Wildlife Health Talks

When Dr. Dave Jessup finished vet school in 1976, there was no such thing as a wildlife vet job. Within a year he became the first wildlife veterinarian ever hired by the California Department of Fish and Game, and stayed 33 years. In this WDA history episode, Dave recalls darting elk from helicopters with the seatbelt duct-taped shut, tracing land parasites to dying sea otters, and testifying bef...

When a Daubenton's bat tested positive for a rabies-related virus at a kindergarten in central Germany, the story moved faster than the facts. Headlines screamed "rabies panic," and Dr. Amelie Lisa Arnecke stepped in to stop good science from being drowned out by panic. In this episode, the veterinary pathologist and Leipzig University postdoc walks us through how one grounded bat t...

Every GPS collar, every blood sample, every dataset built on a wild mammal begins the same way: a dart, and a vet standing over an unconscious animal hoping nothing goes wrong. Dr. Jacopo Morelli has been that vet more than 300 times with brown bears alone, and he thinks our field has been far too relaxed about those few minutes. Jacopo takes us inside wildlife anaesthesia, where the same handful...

For most of this week at the WDA conference in Chicago, Dr. Randy Zarnke has been the one holding the microphone. He is the reason the WDA History Project exists, having had the idea of recording the association's long-timers before their stories are lost. So in this episode we turn it around, and Randy answers the questions. Randy spent 24 years as the wildlife disease guy at the Alaska Depa...

The term One Health didn't come out of a strategy meeting or a peer-reviewed paper. It came out of an interview with a journalist who wouldn't drop a question. Dr. Billy Karesh was explaining why Ebola killing gorillas mattered, and the reporter kept pushing: is this a human disease or an animal one? Eventually Billy said there's just one health, the pathogens don't care about...

Who could believe a blue-tongued lizard can teach you how to be a good human being? Professor Anne Poelina can, and by the end of this episode you might too. For International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, we're re-playing Anne's Carlton Herman Memorial Lecture from the 2024 WDA conference in Canberra. A Nyikina Warrwa woman, scientist, filmmaker and poet, Anne is the inaug...

What if the birds you walked past this morning were quietly fighting off bacteria that have been devastating poultry farms for decades, and you'd never know, because they show absolutely no signs of being sick? That's what Dr. Maria Teresa Reinoso Perez discovered when she started looking inside seemingly healthy house finches in Mexico. More than 70% of the birds she sampled were carryi...

In Iran, there is no established path for a veterinary student who wants to work with wildlife. So Arman Nourishirazi and his teammates built one. Based in Ahvaz, in the province of Khuzestan, Arman is a final year vet student in one of the richest bird regions in the Middle East, where the Persian Gulf coast, vast wetlands and the Eurasian African Flyway all converge. Working with his university&...

What happens when a parasite learns to survive the deep freeze? In this episode, host Cat Vendl talks with parasitologist Cody Malone about Trichinella, the tiny worm behind your grandmother's warnings to cook pork through, and a real hazard for Canada's northern communities who rely on wild game.  Cody shares how this strange nematode completes its entire life cycle in a single host, wh...

How do you find out which animals a mosquito has been biting? You start by thinking like one. In this episode, biologist Elizabeth Linares Alcántara takes us to a public park in Mérida, Mexico, where she hunts blood-fed mosquitoes in their hiding spots and reads the DNA in their tiny abdomens to reveal who they have been feeding on, from humans and iguanas to feral cats and a neighbour's graz...

Genevieve Barnett spends their nights caring for one of the world's most misunderstood animals. From Night Flight Rehabilitation, the bat rehab NGO they founded in Colorado, they nurse little brown bats through white-nose syndrome and gently untangle myotis caught in fishing line, one patient at a time. But Genevieve is also asking bigger questions. Through the lens of queer ecology, they exp...

This episode takes us to Bangladesh, a first for the podcast, where Dr. Sabrina Ferdous is doing wildlife health research in one of the most unusual field sites you'll ever hear about: a centuries-old religious shrine, home to a critically endangered turtle found almost nowhere else on earth. The shrine pond is visited by thousands of devotees who consider both the turtles and their water sac...

Every day at Project Wildlife in San Diego, Briana Eisan sees the consequences of a scroll: baby raccoons scooped up by well-meaning strangers, people reaching bare-handed toward bats, wildlife encounters going viral for all the wrong reasons. As a veterinary assistant at one of the largest wildlife rehabilitation programs in the US, she's on the front lines of both disease surveillance and a...

Northern Kenya is one of Africa's most biodiverse landscapes, and one of its most demanding places to be a wildlife vet. Dr. Sharon Mulindi, senior veterinary officer at Kenya Wildlife Service, covers a vast stretch of this arid, wildlife-rich region where a 24/7 on-call schedule is less a job requirement and more a way of life. From darting wounded lions before breakfast to treating elephant...

What happens when a wildlife vet who spent years nursing slow lorises back to health walks into a live animal market, not to rescue animals, but to sit down with the vendors selling them? That's exactly what Dr. Wendi Prameswari does. Based in Indonesia with conservation NGO YIARI, Wendi works across two of the country's most pressing wildlife-human interfaces: the live animal markets of...

Dr. Justorien Rambeloniaina grew up in northeastern Madagascar watching lemurs captured and killed, not yet knowing they were among the world's most endangered primates. Today he's fighting for them on every front, reconnecting fragmented forests with a five-kilometre wildlife corridor, combating the illegal pet trade, and sharing a quietly powerful encounter with a family keeping two mo...

Six women. Five continents. Decades of experience spanning wildlife veterinary practice, disease research, government policy, and international conservation. Recorded for 2026 International Women's Day, this episode brings together an extraordinary panel to celebrate women in wildlife health, their journeys, their achievements, and their honest reflections on working in a field that hasn&apos...

What if the very fences built to protect livestock have been quietly driving one of Africa's greatest wildlife crises? Professor Steve Osofsky, one of the architects of the One Health movement, has spent over 30 years trying to solve exactly that problem in the vast five-nation Kavango-Zambezi Conservation Area, home to the majority of Africa's elephants.  Steve shares how WOAH’s breakth...

What if the key to saving more wildlife isn't treating more animals, but preventing them from ending up in hospitals in the first place? In this episode, host Dr. Cat Vendl speaks with Dr. Andrew Hill, a senior veterinarian at Currumbin Wildlife Hospital, one of the world's busiest wildlife facilities treating over 16,000 animals annually. Through his Churchill Fellowship, Andrew travele...

Journey to Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula with wildlife veterinarian Dennise Ortiz, who tracks pumas and ocelots to answer a critical question: do biological corridors connecting fragmented forests actually work? From midnight captures to analyzing GPS data, Dennise reveals how these cats navigate between national parks, farmlands, and dangerous roads. Meet Jerry the ocelot, who survived a car st...

From Madagascar's forests to the heart of conservation: meet Dr. Ny Aina Tiana Rakotoarisoa, a veterinarian on a mission to save critically endangered radiated tortoises while transforming how women lead in wildlife conservation. Ny Aina reveals the hidden crisis driving thousands of tortoises into illegal trade. It's not just about their striking beauty. She explores the local beliefs,...

What if the biggest threat to Australia's wildlife during a disease outbreak might be lying dead in the bush? Join host Dr. Cat Vendl with Niraj Meisuria, a PhD student investigating one of disease ecology's most overlooked frontiers: scavenging and carcasses. From wedge-tailed eagles brawling over kangaroo kills to brushtail possums turning carnivorous, Niraj reveals how carcasses act a...

Dr Ana Maria Villada has spent years unraveling the mysteries of sloths—creatures so physiologically unique that they're closer to chimpanzees than they are to each other. But her work treating electrocution injuries, creating rope highways through fragmented forests, and tracking hand-raised orphans released into the wild reveals something surprising: sloths are far more adaptable than scien...

By day, Dr. Alexandria Bullen treats cattle and cats at a veterinary clinic on Tasmania's rugged northwest coast. By night, she's out tracking platypuses and bandicoots in the wilderness. In this episode, host Dr. Cat Vendl meets Alex at the Australasian WDA conference to explore how she bridges clinical practice with wildlife research. Discover why golf courses and urban dog parks are u...

What if we could prevent wildlife health crises instead of always racing to respond to them? Dr. Leanne Wicker has spent decades asking this question – from anesthetizing seals in Tasmanian car parks during lunch breaks to tracking ocean temperatures through Antarctic seal movements, from nearly a decade managing confiscated wildlife during Vietnam's bird flu outbreaks to pioneering the field...