As it turned out, many of the zoo's supporters felt the same way. The hospital's opening is a bright spot for the zoo, which suffered a devastating fire in its primate exhibit on Christmas Eve 1995. Attendance last summer was down, and the number of visitors from June through August this year was 464,463 - about the same. A zoo hospital is a peculiarly complex proposition. If you were building a human hospital, for instance, you'd start with the comforting knowledge that all the patients would be shaped more or less the same, with relatively similar requirements.
Patients come in dozens of different forms.
They slither, they hop, they fly. They might have scales or fur or feathers, need desert heat or arctic chill. Some are amphibians. Some are nocturnal. There are more than 400 different species under the care of zoo veterinarians Keith Hinshaw and Donna Ialeggio.