrible thing, you know?

Or, “Puts 36 Animals to Death”, and that. But when you read it then, read the article, it talks about, a little bit about Johne’s disease, and then it says how forward-thinking the zoo was, and how great they were to be able to prevent this from spreading to all the other, you know, animals at the zoo.

And it just you know, brought home to me a little bit about PR and keeping everybody informed, and telling them what to do, you know?

Good lesson. Good lesson.

Another, going from hoofstock to felines, you had a cheetah, I think you mentioned earlier, that had cataracts, and how was that diagnosed and how did you treat it?

Well I mean, we could tell that that animal, I mean you could even see, cheetahs of course, they’re the most docile of the big cats. I mean, we used to always go in with the cheetahs, but we would never go in with any of the other big cats. But as a veterinarian, we would go in with the cheetahs, and we could get a control stick on it. We could draw blood sample without anesthetizing them. And so we could pretty well diagnose that there was some issues with the eyes, And we were gonna have to, and it was cataracts. And as I said, again we have our consultants, and in this case we had three different ones that were ophthalmologists.

And so who gets to do it, you know?

And the veterinary ophthalmologist did the majority of it, but the other two ophthalmologists that were human ophthalmologists were there to check it out.

Was that- Was that groundbreaking surgery, or was that routine?

Well I think, you know, I mean it was, cataract removal’s done all the time, you know in people, and of course in dogs all the time. But, and another interesting cataract removal was, was here at the Brookfield Zoo. The Brookfield Zoo had an elephant that had cataracts, and the veterinarian at the time was a little concerned, and wanted me to come up to do the anesthesia for the immobilization, and they had a veterinary ophthalmologist coming from maybe, I don’t remember whether it was Purdue or University of Illinois, but a ophthalmologist, I mean a veterinarian who was board certified as an ophthalmologist. And he was doing the surgery, but I was going to anesthetize the elephant. And I met with, night before with, I forgot his name, but he and George Rabb, the director of the zoo, and the veterinarian, and how we were going to do this, and I was gonna anesthetize it. He says, “I just need probably about, you know, 15 minutes of complete immobilization.

That animal can’t move its head at all or anything, ’cause I’m gonna be in there dissolving that cataract, and getting it out of there.” Well, the first difficult part was, I better make sure that when that elephant goes down, that he goes down on the left side, because cataract’s on the right side and he’s not gonna be able to get to it, and we’re not gonna be able to turn him over, you know?

So you know that was, you know the elephant was pretty docile, pretty easy to handle to give it an injection, but how are we gonna get it so that it fell on its left side?

And fortunately it did. I got them to get the animal as close over to a wall as it could, and get it to fall. But instead of taking 15 minutes, it took about two and a half hours to get it, to complete the procedure. And it was not easy to keep it, I mean, we had an IV going and we could monitor the anesthesia, and keep it at a level of immobilization that they got the work done.

What tranquilizer were you using?

I did use M99, or etorphine, in the initial knockdown of the animal, but then we maintained it on barbiturate anesthesia.

And just because you mentioned outside activities, and going to Brookfield to assist with them, you also had some outside activities with San Francisco Zoo?

Well, that was not to treat an animal. That was the, the veterinarian there was, they had some issues with the veterinarian. There was an acting director there who called us in. There was myself and two other veterinarians that were, Mary Fowler being one of them, Phil Robinson the other. And we went to evaluate indeed, whether there was malpractice on the case of the full-time veterinarian there, because they had accused him of all these things, of not working well. And when we got there, that wasn’t the case at all. I mean he was doing, you know, there may have been some issues that his bedside manner, if you call it, was not that great. And his communication skills was not that great.

But certainly he was practicing good medicine. So you’ve had outside activities, but certainly the main of your focus has been at the- Oh, St. Louis Zoo, yeah. And you had to at one time dart a chimpanzee.

You’re a pretty expert shot, and what occurred?

Well, not at one time. I darted lots and lots of chimpanzees, and lots of animals. And of course you wanna, especially if you’re using the Palmer capture gun, you wanna hit them in, you know, one of the large muscle masses. Usually the leg muscles are the, you know, the best and biggest, easiest to hit. And a lot of times the animal’s kinda running away from you, so that’s easy. Well, chimps and primates are quite different. They’re not running away from you, and especially if they’ve been darted in the past. They’re jumping up and hollering and yonking, and throwing stuff, whatever they got in their cage at you.

And I mean, you know you’re there, and so you’re hoping to get into the large muscle masses, usually in the back leg. And (chuckling) unfortunately at that time I darted and the animal moved it or whatever, and instead of hitting in the leg, it hit the animal in the testicle. And needless to say it was, I mean, it did anesthetize the animal and the animal did fine, but not exactly where I wanted to hit it.

The keepers, oh gosh did they jump. (chuckling) Now you’ve worked with big cats, and you’ve had to work with cheetahs as you mentioned, and you had one cheetah that woke up in the transportation?

At one point we had, our x-ray machine wasn’t working. I don’t remember even what was wrong with it, but we had a veterinarian in town that said, okay, we can transport the animal over there, and you know, we can use their, you know, x-ray machine. And we did transport the animal over there, and got it X-rayed, got the films that we wanted, and we were heading back and we were in a van, and the cheetah was starting to wake up.

And I’m telling the driver, “Speed it up,” you know?

He says, “We’re already going 10 miles past the speed limit.” I said, “I don’t care, go 20 miles past the speed limit. We gotta get back to the zoo. I don’t wanna give it anymore anesthesia. It’s doing fine right now, but it’s gonna be awake before we get back there, you know, and it’ll be fine.” You know, he’s going faster and it wasn’t long, and there’s a cop car following behind. And now it was zoo van, and so it’s got a license plate that says St. Louis Zoo on it. But he’s following us, you know, with his lights on now. And I had two other guys in there. I mean, I was doing the anesthesia, but they were holding on, you know, and they had the control sticks on there.

I said, “Raise the head of the cheetah a little higher so that cop can see what we got in here, you know?” So they raised it up, you know, high enough that it could see through the window. And he never stopped us, we got on in. I don’t know what happened, but we got there without getting stopped by him. And the cheetah woke up fine when he got to the zoo.

And what hospital was that?

That was Dr. Eschenroeder’s hospital we used at that time.

Now is that a difference between the cheetah and the Barnes Hospital?

Oh yeah, yeah. No, that was just a local veterinary hospital. But Barnes Hospital is part of Washington University, BJC it’s called now. Barnes, Children’s and Jewish Hospital are all one big, huge conglomerate, part of Washington U Medical School. And I mentioned before we had these consultants that we used to have, and one of our residents, we had this cheetah, this is a completely different incident, a cheetah that had some difficulty walking. And we had radiographed it and we saw a narrowing of the intravertebral space, the space between the vertebrae, the disc. And so when there’s a narrowing of that space, it could be a ruptured disc that’s now putting pressure on the spinal cord, causing them to have difficulty using the hind legs. And so that’s what we diagnosed it with, with our x-ray machine, and he was presenting that, our resident was presenting that case.

And Dr. Gilula, who is one of our consultants, was there, he’s a physician, he’s a radiologist at the medical school. And he says, “Well you can’t necessarily judge, just because of that narrowing. There could be some other things going on. You need to do a, you know, CAT scan, an MRI or something on there.” And I said, “Well yeah, but we don’t have those facilities.” He says, “Yeah, but we have it over at the hospital, you can bring it over and we’ll get it done.” And so I said, “Well if you wanna work on that, we’ll be happy to do it.” And so just as a side light, my sister at the time was having back issues. She was having trouble with her spine and she wanted to know, and I had told her, I says, well, “Dr. Ford is the best spinal surgeon, orthopedic person in St. Louis. He’s the guy that everybody, if you got problems, he’s the guy to go to.” And so my sister Maryanne called Dr. Ford. Well she couldn’t even get an appointment to be looked at for eight months. And so she’s already moved her bed from, she lived on a two-story house, and moved her bed down into the living room, ’cause she couldn’t walk upstairs anymore.

And she’s waiting eight months to get Dr. Ford. So that’s just a sideline of it. So Sunday morning after Dr. Gilula set it up, we anesthetized the cheetah. Steve Bircher, who’s our curator of carnivores and I, and a couple other keepers. We got the animal anesthetized, we got it on a gurney, we got it covered over with a sheet, and we’re going in a back entrance to Barnes Hospital, up a different elevator. So we’re not in with the, you know, general public. And we get up to whatever floor it was, sixth floor I think, where they have all the special radiology equipment there. Well, we’re to radiograph the cheetah.

Well, of course Dr. Gilula was there. The specialist who does those things were there. And Dr. Ford was there, who was there just in case that cheetah needed some kind of surgery, you know, that he was going to help on a Sunday morning. So I of course made sure my sister knew where she fell in the line, that Dr. Ford was gonna be there immediately to help a cheetah at the zoo, but couldn’t see her for eight months. But the cheetah had a different thing that they recognized on the the work up there, that it was a, there was a very minute fracture that was visible on their equipment there, when we did all of that workup. And you know, I guess the outcome wasn’t a whole lot different. We didn’t do anything to it, and it recovered fine. But it was just an interesting thing, utilizing again, some of our consultants and some of the other equipment.

I mean, and this isn’t unusual. A number of zoos have had a lot of consultants that have helped, but we did have to come in the back elevator. Now you’ve indicated that working with elephants medically sometimes can be very, have its own unique things, ’cause of the size of the animal.

But you were involved with castration of an elephant?

There was a time way back, again, this would’ve been in the 19, that would’ve been its second year that I was at the zoo. It was ’72 or so. Very, very few zoos had male elephants, nobody had bulls. And we had, especially not African bull elephants. A couple had Asian elephants, bull elephants. Murray Fowler was doing some work with a number of zoos where they would castrate the bull elephant, but they were all Asian elephants, and they had been fairly successful. Now with elephants, the testicles are in the abdominal cavity. They’re not descended like most other mammals.

And so it’s a, open up the abdomen and get in there, to remove the testicles. And he had been successful in doing a couple of them on Asian elephants. And we, I discussed it with the veterinary school, with the anesthesiologists there, with the surgeons who did equine medicine, not elephant medicine or whatever. And they said, “Well, we can attempt it.” And the reason we did it was we were gonna, the director had already made the decision to euthanize that animal. We had a pair of African elephants, a male and a female, and the male was extremely aggressive, and no longer could any of the keepers work in with it. Today I mean, most zoos have protected contact, but we didn’t have that back then. We worked in with, we had a whole troop of seven or eight Asian elephants that we worked in with all the time. And the female African elephant we could work in with, but nobody could get close to that Asian male.

And he was so aggressive that when they’d put him out in the yard, he would charge towards everything. He especially hated our security vehicle, it would throw, I mean we couldn’t have him on display. He would throw his feces at all the visitors, and broke a couple of windshields on vehicles, throwing rocks or whatever he could get at it.

And the director had already made the decision to euthanize that animal, ’cause we couldn’t get rid of it otherwise, you know?

And I said, “Well, can’t we at least try to castrate, and see if that will change it?” Because that’s what happened at a number of zoos way back then. I mean, those things unheard of today, but that’s what was taking place. And unfortunately we were not successful in doing the castration, and eventually the animal did get euthanized. Lessons learned. I had a question. One last kinda medical question.

How did you deal, if you ever did, with medical mysteries at the zoo, if you had any?

Well, I think every time you’re evaluating an animal, I mean your diagnostics, it’s a mystery.

“What’s wrong with this animal?” I mean usually, you know, “Why isn’t it, what’s wrong?

Why isn’t it eating?

Why isn’t it doing this or that?” But one of the things that really came home was, we had these stone sheep and there was a herd, probably about 10 or 12 of them, and one died. They all looked perfectly normal, and it was just dead in the cage. You know, okay. Another next day, another one died, and two days later, a third one died.

And they all looked, I mean, you examine them, what’s going on?

And you know, I got involved with our veterinary staff. “What, I mean, this can’t be something infectious. I mean, it just doesn’t go that fast. It has to be something environmental.

Did they spray something different?

Did they, you know, did they use a different cleaner in there?

Did they you know, what about the feed?

You know, did we get our feed from a different supplier?” You know, “No, nobody sprayed anything. Nobody changed any of the stuff they normally clean.” I said, “Well, we gotta stop whatever we’re feeding them right now.” And you know, I thought it must be in the hay, because there’s some things in hay, you know, we get that from a supplier.

And I said, “Don’t feed any of the hay in that barn to any of the animals in the zoo.” Now only the stone sheep were dying but, “Don’t feed it to anything anymore.” So what about our other?

And immediately we sent off hay samples, our supplement, our grain, we sent that off to both the university and to Ralston Purina, who helped us all the time. We sent it off, you know, to be evaluated, to see what’s there. Well it didn’t take them long, and it wasn’t a blister beetle or something in the hay. It was actually monensin in the feed that we were feeding. And monensin is used in cattle feeds all the time, but it’s toxic to sheep. And the place where we were getting our feed had made some batches of pelleted feed for cattle, and it had the monensin in it, and it was bagged up and shipped, you know, for cattle feed. Well, they then were making a batch of feed for the zoo, which was a different formula or whatever. However in their hoppers, there must have been some of the old feed or some of the monensin still attached, maybe you know, to the side, and it got incorporated into the feed that we had fed the sheep, and that was the problem.

We changed it immediately, and of course it cleared it up. A little detective work.

Some of the questions now are, just what’s your opinion about these things?

During the time you were at St. Louis, what had you hoped to accomplish but were a unable to finish?

I don’t know if there’s anything that, you know, was high on my list to accomplish that I didn’t get done. You know, we continued to always improve our educational programs, which were high on the list. You asked about graphics before. I said, “You know, a lot of people don’t even read those graphics,” and instituting a program of getting what we used to call our animal ambassadors, are just our people that engage the visitor all the time. And essentially passing that information that you would find on the graphics to the people personally, and it was so much more effective. And we did accomplish some of that, in terms of education wise. You know, our conservation activities that we were involved with by the time I left, you know, none of those were there in the beginning. And you know, they’re still improving, and more and more all the time.

What was your most difficult time at the zoo, what lessons were learned?

Well, I learned from everybody.

I mean, I learned from the various directors that I served under, I learned from the keepers all the time, you know?

The animal management of what you could get, you know, an animal to do or not do as far as, you know, I was very dependent upon the keepers to know, you know, what’s going on and how they’re doing. But you know, some of it was a physical restraint, some of it was a chemical restraint. And when it came to physical restraint, they had a lot more experience than I did. And so I learned a lot from them. Throughout your career, you had a front row seat in seeing the advances in zoo husbandry and medicine.

What do you think were the most significant changes during your career?

Well no doubt about it, the improvement in the drugs that were available for anesthetizing animals intermuscularly. In other words, the dart gun, and being able to deliver a medication to an animal from a distance, and hitting the muscle. You know, because prior to that, there were other anesthetics, but had to be given intravenously or inhaling, and you know, you just couldn’t do that with zoo animals. Now that you could deliver, you know, medication that was going to anesthetize them, allow you to get in there and draw a blood sample, take radiographs, just examine the animal, you know, that made all the difference in the world.

Any predictions about the future of US and maybe world zoos, either good or bad?

Well, I would hope and I think, you know, with AZA and the accreditation program, they already do all of that.

What makes a good zoo and what’s prepared?

I would hope that that, you know, there’s no question that animal care has to be the top priority. You know, animal welfare is a part of it, and there are some zoos, some roadside institutions that don’t give proper animal care, and I would hope that those would improve or be eliminated, and the ones that are doing a good job, to continue. I’m a new zoo director.

Any advice for a new zoo director based on your experience?

Well, I would hope that you would take your job seriously, but also try to enjoy it. I always took my job seriously. I’m not sure I always, what would you say, smelled the roses or enjoyed, I mean, it was exciting, it was challenging, but it was also difficult. And you know, I was always, you know when you, I guess you’re always concerned that you’re doing the right job, a good job in the right way. And so I guess I put that on myself to try to do a good job, and maybe didn’t step back and just enjoy how great a job it really was.

Now saying that, you’ve given me that advice, what skill set, qualities does a zoo director need today as compared to when you were director?

Well, I don’t know that it’s any different. I think you better be a good people person. You gotta understand your staff, you gotta understand your visitor. You gotta be able to work with people if you’re gonna be successful, and I think that that hasn’t changed.

You know, maybe you could get by with stuff in the past that you can’t now, but there’s no reason to not treat people properly, and you know learn, what’s the visitor expect to get out of this?

What do they wanna know?

What can we do with them?

And the same with your staff, how can you help them?

And so, I think you need to do that.

Do you think that zoo directors today need to, and again zoo directors in general, need to be more adept at fundraising then they were before?

Well, I think that somebody in the zoo needs to be adept at fundraising, and you know, I know one of the things that, that people ask, you know, what makes the best zoo director?

Is it a veterinarian, is it an animal person, is it a PR person, is it a finance person?

Is it a, you know, a business manager?

What makes a good zoo director?

What’s your answer?

Well, my answer is you need to be all of it, you know?

And so if you’re a good finance person, okay, you got that covered. If you’re not a good finance person, you better have a good finance person on your staff. If you’re good at PR, okay. And if you’re not, you better have somebody on your staff who can do that. And so it’s tough to say that one is better than the other. Other than that you better be a good people person for sure. If you’re good at finance, and you know, what you would call an animal person, knows animals, but you’re not good with people, I don’t think you’ll make it as a successful zoo director. You know you just, you need to have all those qualities and nobody can have everything.

So if you don’t, you need to know where your weaknesses are and hire somebody else on your staff who can handle that part of it.

Since we talked about skill sets or qualities a zoo director might need, in your opinion, what skill set or qualities does a curator or a general curator need today as compared to with the staff that you worked with?

Well I think a curator, a little less than a director, may not, I mean they still need the people skills to work with their staff. They may not necessarily be as adept at finance, or PR or something like that. Because as a curator, you need to have the animal knowledge, but you still need to be able to work with your people.

So what do they have to bring to the table, these curators?

What would you be looking for if you had to hire a curator today?

Well, I would want them to of course, be proficient in their animal knowledge and their animal skills. But again, they’re managing people. They’re not doing the day-to-day work with the animals. The keepers are doing that. And so you know, they need to be able to manage the people who are taking care of the animals.

What would you think are, what would you say is the largest professional problem facing US zoos today?

And whatever that professional problem is, what can we do to correct the problem?

Well, I don’t know what you mean by a professional problem, what- Probably dealing with animals, or fundraising, or something that has to do with the operation of the zoo. What are the big problems- In all US zoos that you may see.

Oh, you’re talking about what curators have to face, or what directors have to face?

Well directors- Or what problems, zoos in general, as it affects directors and curators and all the staff, and is there, well things that might correct these issues?

Well, I think attitudes are changing of the general public, the visitor. I mean you know, you have to have the funding to continue to do the various programs at the zoo. And so, I guess fundraising is part of it there. But the attitudes of the general public is different. The attitudes towards animal rights is different. The attitudes towards animals in general in terms of livestock, and providing food on the table is different than it was. Animal welfare and animal rights has changed drastically in the last 50 years. And so you need to be attuned to those and, you know, be able to just work with them.

Now, did animal activism or animal rights affect the St. Louis Zoo?

Very little.

I mean we were, I think within our own staff we had, I mean, everybody is concerned about the animal welfare, and is it, you know, the best?

What’s the best thing that we can offer these animals, and what’s the best thing that we can do for them?

And I think again, times have changed. And what we were able to provide, today almost all of the exhibits are much larger than they were before, more space, more natural surroundings instead of the bars and sanitary concrete floors. So those things have tried to provide for the animals better, and I think that the staff has always been trying to do that.

Did we have problems with animal welfare or animal rights people from the outside?

No, we didn’t. We had a close relationship with the Humane Society. I mentioned that I used to work there, and we continued to utilize them, that they were always very supportive of us. We did not have issues with animal rights in St. Louis. Which is, I mean again, zoos that are in larger metropolitan areas have more difficulty I think, because they’re farther and further away, removed from the farm, and so they don’t understand animals as much. I mean, their animals have been cared for differently. But in 2006 when you were director, you had protests from animal rights group about your elephants. We had an animal rights group, and so they had a demonstration.

I think there were four or six people who showed up for it. So there weren’t very many that were, I’m not sure, the animal rights group was not in St. Louis. They were complaining about the elephants and their lack of space in your zoo.

If they were complaining, you know we, in 2006?

Because we already had built the River’s Edge, much earlier than that, and had very large exhibits when we changed from our old elephant house to that. And I would’ve agreed with our old elephant house, that they needed a lot more space.

Have you had to have dialogue with animal activists while you were in your leadership position at the zoo?

Yes, I recall being on a couple committees actually with some animal, I guess you’d call them animal rights people. But because we had such a close relationship with the Humane Society that it was, you know, we had them really supporting us.

Did you find it, do you think there’s a way for zoos to achieve some relationship with animal activists or animal rights?

I think when I got involved with a little bit, I said I was on some committees with animal rights people, it was actually dealing, for the city of St. Louis, because their animal control group was considering some different things. And I think trying to understand where they’re coming from, and trying to get them, you know, and hopefully they can understand where you’re at, and sometimes meeting some middle grounds. And sometimes, you know, they open your eyes and say, “Yeah, I think you’re right there.

I think we can do better.” Did you have an issue with animal rights people when the St. Louis Zoo wanted to purchase an elephants facility in Arkansas to turn it into a breeding facility?

That’s when I think we had a few protestors, and we were part of a group that was looking at getting facility in Arkansas that has some elephants down there in large open spaces. I don’t know exactly how big they are, but acreage.

And because there was some thought that elephants oughta go to some of these, I don’t know what they call them, not a rehab center, but a- Sanctuaries?

And some of the sanctuaries that we were aware of, we thought that our care was much better than what they got at the sanctuaries. So we were looking at a place in Arkansas, which just never did come about.

Was that, that was not just St. Louis, that was with group of zoos?

Oh yeah, that was with a whole group of zoos. Now you’d mentioned I don’t know what happened to that facility in Arkansas, whether anything ever came of that, because it was essentially, well you know zoos who are, you know, over the years the elephant SSP, species survival plan for elephants, has made a lot of different recommendations. And of course one of them, because some zoos had single animals, and you should never have single animals because they’re such a social animal, and a lot of things like that that were great advice. And so there were some smaller zoos that either had to pair up their animals, or get rid of them, and so that was a place that I think was potential for them. You had mentioned before about the animal acts in St. Louis. The primate- Acts and all that- Yeah.

Yeah, now St. Louis was famous for its animal acts, why did they stop?

And do animal shows like birds in flight or other types of things, demonstrations of marine mammals, so forth, help to get the message across to visitors about a group of animals or a conservation effort?

What’s your opinion about, generally about that?

Well, we had three different shows as I started. We no longer have those shows. We still have a sea lion show. At one point we did have a show that we tried with birds primarily flying in, a lot of hawks, and I think birds of prey. In terms of the visitor, it was not as as popular, I guess, as the old circus acts. And they were, I mean they were just like a circus. They were better than the circus acts, ’cause they, you know those chimpanzee shows, they’d have 15 chimps on the stage at one time, riding bicycles, motorcycles, just doing all sorts of things. But we, as time changed, because that was popular back in the ’60s or whatever, but as time changed, it wasn’t getting the right message across, because it was dressing the animals up in clothing and having them do odd things that would not be natural.

And so gradually we moved away from them and into more conservation activities. We still have a sea lion show, and that’s still a popular entertainment thing, but it is also a very good educational thing. They do try to get the messages across to the people. I think, you know one of the things that did learn, I guess, in my time at the zoo, was that it would bother us sometimes. We’d have this exhibit that we spent a lot of money to make it all natural, and the right barriers to keep the people protected and so forth. And here would be, maybe a roadside zoo that allowed you to feed the animals, and give them bottles or whatever, and the people would, you know relatives of mine would come back and, “Oh yeah, the St. Louis Zoo was okay, but boy we got to feed these animals. We got to touch these goats, and we got to do this.” And you know, how excited they were because of that close contact. And so, I think zoos have to look at things.

People, you can’t just feed them information and expect them to keep coming back. People come to the zoo to have a good time. Now when they’re there you can educate them, and get them, you know I think, change their attitudes or their opinions. But if they’re not having a good time, they’re not gonna keep coming back. I think you know, you talk about the animal rights people that object to say, some of the animals that are used in TV shows or whatever, “Flipper” and some of the old ones, you know, that were there. Those animals really changed, if you didn’t have those TV shows that were doing that, you would not have changed people’s attitudes of, “Oh wait a minute, these are pretty neat animals,” ’cause they wouldn’t have known anything about those animals. But because of, and of course there’s a lot of wildlife shows on now that show, of wildlife, and you know, starting with “Animal Kingdom”.

So these are, would you say those and maybe others are factors that changed the zoo, St. Louis Zoo, as an entertainment venue, which I think was envisioned by the Vierhellers- Vierheller was the first director of the zoo- To be more of a conservation center?

Well I think it’s been a gradual change. You know, Charlie was instrumental in helping to change that. Hopefully I was part of that, and to educate the visitor about these animals. Now can you, people will say, “Well, we really don’t need zoos,” ’cause today you can get it all over the internet, or you can can watch all the various wildlife shows that are on TV, so you don’t need zoos. However, I would say this about it. You don’t never need to go to a football game or a baseball game, because you can watch it on TV. And you get a much better view, you can see the instant replay. You can see it from all these different angles.

Why would people ever pay to go to a football game or a baseball game or any sporting event?

‘Cause you can see it on TV for nothing. Well, it’s not the same, it’s a different experience. And going to a zoo is different than seeing, you know, to see an elephant, you know, or a tiger, or any animal in person is different than seeing it on the tube.

Would you say that the role of the zoo veterinarian has changed from when you started?

Definitely, I mean I think when I started veterinarians in the zoo were something new, because there were very few of us, because we didn’t have the drugs to even be able to do good veterinary care. And so that has changed. I mean you know, the medical care is still the major portion, but I think zoos have realized that veterinarians can offer more than that, and offer advice on nutrition, housing, sanitation, all the other things that are part of it. And so, you know and some veterinarians like myself got more involved in other aspects of the zoo, in terms of administration too.

Can zoo animals be reintroduced into the wild, if there is a wild to do it?

I think that there are some species that can be introduced. There’s some species that are gonna be very difficult. The predator animals, especially some of the carnivores, you know, wolves, big cats, stuff like that, is very hard to introduce them, because you gotta be able to teach them how to hunt and everything. You know, even a good example, it’s not a predator, but the condors, the California condors that have been reintroduced. You know, you gotta be able to teach them how to survive in the wild. And you know, it has been successful, but not without a lot of work. The prey animals, some of the hoofstock, or I mentioned the hellbenders, that’s a little easier. We’re reintroducing burying beetles, a little beetle that we’ve been very successful in reproducing and reintroducing them in the state of Missouri, and that’s pretty easy to do.

Some species, much harder. Also, some species may not have the environment or the habitat to be able to reintroduce them.

Do you have any thoughts on new trends in zoos in the last quarter of the century?

Example, the drastic reduction of animal species in zoos, in the collection, immersion landscaping.

Any thoughts on these type of trends, or trends that may come up?

Well, I think immersion landscaping is something that we pushed for years ago, rather than you know, making them to appear to be in their natural habitat. That was not too difficult to do. I think that in terms of lessening the number of animals, or I’m not sure exactly, certainly the number of species. To save a particular species, you often need a number there. You can’t have a pair of aurochs, kudu, Speke’s gazelle, anything, and expect to do anything worthwhile. You better have a whole group, and the gene pool expanded. Now you are cooperating with other zoos, but still within your own institution, I know what we end up doing was well, we have less species involved, but we have more of the species that we do have. Now over the years the zoo profession has changed greatly, in the years you have been in it.

Knowing what you know today, would you enter the field when you did, and would you enter it today?

Would you have entered the field when you did, and would you enter it today?

Oh, I definitely would. I mean, it has been a fabulous career and I would, you know I would say to anybody who’s interested that it would be great if they if they can get, you know, if they can do it.

What observations have you made, if any, about today’s zoo directors, their style, their job responsibilities?

Well you know, each institution is a little different, of what their needs were. I think of, you know we were fortunate at St. Louis to have the tax base to start off, but that eventually was not enough. And to do all the programs that we wanted, we increased that tax base by creating the Zoo Museum District. But then we’ve increased our funding by, you know, lots of very supportive people that wanted what we were doing to continue being done. And so you know, funding of it is still part of that.

Do you believe that animal keepers, and you mentioned, because you published so extensively, do you believe that animal keepers, younger curators, veterinarians, are aware or understand the knowledge of people such as Heini Hediger, Lee Crandall, Bill Conway or Dr. Murray Fowler?

Is this important for them to know who these people were, and what they wrote about, and what they tried to put forward to this profession?

Well, I think those are all historic individuals who helped to shape the profession that we have. And it’s important to know where we were and where we’ve come from. So in terms of that, I would also add to that, those are people who published. But also in terms of people who have, you know, put the profession further along. I mean the Marlin Perkins and the Jack Hanna that have done it, not by publishing, but by filming things, and bringing those to the public. And even, you know, way back before “Animal Kingdom”, “The Zoo Parade” was one of the things that brought zoos to everybody without publishing it and without, in the printed form, but you know, bringing it to the general public. So that’s important too. Now they publish, the printed form is more for the, you know, the knowledge of how to care and take care of those animals.

How would you describe conventional zoos now?

What would you like to see them become in the future?

Well, I think they have to, I mean, conservation and education and research are still the main purpose of zoos, but I don’t think they can forget the fact that entertainment has gotta be part of it, or the visitors aren’t gonna come. You know, people don’t come to the zoo because of the research that you’re doing. People don’t come to the zoo, again because of some of the conservation or educational things. They come to see the animals, to, it’s often a family outing with, you know, mothers with young children, or families with young kids, or teenagers on dates, or what have you. They’re coming as an entertainment venue more than anything. You had mentioned that people you knew sometimes would say, “Oh, St. Louis Zoo is great, but oh my gosh, we got to go over there and feed a gazelle and give it a bottle,” or whatever they said.

Do you think, how can zoos incorporate that kind of excitement to people visiting their zoo?

How do they get that feeling for them to wanna be at the St. Louis Zoo and say, “Oh my gosh, you should see what we did,” or could do or saw at that zoo?

Well, I think you can do some things with domestic animals to allow, especially children to get to touch an animal. It’s so much different, you know, being able to touch it and hold it, to pet a, whether it’s a rabbit or a guinea pig or whatever. And so many of the, you know, I still think there’s a place for what some zoos call the farm in the zoo or whatever, because today there’s so many of the, especially in the metropolitan areas where people have no association with anything except maybe a dog, but you know, or some pigeons flying around. But unless there’s a place for them to be able to have that contact, they won’t. And you know, it used to be years ago I’d think, well everybody had a, you know, a grandparent or an uncle or somebody that had a farm that you could go and see their cattle, or sheep, or chickens, or whatever. You know, today there are kids that don’t know where eggs come from and milk comes from, and that, you know, other than the store.

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

Hmm, I guess I’d have to think about that. I’m not sure that I got advice from anybody about it, but I just, I was always willing to work with people, you know, and try to find out what made them tick.

What made them, what were they having problems with?

What did they like to do and why did they like it?

You know, so I was always more interested in finding out the, you know, whether it be staff members or whether it be visitors. I don’t know if I answered your question very well. Well, it’s a follow up.

Did you have staff members that maybe were not producing the way you wanted them to produce, and helping find out what made them tick helped the situation?

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, I remember some of the staff that, well, they didn’t like what they had to do, you know?

And, “Well, can somebody else do that instead, and give you the part that you do like to do?” We did that a lot with the maintenance people. In the keepers areas, you know, it was a matter of, well you know, there were different duties if you were an elephant keeper as opposed to in the birdhouse. And you know, sometimes in the birdhouse you had to take care of all of the plants as well as the animals, and some of them, well, they didn’t like that. “Well, let’s go to an area where you don’t have to take care of plants.” And so we were able to move people around, or give them the stuff that they were good at. And I think that, you know, a good manager tries to get his people to be productive. They wanna be productive. They don’t wanna be slouches, you know they don’t, if you have some, you know, seldom in the zoo do we have anybody that wasn’t really dedicated. It was one of the neat things about working at the zoo.

The people were all, it was no problem if you had an animal, “Oh well, this animal’s gonna have to be watched, you know, all night long.” Oh everybody, “I’ll do it, I’ll do it.” You know, everybody was really dedicated. I don’t know whether that was just because it was a zoo, or just because it was the St. Louis Zoo, but it was a great feeling. You know, people didn’t think of it as, “Oh well, you know, it’s getting on. Oh man, I got another hour here before I get to leave.” You know it was, “Oh wow, this is neat. I can hardly wait till tomorrow.” Now, in St. Louis it was a fairly big operation.

Do you believe, what can a small or a medium-size municipal zoo do today to be involved in wildlife conservation nationally or even internationally?

Well I think it, you know, I think they want to be involved and would be involved. I think if anything, it’s a budgetary restriction that would cause them to not be involved. Because if you, you know, you have to have the budget to be able to take care of your animals and your staff first, before you can be sending money, you know, to do programs in other countries. And so it would be difficult, you know, to be running programs in other countries. But they can always latch on to other zoos that are doing them, and become part of that activity that’s being done. There’s a lot of zoos that work together, a number of zoos together, to accomplish various projects.

Should every zoo strive to have a breeding program?

Not necessarily. You know, if you have endangered species, or species that need to be reproduced, and a breeding program of that, then yes. But if you have, there’s some zoos that may be just for display. Some common zebras are different than Grevy zebras, that would be endangered. But if you just have common zebras there, there’d be no reason to necessarily be breeding them, or you know, even reticulated giraffe. Maybe you don’t, you know, they’re represented already and they would not need to be, continued to be breeding. Now a constant complaint, or at least somewhat of a complaint from zoo directors is there are too few good curators in the community today.

Do you believe that’s true, what’s the problem?

How should curators be trained today to do what is expected of them?

I guess I’ve never heard that complaint that much, because we always had people coming up in our ranks. You know, we didn’t always hire from within. If there was an opening, if a curator left, we had a number of curators and you know, and staff who went to other zoos. You know, it was usually a step up. They were curator at our zoo, they became director at another zoo. They were keeper at our zoo, they became a curator at another zoo. And some of them came back as a, you know, whatever. But we always had keepers who could see what a curator needed to do and what knowledge, and they were always going.

We also had a program that we allowed our staff if they chose to, they wanted to improve themselves educationally, to participate in things. We would help pay their tuition, or what have you. They had to get at least average grades. They couldn’t be failing. But you know, that we promoted education all the time.

What would be the three top qualities in a curator, or that a curator should have today?

What are, in your opinion?

Well they usually, in say a fairly good-size zoo, they’re not the ones day to day taking care of the animals. The keepers are doing that, so they gotta be able to take care of the keepers. They’ve got to be the, and there they need to be good people persons. I mean, they have to again, be able to work with their staff who, but usually, in most case, at least in our situation, most of our curators had been keepers prior to that. And so they also had the knowledge of at least some of the species, maybe not all of them that they were in charge of, but at least some of the species. And so knowing the ins and outs of the animals, of the husbandry of the animal, was also just as important.

What’s your view regarding the hot topic of zoos maintaining elephants in their collection?

Well, I think that’s a good question, because you know, it is of course, an animal that does require a lot of input. It’s expensive to keep them. You got a large area that you have to have. You know it’s, today again, you know, there was a lot of talk about, because there used to be hands-on elephant care, and protected contact and so forth. Well I mean, it was told to me that the elephants have caused more injuries and killed more keepers than all the other species combined. And that’s because, and that’s very simple. We used to go in with the elephants. You didn’t go in with bears, you didn’t go in with, you know lions.

You didn’t go in with a lot of stuff, but you went in with the elephants all the time. And it’s such a big animal that it just, you know, even accidentally you get hurt by getting in their way. And so I think the movement to protected contact is a good one. You know it’s moved to that, and yet part of that was also being able to still carry out all the things that you used to do before. We had a big a program, we were working with elephants, and I’m trying to think of when this started, probably back in 1980s or so, where we were working on trying to, we didn’t have a bull elephant, and yes, we had six or seven cows, and we were working on artificial insemination in elephants. And so we would draw blood samples from the elephants. At one point we were doing it every day. Very easy to do, you just, the ear vein is a big one.

You just flip the ear open, put some, you know, have the hose going with warm water, that vein stands out and you can draw a blood sample. I mean, anybody can do that. Doesn’t have to be somebody who’s skilled. The keepers could do it, and did it. And then we could run the hormones, and we can see that the elephants are cycling about three times a year, not you know, monthly or anything like that. And so that’s the first part of artificial insemination, being able to tell when the female’s gonna be receptive to inseminating, the other part, being able to collect the semen and do that. And then the third part, then doing the insemination and being successful. We used a colonoscope, big scope that you would normally use to do a colonoscopy or whatever, but we could pass it in through the vaginal opening, get all the way up to the cervix with it, and then we could inseminate at that point.

We worked with the Springfield Zoo that did have a bull elephant, that they used to collect semen from, and they agreed. We would know the week that the elephant was gonna cycle and we’d say, “We don’t know what day, but we know it’s gonna be this week.” And, “Well, we’ll send semen up every day.” So every day we would inseminate it. We were never successful with it. We eventually sent two of our females down there to get bred and then, so we have an active program. We had our first, you know, elephant born. Our first bull elephant was the first baby, that we’ve kept as the bull now. But elephants require a lot of effort, and unless you have the space and the finances to be able to back that, then you probably shouldn’t have them in your zoo.

What would you say are some of the most dramatic or important changes you’ve witnessed in animal management?

Oh, we’ve talked about that, I apologize.

What would you say to those people who still believe that zoos are nothing more than places where animals are caged?

How do you respond to that?

Well, I guess like I said before, people come to be entertained, but I think a zoo changes people’s attitudes towards animals. More so than than seeing it on TV, or seeing a movie. That’s helpful also, certainly to see, you know, to see things like “Wild Kingdom” type of shows, but that seeing it in person is a big thing to change people’s attitudes that these things are worth saving, that these things are something that we can’t just let become extinct. And I think, so I think zoos do that, as well as a lot of the video that’s available now too.

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

Well, initially I think funding was a concern. We did deal with that, and I mean, fortunately the St. Louis Zoo now is well funded, including endowments and things, on various activities of the zoo. So funding, I think could be an issue in some institutions. You know knowledge of initially, certainly in terms of veterinary care, but we didn’t know how to do things. We didn’t know the dosage to use of various drugs and things. That’s changed, I mean it’s known. I mean, it’s not like, you know, immobilizing a gorilla now, used to be a big thing, ’cause oh, only a few people have done that, and boy you didn’t do that unless it was really something really serious. Now it’s done all the time.

I think sometimes you needed to step back and say, “Well wait a minute, isn’t there another way of doing it?

We don’t have to, we’re gonna ship this animal to another zoo, but we don’t necessarily have to to anesthetize it to do that.” You can, you know, get it to be trained to go into a crate pretty easily. It’s gonna take a while but, so there are other things that can be done to do that. So I’m a new veterinarian coming to a zoo right out of school.

Got any advice for me?

(laughing) Yeah, I’d say go make sure you’re going to a zoo that has another veterinarian that you can learn from. Don’t do what I did, get there and have now nobody else to talk to about it.

Okay, when you were that young zoo veterinarian, we may have touched on it, but when you were that young zoo veterinarian and you came up, who were you calling to say, “Oh, I’ve never,” other zoo veterinarians or other veterinarians that weren’t in the zoo business?

No, mostly other zoo veterinarians because somebody that wasn’t in the zoo business wouldn’t have the answer to it for me. I mean, now if it was a particular thing, I knew what it was, you know then, you know, if it’s something involving reproduction, I might be talking to the theriogenologist. You know, “Okay, well wait a minute. How do we check the cycle on this animal?” Or you know, “What do we use for an extender with the semen,” or whatever. If it’s something that is already done in domestic animals and we could convert it, then I would be talking with other veterinarians from the university or whatever. But if it was something in dealing with a zoo animal, I would talk to veterinarians that would’ve had that experience.

What should zoos be doing to prepare for the future?

Any thoughts as to what zoos will look like in the future?

I think they’ll be much more naturalistic-looking facilities. I think that there will be, I would hope that they would be able to acquire more property and not be real small institutions. I don’t know how they might look differently.

No, you don’t think they’ll look differently, or will they be more like White Oak, or less like, you know?

Well, it’s kinda interesting, you know?

The St. Louis Zoo at this point has acquired a parcel of property. I forget whether it’s three, 400 acres, that they’re going to be developing. You know, and a lot of other zoos have gotten breeding farms or whatever, some of them. San Diego with the Wild Animal Park is probably one of the biggest ones of that. But that either create a drive through, or you know, a larger area where they can have larger groups of animals. But, like the place in Yulee, Florida that is pretty much, you know, it’s not geared to the public as much as it is to breeding, and that’s a different role.

So if you could make the choice, what issues would you like to see zoos address in the future?

Well, I think education is key to everything, and changing people’s attitudes. And I think zoos already do that, and need to continue to do that, and make them aware of what is the plight of endangered species. And there’s several things involved that are beyond what a zoo can reach. I think what we can do is take care of educating, and changing attitudes within our own city or country or state. But we’re not gonna be very successful in changing things in the wild in Africa. I mean, we can work on various conservation programs, but if you’re not controlling the human population that continues to expand, and need more and more area just to live, much less area to grow crops and provide food for them. The same thing is happening in agriculture, in that we’d better be getting more efficient at growing what we’re growing, or we’re not gonna be able to feed the world with the way the population is increasing. And so there’s some things that we’re not gonna be able to reach or touch or take care of.

If I asked you what your, professionally what your proudest accomplishment was, what would you say to me?

I guess I would say that, I was very proud of the way that the zoo responded to me and how I responded to them. And I’m talking about the employees and that, because when I got into it, it was really new. Zoos didn’t have veterinarians, and there were a lot of veterinarians that did some stuff at zoos that weren’t very successful, ’cause they just didn’t have the right attitude to work at a zoo. I valued the knowledge that the curators, and the keepers, and the whole staff had, and learned as much from them as I could teach them, I felt. And I guess that, you know, it’s not something that everybody can do and just, you know.

So I was, you know and I, they’re my friends, you know?

I got along with everybody because I wanted to, and so I think that I respected them, and they respected me as a result.

What do you tell a young person in college to do who has what appears to be a sincere and realistic interest in a zoo career?

Tell them, study, work, read, what do you tell them?

Well, it is quite different than it was when I got in. I mean, to tell veterinary students or anybody today, “Oh yeah, I was offered a job even before I graduated.” They’d say, “What?” You know, they’ve been working 10 years to try to you know, get into a place. It’s just different, there’s a lot more interest there. I would say that today a veterinarian, you know, ought to first off, you know, get their veterinary degree, but they’d better be open to the fact that they may not get a position in a zoo. People, you know you tell them, “Well, I was a zoo veterinarian.” They, “Oh, that’s a job, that’s the perfect job, I would want it all the time.” You know, it’s like, well you know kids who say they wanna be zoo veterinarians, I say, “Well, you gotta go to veterinary school, but you better just study veterinary medicine, because you may not get into the zoo.

And are you gonna be unhappy the rest of your life because you didn’t get the perfect job?

You know, you better be willing to be a veterinarian in private practice or teaching, or some other areas of veterinary medicine, because you may not get into a zoo.” The same thing with people who want to be curators or keepers, they may not get a position right away. I think, you know, most of the time if you can get into the institution and prove that you’re a hard worker and capable, at least in our institution, you would get something eventually, but you’d have to stick it out. Studying, yeah, that’d be, you know volunteering. Those are all helpful to getting in.

Do we still need zoos?

I think they serve a purpose, and yes, I think they change people’s attitudes. We talk about the animal rights people, you know, and saying, well, ’cause they would be the ones who would say, “we don’t need zoos,” maybe.

But how did they become such advocates for animals?

Their attitudes got changed somewhere along the way, you know, to like animals.

What was their experience?

Did they see it on TV, did they go to other zoos?

Why do they have this, you know?

And I think it’s because, you know, they have had that exposure somehow along the way.

How important is community support, and do you think the zoo can survive without it?

Well I guess no, I don’t think it can survive without it. Financially it might, if they have several big donors who say, “Well look, whatever it is you want, I’ll take care of it.” I mean, there’s a number of zoos that are named after certain individuals because they supported it all along. But in general, I think you still need the community support for it to be successful. You have dealt with and mentored a number of young veterinarians.

Without slighting anybody, can you name some of the zoos that your people you have mentored have gone to, and who they are?

Well, a lot of them have- Can you remember them all?

No, I don’t remember most of them. (laughing) Over the years, if you count the preceptors and so forth, there has to be well over 100 veterinary students and veterinarians that have come through our program. Both just learning, a lot of them never did go into, you know something, the preceptors I’m talking about, before, they graduated as veterinarians. They went into private practice, or a number of them are teachers at various universities. They, you know, at least have an exposure and a somewhat, they see what zoo medicine is. And gosh, you know, I would, I’d have a tough time naming them all, because they’ve gone to a lot of different zoos. In the beginning, the residents that we had, you know, went on to Disney and to Brookfield, and to Lincoln Park and then onto Minnesota State Zoo, Denver, Colorado Springs, you know, just all over the place, but I’ve lost track of most of them now. Couple of them have gone on to be directors at other institutions also.

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

What do I know about it?

Yeah, what do you know about it?

Oh my gosh, I mean, it’s just something that I’ve lived all these years and I’ve enjoyed, and gosh, I wanted to get everything, every part of it, you know?

And that’s why I continued to change and do different things while I was, was there, you know?

I keep remembering back that I said I’d stay at least two years. Well you know, I stayed a lot longer than that.

How would you like to be remembered in the profession?

Ah, I know that I will be remembered as a person who worked hard at it, a very heavy work ethic. Maybe too much of a workaholic sometimes, but I hope I would also be, you know, known as being a nice guy and a friend to the people at the zoo. Dr. Bill Boever, I wanna thank you very much for sitting down for this extended interview. Very much appreciate it.