Show Notes
Join host Dr. Cat Vendl as she speaks with Dr. Sonia Hernandez, Wildlife Disease Association president and professor whose research spans continents and species. From studying prehistoric-looking tapirs adapting to human landscapes in Costa Rica to tracking white ibises navigating between Florida's wetlands and city parks, Sonia shares insights from her remarkable career. Discover how her journey from intimidated veterinary student to association leader has shaped her vision for science comm...
More from 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 before Congress without telling his bosses. He also looks back on a decade as WDA executive manager,...
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 triggered a vaccination campaign, a media storm, and a 500-person public event, and what she's learned about gett...
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 of drugs used worldwide clamp shut the peripheral arteries and quietly starve organs of oxygen wh...
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 Department of Fish and Game, and has recorded 202 oral history interviews with veteran Alaskan hunters, tr...
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 our categories. Recorded in Chicago for the WDA History project, Billy looks back on building WCS's field veterinary...