Meet Adam Eyres, supervisor of Hoofstock
continued from main page

Evan Blumer, our vet, and the Zimbabwe vet were with the rhinos. There were keepers there from all the receiving institutions as well as help from the Houston Zoo.

We started working animals, cleaning crates, disinfecting, giving shots, drawing blood, etc. early Saturday morning and worked for a little over 24 hours. As we finished animals and loaded them onto trucks some of the workers would leave with them. Since the four animals coming to Fossil Rim were the last to leave, so were we the last to leave.

We got many, many hours of black rhino handling all in one weekend, then drove those animals to Fossil Rim and unloaded them Sunday afternoon. Not much sleep, but a great experience.

Highlight of the weekend was the media circus. There were probably 100 people from different media all trying to get stories. One of the young male rhinos was released from his crate (on purpose). As we were trying to work with him he got a little antsy and started pulling on the ropes that were holding him. Before too long he had a good 'crack the whip' going with 3 or 4 animal people on the rope being slung around the hangar. The funniest was seeing a camera guy, reporter and sound guy all getting pulled out of the way by this huge Houston Zoo Keeper. They had no idea what was going on--or maybe I had no idea what was going on since I was one of the guys getting whipped around the hangar by the rhino. All in all, no people were hurt, no animals were hurt and those 10 rhinos were the foundation of the current black rhino breeding group in North America.”