Dallas Zoo president and CEO Greg Hudson. Photo courtesy Dallas Zoo
The Dallas Zoo announced Monday that its president and CEO Gregg Hudson died last week following a brief, brave battle with cancer.
“Words are simply not enough to express the magnitude of this unexpected loss,” the zoo said in a public statement. “Gregg was a husband, father, brother, son, and a leader in the zoo and aquarium industry — a north star for so many.”
Hudson led the Dallas Zoo since 2006. He spearheaded the creation of a public-private partnership with the City of Dallas in 2009, which made the awarded 11-acre Giants of the Savanna habitat possible.
Under his guidance, the zoo reached the one-million-visitor mark in 2015 for the first time in its history and has maintained a yearly average of one million visitors ever since, according to the statement.
“Leaning into learnings from his early career in the hospitality industry, Hudson strategically emphasized increasing conservation resources and education programming to help fully realize the mission of the Dallas Zoo: engaging people and saving wildlife,” stated the zoo.
Hudson was most recently in the public eye during the Dallas Zoo’s bizarre chimp-napping and vulture-murder era.
And, in fact, he oversaw the organization through some extremely trying times — missing leopard, multiple giraffe fatalities as well as the deaths of an African dog, a baby hippo and a gorilla, and not to mention a park-paralyzing pandemic in 2020-21.
When Hudson gave a January press conference, the public was unaware that he had cancer.
He worked tirelessly as a pioneer for wildlife conservation for 30+ years, serving on the national board of directors for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums as well as on the boards of Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (Rwanda) and the Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education Center (Democratic Republic of the Congo), according to the zoo.
The zoo team “is positioned to, and proud to, build on the foundation of success [Hudson] built here at the zoo,” the team said in the press release.
Hudson’s family asks that donations in his memory go to Dallas Zoo or to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
