Schmitt's eye for picking mothers wasn't developed in the African grasslands or in some other exotic, Jane Goodall-type field excursion. He learned most of what he knows growing up on a dairy farm outside Springfield, where his father wasted no time teaching him the finer points of breeding large animals. His interest in reproductive science led him to vet school, and later to a reproductive practice in nearby Republic, where we worked nearly 20 years perfecting breeding techniques with cattle. In the early 1980s, Dickerson Park Zoo asked Schmitt to take part in a six-month project to develop a technique for freezing and moving embryos from the horned oryx, a member of the antelope family. A six-month project turned into 17 years of work at the zoo, and a newfound love for the creatures.
Elephants are charismatic creatures.
The way they greet you with their trunks and interact with humans. I can't explain it, there's just something about these animals that is very special. One of the biggest challenges facing elephant breeders is that few zoos have the capacity to house adult males, which are so aggressive they require special holding pens. Transporting males is costly and difficult, and doing so with females disrupts their reproductive cycles. Veterinarians had tried unsuccessfully since the mid-1980s to solve the problem by impregnating elephants through artificial insemination, but they ran into difficulties determining the female breeding cycle in captivity.