Wildlife Health Talks | Podcast Guru

Details

This is the podcast of the Wildlife Disease Association (WDA, https://www.wildlifedisease.org). Our host Dr Catharina Vendl chats with wildlife health professionals including researchers, vets, pathologists and more, about the joys and challenges of their job and the emerging issues of wildlife health locally and worldwide. All of our guests have a longstanding affinity with the WDA and a true passion for wildlife in common. So brush up your knowledge of current wildlife issues and One Health with Wildlife Health Talks.

Recent Episodes

#95 Maureen and the Rethinking of the City Rat (USA)

What if the most hated animal in your city is really just a very small coyote? Dr. Maureen Murray runs the Chicago Rat Project at Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute, and she makes the case that you cannot understand a city’s rats without understanding its people. Her team found leptospirosis concentrated in rats in Chicago’s wealthiest neighbourhoods, overturning the assumption that rats are a problem of poverty, while the people most exposed to rat urine at home were lower income re...

31 MIN

#94 Dave, Duct Tape, Helicopters and Elk: Wildlife Medicine in the 1970s (USA)

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,...

27 MIN

#93 Amelie and the Taming of a Lyssavirus Panic (Germany)

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...

29 MIN

#92 Jacopo and the art of wild bear anaesthesia (Norway/UK)

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...

26 MIN

#91 Randy and the blast from WDA's past (USA)

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...

27 MIN