Introduction
(John Lehnhardt)

Even before Kumari died, we had planned to breed Shanthi again. We wanted to have another baby, we wanted to start developing our family group, but we didn’t want to move Shanthi to another institution; we wanted to keep her with Kumari, and build our group here, so we want to pursue artificial insemination. It’s never been successful, but we had plans to do that, and then out of the blue Dick Montali had met Dr. Thomas Hildebrandt, one of our next speakers at a conference in Europe, and it turned out that Thomas came over for a six month visiting scientist tour and with him brought some really neat stuff that he had been developing related to elephants, ultrasonic techniques and ideas and instruments for artificial insemination. I think about 30 minutes after he arrived, we had connected and suddenly had launched into a major artificial insemination project with Shanthi.

I'd like to introduce our next two speakers together. They're going to be doing sort of a tag team match-up here with their presentation. Dr. Hildebrandt comes from the Berlin Institute for Zoo Biology and Wildlife Research, and he's been here now for almost 6 months. His specialty is really reproductive pathology, and that's one of his major interests. Dr. Nancy Pratt, who got her degree at Princeton, and is a reproductive physiologist, spent five years at the San Diego Zoo studying reproductive physiology. She came here a little over a year ago and is our curatorial intern. And she is very wonderfully sort of got connected with the elephants and has become a major part of our reproductive program. I think Thomas is going to start first, so Dr. Hildebrandt: