What wildlife veterinarians do all day
Wildlife veterinarian Romain Pizzi tells extraordinary stories from his career operating on orangutans, elephants and snakes to name just a few, in his book Exotic Vetting
What is it that we actually do as wildlife veterinarians? The vision of a tanned, khaki-clad Chris Hemsworth look-alike darting rhino while dangling out from a helicopter in South Africa, where I was born, grew up, and originally qualified as a vet, is appealing but an illusion, existing only where animals are constantly darted and moved between privately owned game farms in South Africa.
There is even a wildlife vet Barbie doll; a strange character, looking like a plastic reincarnation from the 1960s TV series Daktari.
Despite working in over 40 countries, from Myanmar to Sierra Leone, with everything from Sumatran orangutans and orphaned Asian elephants, to critically endangered Polynesian snails over the last quarter of a century, I realised that my family, like everyone else, really still have little idea at all what I actually do.
Perhaps this book is written for my children, in the hope that when they are older they may understand my crazy life and work, and why I and vets like me, do the things we do.
But it is certainly written for anyone who wonders what wildlife vets all across the globe, working with everything from whale sharks to giant pandas, can do to treat our wild patients.
When at home I deceptively lead the same life as everyone in the Scottish village where we live, washing dishes, walking kids to school, and answering endless emails.
Yet during the pandemic lockdown my zoom meetings were somewhat different.
As my children would peer over my shoulder between home schooling sessions, they would catch me trying to explain to West African vets how to fix a young wild chimpanzee’s broken leg with only bicycle spokes, an old drill and car body repair putty.
Or talking Indonesian vets through an emergency abdominal operation on a sun bear via shaky mobile phone video.
They had periodically come with me to release hedgehogs and tawny owls back to the wild, that
I had treated locally in Scotland over the last two decades, or been forced to attend the odd zoo animal emergency, patiently sitting on an upturned bucket in a corner while I anaesthetised and treated a lemur with a bite wound, or a macaw with a broken wing.
But I never manage to explain that seals hold their breath under anaesthesia; that penguins have hot eyes when they get sick; or that cheetah make the fussiest dating partners, and all the other quirks you learn from working with our patients.
I wrote my book to try explain how best to catch and hold a kangaroo, and what to be careful of when anaesthetising a walrus.
How can you tell if a yak is pregnant using a few mung beans, or fool an elephant into eating 50 bitter tablets every day?
How do we, as clinical wildlife veterinarians diagnose diseases in the most uncooperative of patients, many that can claw, crush or kill you without care, or are so delicate we risk doing the same to them?
And finally, after catching, diagnosing, operating on, medicating and healing our patients, from giant anteaters to condors, how do we go about returning them to their life in the wild, and monitoring how they cope and survive?
Each book chapter covers one of these aspects of our veterinary work, whether drawing a blood sample, or performing dentistry, across the wide variety of species we treat.
Our wild patients can’t speak to us like in children’s books, but learning to treat them, we do come to learn intimate and surprising details of their lives in the wild.
From treating bladder problems in maned wolves we learn that they actually eat more fruit than meat in the wild.
By catching an ostrich with a handful of shiny pebbles, we realise they need these to grind grass in their stomach.
They may have evolved to eat grass like the African antelope around them, but being birds they have no teeth to chew with.
We also find that the Japanese giant salamander that can weigh more than a wolf can regrow its entire leg again if amputated.
It will also conveniently absorb medications we pour on its skin, so there is no need for any injections or tablets.
And despite all we pride ourselves on knowing, we still have much to learn to understand.
While it is very easy to blame heart disease in people on our modern fastfood diets and lack of exercise, why do gorillas on healthy vegetable diets still also suffer frequent heart problems?
With all the amazing procedures we can now perform thanks to modern technology, from diagnosing poisoning from a single feather, to trying to resurrect a completely extinct frog species, I also try to delve into why we do these things, and whether they actually always help the animals we treat.
Most of our work is truly meaningful, but occasionally, with appealing animals like tigers and sufficient media hype, we can risk straying into some quite dubious territory.
We live in a time of unprecedented environmental destruction, biodiversity loss, and species
I wrote my book to try explain how best to catch and hold a kangaroo, and what to be careful of when anaesthetising a walrus
extinction. Now less than 4 per cent of the planet’s terrestrial vertebrates are wild animals.
It is easy to get gloomy with constant bad news, and I do genuinely worry what world my children will inhabit when they are my age.
These problems are sadly almost entirely manmade. Yet us humans are also the only ones who can fix it.
It is heartening to realise that never before in human history have so many people cared so much, nor worked so hard to try fix these problems.
As wildlife veterinarians we have many roles to play, whether investigating causes for mass strandings of whales, evaluating pollution levels in declining orca pods, or simply trying to find ways to feed confiscated smuggled pangolins so they survive and we can return them to the wild.
This book gives a glimpse into the varied and interesting work we as wildlife vets do all across the world. Above all, I hope it inspires a sense of wonder and appreciation for the amazing creatures we share our increasingly fragile planet with.