User:IllaZilla/Charles Schroeder

Charles Robbins Schroder, D.V.M. (July 29, 1901 – March 21, 1991), was an American veterinarian, research scientist, and zoo director who, during his tenure as director of the San Diego Zoo from 1954 to 1972, founded the San Diego Wild Animal Park (now named the San Diego Zoo Safari Park).

Between 1932 and 1953, Schroeder worked as a veterinarian twice for the San Diego Zoo and once for the Bronx Zoo in his native New York City, and twice for Lederle Laboratories (a division of American Cyanamid) in Pearl River, New York, where he researched and managed the production of vaccines. Returning to the San Diego Zoo as its director in 1954, he took a much more businesslike approach to its management than his predecessor, Belle Benchley, and led a concentrated effort to modernize and improve it. Under his direction, exhibits made of wire fencing were replaced by larger, open-air ones with moats as the primary barriers. New features added to the Zoo under his direction included a new entrance and restaurant, a gift shop, a Children's Zoo, a flamingo pond, walk-in aviaries, a gondola lift, and moving walkways, many of which remain today in some form. He also modernized and expanded the Zoo's research facilities, adding an Institute for Comparative Biology, as well as its marketing and public relations arms, launching the television show Zoorama and appointing Joan Embery as the Zoo's goodwill ambassador. These changes were highly successful, and by the end of his directorship the Zoo's annual attendance exceeded three million visitors and its operating budget had increased from $500,000 to $8 million.

In 1959 Schroeder began proposing the creation of a second Zoo campus, a game farm or nature reserve where species of herding hoofed stock and ruminants could be given greater space in order to increase captive breeding, particularly among endangered species. Over time this developed into an idea for an African-themed "natural environment zoo" on 1,800 acres (728.4 ha) of land in the San Pasqual Valley, featuring African and Asian animals living in large, open-space habitats visible from a monorail tram. Schroeder faced resistance from some members of the Zoological Society of San Diego's Board of Trustees, who feared that investing in such a facility would detract from the San Diego Zoo and hurt it financially. After ten years of effort the San Diego Wild Animal Park was approved; Schroeder delayed his retirement by several years to see it through to completion, and was closely involved in all stages of its development.