Beginning in the 1910s he made many expeditions into Asia for the purpose of hunting and collecting exotic animals, bringing over 100,000 live specimens back to the United States and elsewhere for zoos and circuses and earning a reputation as an adventurer.

He was also briefly a director of the San Diego Zoo, displayed wild animals at the 1933–34 Century of Progress exhibition and 1939 New York World's Fair, toured with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and co-authored an autobiography, 1941's All in a Lifetime.

[1] According to a 1957 article about Buck's life, "For years he avoided telling about the poker game that staked him to his first venture in South America, instead claiming he had skimped and saved as an assistant taxidermist in a museum.

Robinson, a pet store owner from the third generation of a family of San Francisco animal merchants, recalled from over a distance of some 50 years "the day Buck barked frantically over the telephone, 'Come quick, Ansel, the panther escaped when we were unloading it!'

[14] Buck was assigned to visit Japan, China, Hong Kong, Straits Settlements, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, Java, Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and British Possessions.

[5] By the 1940s, Frank Buck claimed to have captured 49 elephants, 60 tigers, 63 leopards, 20 hyenas, 52 orangutans, 100 gibbons, 20 tapirs, 120 Asiatic antelope and deer, 9 pigmy water buffalo, a pair of gaurs, 5 babirusa, 18 African antelope, 40 wild goats and sheep, 11 camels, 2 giraffes, 40 kangaroos and wallabies, 5 Indian rhinoceros, 60 bears, 90 pythons, 10 king cobras, 25 giant monitor lizards, 15 crocodiles, more than 500 different species of other mammals, and more than 100,000 wild birds.

[24] It had been granted a permanent site in 1921 (an area of about 140 acres in the park's northwestern quadrant) and most of its initial exhibits had been built over the following year, with a "grand opening" of the new grounds held on January 1, 1923.

[23][29][30] Philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps, who had made several significant donations to the zoo, suggested that it needed a full-time director and volunteered to pay such a person's salary for three years if Wegeforth could find someone suitable for the job.

[26][31] Buck was headed to India at the time, and struck an agreement with the Zoological Society's board for him to collect some animals for the zoo and then come to San Diego to become its director.

[32] When the elephants arrived in San Diego after a long journey by boat and freight train, Wegeforth and superintendent Harry Edwards rode them through the city streets to the zoo.

[32][33] Buck soon arrived with the rest of the promised animals, including two orangutans, a leopard cub, two gray langurs, two kangaroos, three flamingos, two lion-tailed macaques, two sarus cranes, four demoiselle cranes, assorted geese, and a 23-foot reticulated python named Diablo that became famous when it would not eat and had to be regularly force-fed by a team of men using a feeding tube attached to a meat grinder, a spectacle that attracted thousands of onlookers and became a paid event until the snake's death in 1928.

[23][29][37] Wegeforth, a physician, took a strong interest in veterinary medicine and personally monitored the health of the animals, and had learned that oiling could cause pneumonia or Bright's disease in elephants.

[29][38] Buck promptly sued the board of directors for breach of contract, saying he had given up his lucrative animal collecting business to work in San Diego and had suffered damage to his reputation.

"[23][29] Buck also claimed that Wegeforth had killed a sick tiger by dosing the animal with calomel, and that the doctor's experiments in force-feeding snakes with a sausage stuffer had resulted in the deaths of 150 of the reptiles.

[23][29] Wegeforth had in fact administered calomel tablets to a tiger suffering an intestinal ailment in August 1923, and in his memoirs described experimenting with methods of force-feeding Diablo the python before coming up with the idea to tube-feed the snake using a sausage stuffer.

[36][40][41] Board member Thomas Faulconer and other witnesses, however, suggested that the sick tiger had died after a suspicious blow to the head, and flatly denied the snake-killing accusation.

[23] He did, however, claim that "while acting as temporary director of the San Diego Zoo", he had invented a method of force-feeding snakes, the means "by which captive pythons are mainly fed today".

[23] He made one subsequent contribution to the zoo, though indirectly: Having returned to his animal-collecting career, in 1925 he brought a shipment of animals to San Diego including a salmon-crested cockatoo named King Tut from the Maluku Islands.

[3] RKO Pictures created a triplet of financially lucrative films in the early 1930s that all dramatized "man versus ape" encounters: Ingagi (1930), Bring 'Em Back Alive and finally King Kong (1933).

[58] World War II temporarily halted Buck's expeditions to Asia, but his popularity kept him busy on the lecture circuit and making guest appearances on radio.

[61] His endorsement deals included tires, toys, clothing,[62] Pepsodent,[63] Dodge automobiles,[64] Armour meats,[65] Stevens buckhorn rifles,[66] Camel cigarettes,[67] and Cream of Kentucky whiskey.

"[81] In All In a Lifetime, Buck states that he first rented an acre on Orchard Road in Tanglin for three years: "Here I built cages and shelter for what I had, arranged with DeBrunner to look after my compound while I was gone, with the help of the Malay boys who had been with me in the jungle."

"[82] When Armand Denis was hired to direct Wild Cargo in 1934 an executive told him the location shoots would be "Ceylon for elephants, India for tigers, Malaya for cobras.

[54] Upon arrival, he found that Buck's camp "which I had imagined to be somewhere in the heart of the jungle, was a great disappointment...It was a hundred yards or so off the main road in Johor Bahru, just across the causeway from Singapore, on the edge of a rubber plantation.

[86] In his autobiography, Buck described her as "a small woman, plump, with keenly intelligent eyes, the most beautifully white teeth I have ever seen, and a red, laughing mouth," adding that she was "always good-natured".

[92] Buck spent his last years in his family home at 324 South Bishop Street in San Angelo, Texas, and died of lung cancer on March 25, 1950, in Houston, aged 66.

In a 1985 New York Times review of a history of American world's fairs, William S. McFeely recalled "at the exhibit called Bring 'Em Back Alive, the great white hunter Frank Buck smiled down at me.

[97] Daniel Bender, author of The Animal Game: Searching for Wildness at the American Zoo, argues that Buck was a fundamentally fraudulent character who told "many fibs...over the course of his long career," but that his manufactured persona was generally accepted in his time as exciting enough to warrant tolerance of the fiction masquerading as biography.

[81] Diamond also observed that "The wild animal capture narrative belongs to a specific period—from the height of colonialism in the early twentieth century to the post-World War II aftermath—and reflects many American and European attitudes toward colonized peoples and territories.

But Buck gave credit to the indigenous people for teaching him everything he knew about trapping and collecting wild animals, as well as repeatedly heaping praise on his assistants, and noting how beneath the skin all men are basically the same.