New season of ‘Yukon Vet’ premiering Saturday
AMERICAN BECAME AWED BY YUKON
According to Dr. Michelle Oakley, animals can have keen memories. Take the larger animals the veterinarian used to examine regularly at the Calgary Zoo.
“Everybody hates me,” says Oakley, speaking in Los Angeles recently to promote the sixth season of Nat Geo Wild’s “Dr. Oakley, Yukon Vet,” premiering Saturday.
“Even if I came in wearing street clothes, the gorillas know. They’d put poop in their hands and throw it at you.”
Not unlike facing a room full of TV critics, it is suggested. Oakley can’t help but laugh — after all, once you’ve stared down a moose or a wolverine, reporters are pussycats.
Oakley’s love of animals began in her native Indiana where she spent summers on her uncle’s dairy farm. She grew up a big fan of Jane Goodall, watching the famed anthropologist’s TV specials “over and over again.”
Meeting Goodall at a book signing at a local zoo was a lifechanging moment for Oakley, who was 11 years old at the time. “I’ll never forget it,” says Oakley, recalling how she went with her mom and told Goodall she wanted “to do what you do.” Goodall’s answer: “I believe you will.” Oakley now feels an obligation to keep paying it forward.
What she hadn’t anticipated was that she’d be doing it in Canada. While studying zoology at the University of Michigan, she signed up for a wildlife study in southwest Yukon. “I literally didn’t even know where Yukon was,” she says. When she got there, she was awed with the vast wilderness and the moose, bison and other animals within. “There are not too many places on earth left like it.”
She also fell in love with local wildland firefighter Shane Oakley. After they married, Michelle continued her studies at P.E.I.’s Atlantic Veterinary College, earning a doctorate in veterinary medicine. She started interning at the Calgary Zoo, returning over the years as an educator.
Now, she is constantly jumping into her truck and sometimes — despite a fear of flying — helicopters, travelling hundreds of miles into northern B.C., the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan and other provinces.
Home, though, is Haines Junction, Yukon, population 800, including all five Oakleys: Michelle, Shane and their daughters Sierra, Maya and Willow. They’re all featured on the series.
“They’ve kind of grown up on it,” she says of her daughters. “I look back and think, oh geez, that was probably really hard for a teenage girl to be on TV and, you know, working with her mom.” Oakley recalls talking castration and testicles “and making jokes and they’d be like, ‘Oh God — could you not say testicles on TV?”
The two oldest are off on their own Canadian university adventures. Sierra, 21, studies criminology in Nova Scotia; Maya, 19, is in London, Ont., pursuing a pre-vet degree. “They’re my right and left hands,” says Oakley, with her youngest, Willow, following right behind.
Along the way, there have been “incidents” while working with unpredictable animals and in high-stress situations.
Husband Shane has been stomped by an angry moose. Oakley was trying to blow-dart a tranquilizer into a “wily coyote” when she stood up against an electrified fence and was zapped.
“There’s definitely a fear factor to it, and there’s a lot of adrenaline to it, but it’s not why I do it,” says Oakley. “It doesn’t stop me. It’s what needs to be done.”
She’s had close encounters with bisons and bears, but the only animal to bite her this coming season was a 16-yearold cat.
“Nailed me three times in the finger,” says Oakley. “I thought, seriously? This old grandma cat?”
This season will also see Oakley tackle working with wild boar in Saskatchewan and grizzly bears in Europe. She also performs health checks on bison being bred in Alaska and then imported into the wild as a new herd in Siberia.
“It’s great to work with them in captivity but when you get them back out there you feel like you’re righting some wrongs,” she says. “That’s one of the best parts about the job I do, is the animal, the raptor, leaving your arm to go back to where it belongs. The bison going out of the pen. That’s what it’s about.”