SECRETARY’S REPORT 18l 
national Wild Waterfowl Association, Inc., was appointed to its board 
of directors in July 1958. 
Keepers Burgess, DePrato, Stroman, Welk, and Widman brought 
young animals to the television screen repeatedly. Many of these 
programs were on “Time for Science” from WTTG, which is watched 
by 43,000 students in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Vir- 
ginia schools. A half-hour program devoted to the Zoo was broad- 
cast from WTOP, sponsored by the Friends of the National Zoo, 
and showed the Director and Keepers Maliniak, Stroman, and Gal- 
lagher with a young gibbon, a baby chimpanzee, and two hybrid 
bear cubs. 
Ordinarily the Zoo does not conduct guided tours of the park, but 
exceptions were made for groups of physically handicapped children 
who visited the park. Two groups were from the District of Colum- 
bia Health School, whose children were brought by the Kiwanis 
Club, and another from the Silver Spring Intermediate School. A 
small group of blind children were conducted through the Zoo in 
July 1958. They came from Four Corners (Md.) School and were 
sponsored by the Lions Club International. 
Fifteen members of the Virginia Society of Ornithology, Northern 
Branch, met at the birdhouse to study Central American birds. The 
American Society of Mammalogists, during its 3-day meeting in 
Washington, spent an afternoon on a guided tour of the Zoo. Ten 
students of chordate anatomy from Baltimore (Md.) Junior College 
were taken on a tour of the reptile house by Senior Keeper Mario 
DePrato. 
While the Zoo does not conduct a regular research program as such, 
effort is made to study the animals and to improve their health, hous- 
ing, and diet in every way possible. 
VETERINARIAN’S REPORT 
During the past year further uses of the projectile syringe for treat- 
ment and immobilization of the large animals in the collection were 
investigated. 
With the help of Dr. Warren Pistey of the New England Institute 
for Medical Research, experiments utilizing the drug succinylcholine 
were carried out on numerous species with a view to developing a 
safe method of immobilizing animals for treatment and such routine 
procedures as the intradermic tuberculin test. Successful immobiliza- 
tion was accomplished by this method in the zebu, eland, tiger, lion, 
fallow deer, Virginia deer, gaur, American elk, yak, American bison, 
giraffe, peccary, and red deer. All these were immobilized without 
any form of physical restraint being applied. The full particulars 
of these and other immobilizations are to be published in two papers 
concerning the use of succinylcholine. The first paper was presented 
