He liked dealing with the animals, but not their owners. The animals he could treat. The owners didn't always follow directions.

That didn't mean his career was over, though. He continued as a vet, but in zoos, not clinics, and became a researcher, studying the effects of radiation on mammals and investigating animal deaths. It was a kind of CSI aimed at the four-legged set; Wright performed necropsies on every animal that died at the N.C. Zoo in Asheboro.

James Francis Wright died in January of a heart attack. He was 83.

Saving the littlest lives

Wright was born in Philadelphia in 1924. He was somewhat of a loner, a man who preferred the company of animals to people, said his daughter, Annette Stallings.

Wright worked in Reston, Va., at the federal Environmental Protection Agency when Stallings was a girl. There, cats were used as lab animals. One day, shortly before the lab was to move to Research Triangle Park, Wright took Stallings to work with him -- it wouldn't be the first time -- and told her to pick out any cat she wanted. She chose a calico and understood, as much as a young child can, that she was saving its life.

The remaining cats were not likely to make the trip south.

Wright tried whenever he could to do animals a good turn.

If a turtle was crossing the road, Wright would pull over, hop out and ferry it to the safety of the shoulder. Should an unusual snake slither across the asphalt, he'd bag it.

"He would chuck it in the back of the station wagon and take it to the closest zoo," said his son, John Wright.

As children, Wright's kids raised horned toad lizards and turtles, plus the omnipresent felines. They have pictures of themselves as little kids proudly clutching tiger cubs. When they went to work with their father, it was not the typical day in the office.

In the 1950s, before they were born, Wright worked at Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York. On the ferry on the way to work, he met his wife.

Soon after, he became the head vet at the National Zoo in Washington, followed by his EPA stint, where he researched the effects of environmental stress on animals.

CSI at the N.C. Zoo

In the early 1980s, Wright began teaching at N.C. State University. Lucky veterinary students would get to accompany him on his weekly trips to the Asheboro zoo. Sometimes, his kids came along, too. Once, a tortoise was feeling under the weather. Wright brought along his daughter to observe as he tended to the plodding giant.

At the zoo, Wright met Mike Loomis, now chief veterinarian.

Wright was a generation older than Loomis, but they'd shared many experiences, albeit at different times. They both studied at the University of California-Davis, worked at the National Zoo and the N.C. Zoo. When Loomis was hired in 1983 as the first full-time vet at the N.C. Zoo, Wright was the zoo's pathologist, examining tissues of dead animals under the microscope, trying to figure out why they'd died. The two vets would go to lunch, but they rarely talked shop. Instead, they spoke of books they'd read or Wright's passion for planes and trains.

Efforts in Africa

Wright didn't speak much of his accomplishments, but after his death, his son found papers in his briefcase regarding a trip he took to Senegal to help establish a national zoo there. The government was damming a river and looking to save the wildlife. It was Wright's job to help select the healthiest creatures and figure out how to immobilize them and move them to their new home.

Animals can act like young children; they don't know how to listen. Say you want to move a lumbering elephant or a recalcitrant rhino. Coaxing doesn't always work. The standard way of persuading animals to submit to a medical exam or relocate from a savanna to a zoo is by shooting a tranquilizing dart that temporarily incapacitates them. Wright helped refine the original dart gun and developed anesthetics in appropriate doses to be used as the tranquilizing agent.

But animals were not his only passion.

Wright piloted planes and drove trains, specifically the steam locomotives restored and maintained by the New Hope Valley Railway in Bonsal, not far from Apex.

He couldn't bear to see animals suffer. When one of the family's house cats was near death, he used his professional skills to put it to sleep at home. When his daughter and her husband called about one of their goats that had begun to drool and stagger, he made a house call and put the goat down.

His aversion to suffering extended to humans, too. His wife, Helen, has had Parkinson's disease for 35 years. Wright was the one to take care of her.

James Wright is survived by his wife, Helen; four children; seven grandchildren; and step-grandchildren.