13. Tyger Tyger

[Music playing]

Host: Hello and welcome back to the Animal Friendly podcast. Today I'm talking to a wonderful group called Wildlife Vets International. This dedicated group, which includes biologists and veterinarians, use the knowledge they've gained from working with domestic pets or animals in captivity in order to train and help other people who are working on conservation projects around the world. For example, a vet who has a clinic dealing with cats and dogs gets plenty of practice at a lot of the techniques that they have to use in the day-to-day care of these animals. Diagnosing problems, giving injections, bandaging, prescribing medicine, sedating or intubating in order to anaesthetise them for an operation. Wildlife Vets International help to transfer this kind of knowledge to people working with endangered species; to help them treat sick or injured animals and safely reintroduce species to the wild...and also how to monitor and mitigate the threat of infectious disease. This is really crucial, because, with endangered species, a disease outbreak could easily wipe out the whole population. I had a great chat with Olivia Walter, executive director of the organisation, and we started by talking about big cat expert, Dr John Lewis, who founded WVI, alongside avian and reptile expert, Andrew Greenwood.

I was fascinated to hear about Dr Lewis's work in East Russia with Amur tigers and leopards. The Amur tiger is the world's biggest cat. It used to be called the Siberian tiger but they don't exist in Siberia anymore so it has been renamed for the Amur river - A.M.U.R. - on the border of Russia and China. The current estimate is that there are only about 500 Amur tigers left living in the wild. That's 500 in the whole world. And when it comes to Amur leopards, there's only about 70 of them. So the loss of a big cat specialist like Dr John Lewis, is a huge loss indeed.

Olivia: Dr John Lewis, who set up WVI, who sadly died in 2020, far too early...he was invited out to the Russian Far East to help them anaesthetise tigers and leopards that they tracked for research purposes, and to teach the biologist about anaesthesia. And anaesthesia is difficult in captivity, you know, in a controlled environment. It is really difficult in the wild when you...you don't tend to see the animal or, if you do, it's sort of...you don't know what condition they're in. You don't know exactly how much they weigh. And both of those things have a huge impact on the anaesthesia process and what you would want to deliver to them. And they're doing it in minus...whatever. I mean, not in a nice room temperature. And that again has quite a big impact on how the anaesthesia works and how the animals respond to it. So he went out to go and teach them about that but he also taught them about taking samples. So you have this animal in front of you that...you know, there were 35 Amur leopards in the wild that we knew about when he first went out there, and there were something like 2...300 Amur tigers. So it's...and they live...a tiger range is something like 20,000 kilometres squared. So you don't get your hands on a wild Amur tiger or Amur leopard very often.

Host: Amur tigers and leopards live in sub-zero temperatures and as a result they have very long coats, with the fur growing up to 7cm. So when you see video of these big cats, you really can't help thinking...well, okay, I can't help thinking...

CLIP (from Despicable Me, child's voice): He's so fluffy I'm gonna die! He's so fluffy!

Host: (laughing) Okay, back to Olivia and the important business of gathering data.

Olivia: And you've got to gather as much information as you can from it. So the biologists are measuring paw length and teeth length and tail length and the head to...nose to tail etc etc, all those kind of measurements. But he was teaching them how to take biomedical samples. So, faecal samples, saliva swabs, blood samples, etc. And how you store those samples. Because for every kind of test you want to do, sometimes you'll freeze them, sometimes you'll store it in alcohol. You know, there are different ways of storing different types of samples. And then you've got to label it, which is the most important bit. Label them properly with a pen that won't come off. I discovered there's no such thing as a permanent marker [laughing]. It doesn't exist. When you're writing on those plastic tubes? Even the permanent markers come off. So you have to look after your samples very well.

And John, because he was the big cat specialist for captive animals as well, and he was the veterinary advisor for the captive populations for Amur leopards, Amur tigers, Sumatran tigers and various other cats, he had a personal knowledge but also a big data set behind him of the kinds of...what we consider to be normal in captive animals. So he could compare the samples from the wild to the captive ones.

 He revolutionised tiger medicine. And definitely a pioneer in that department; field anaesthesia. And he developed an amazing piece of kit that meant that you could do gas anaesthesia in the field. So, norm...when you tranquilise and animal, you dart it with an intramuscular anaesthesia, you inject it. And that's fine for a certain short period of time, but to do a longer anaesthesia, it is better for the animal - you get better outcomes, you have much better control of how deep is anaesthesia is - if you intubate it, which is what would happen to us if we were anaesthetised. And you need to have oxygen gas, and you carry that around in huge oxygen cylinders, those are really, really dangerous. I mean, now in practice, I think you get machines that extract oxygen from the air, but they're aren't...they need electricity, they aren't necessarily particularly transportable, and dust and humidity is always an issue for fancy equipment in the field. So he developed this...and you can't carry canisters of oxygen around on the back of a vehicle that's bumping around in any habitat, it's incredibly dangerous. So he managed to develop one that used air - just straight air - and the anaesthesia agent. And then you can intubate at various different temperatures in the middle of nowhere. Absolutely genius piece of kit, and there are something like 10 of them around in the world now. It needed a particular piece that the NHS used to use, and he had a friend who went, "Oh yeah, I can get loads of those", and then that friend retired and didn't have access to them and we never managed to replace it. But I think there are 10 that are still going. When he died there was a clamouring of vets going, "I'll have his anaesthesia machine please!" [laughing]. Yes, so it's definitely a very good piece of kit that he invented.

So going back to the Russian Far East - I digress - John was able to talk to his counterparts there - the WCS Russia and the Institute for Soil Biology and a couple of other Russian states departments - and they looked at all the past samples. WCS pathology published a paper to say that it was Canine Distemper Virus - it was an emerging disease, new disease in the tiger population. And they could determine where it came from and that it started emerging in the tiger population about 2000. If John hadn't been out there to do the anaesthesia stuff, they would never have had those backlog of samples to determine exactly that. And then, from then onwards there's obviously much more research about what they could do about the problem.

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Host: Olivia mentioned Canine Distemper Virus and contrary to what the name suggests, this virus doesn't just affect dogs (canines). It can affect many carniverous animals. We don't hear much about it, in our daily lives, because all domestic animals are vaccinated against it. But as we humans have learned, in the past few years, if a population doesn't have natural immunity and isn't vaccinated, a virus can be a very dangerous proposition. One indication that animals are infected would be changes in behaviour, as Olivia explains.

Olivia: So in about 2 thousand...I think it was about 2010, there was an incident where a young tigress came into a village and just wandered around, behaved really strangely. Tigers don't wander around, they tend to have a bit of purpose. They will come into villages but they, you know...and then the people get frightened and then the tiger gets frightened and it's quite a negative spiral. But this tiger was just wandering around. Obviously wasn't very well, very thin. They tracked it and there's a picture of a tiger biologist called John Goodrick and he's sitting, crouching next to this tiger, he has his hand on this...this is a wild tiger in the middle of the Russian far east, so you instantly think, hmm, there's something very wrong going on there. And she then had seizures and she died and it was confirmed that she had Canine Distemper Virus. An infection. And here, everbody's dogs are vaccinated against it so we tend not to see it but it's a really horrible virus that affects a huge number of species - carnivorous species - so the word canine is a bit of red herring. And I don't know if you remember but in the 1990s there was a big outbreak of Canine Distemper Virus in the lions of the Serengeti, and in the Masai Mara, and Painted Dogs and lions particularly were noticed as totally decimated. And there are videos, horrible videos, on YouTube of lions having fits, I mean wild lions having fits, absolutely grim. And to take that story a bit further, with the African Painted Dogs, who are also incredibly endangered, they've been decimated by Canine Distemper Virus. I mean, whole packs wiped out within days. And in the zoo community we've been vaccinating against Canine Distemper Virus for a long time and have never had an outbreak due to that with the modern vaccines.

There was a previous vaccine in that...I don't think worked quite as well and there were outbreaks in the Serengeti after they had ring-vaccinated all the way around the National Park with Canine Distemper Virus vaccine. And that led to a scare that the vaccine was causing the outbreaks and obviously led to a huge amount of more research. But at that time, all the Painted Dog conservationist went we're not vaccinating our Painted Dogs, the wild ones, with a vaccine that we're not sure whether it works, it might be causing disease. Totally fair enough. And the research found out that it's the main populations, not the domestic dogs (who'd been vaccinated), but it was actually the miso-carnivores. So the jackals, the civets and those kind of smaller carnivores - that that was a reservoir and then it was popping up, out into Painted Dogs periodically. So there is a current study by Rosie Woodruff to look at the titres of antibodies against Canine Distempter Virus of puppies from zoos - and lots of European zoos have donated samples - and they're just analysing it as we speak. So that, we're expecting, will determine categorically that this vaccine is incredibly safe and I think that it's also going to...it's looking like it's going to show us that they need a lower amount of vaccine to trigger a good enough response, a good enough antibody response. Which is fantastic because vaccinating wild animals is not easy if you are doing it by injection. It has to be done by injection. So we, you know, that's a huge amount of transfer of knowledge from the captive community to the wild community.

And we have a...one of the other vets, Jessica Bodgener, is about to start some research into the health of conflict leopards. Again, we know...she did some research a few years ago to show that the leopards are being exposed to Canine Distempter Virus and what we don't know is how that's affecting their behaviour and what their general health is, of these leopards that get into conflict situations. There is a quite strong possiblity that they are, if they're not injured in some respects, that they are sick. And if we can sure the reason to why they are sick, then hopefully fewer of them will get into conflict situations.

Host: When you say conflict do you mean with other animals, or...?

Olivia: No, with humans. Sorry. Human-leopard conflict. So Canine Distemper is one of the diseases that she will be screening them for.

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Host: Transfer of knowledge is at the core of WVI’s purpose. They point out that traditional conservation groups can sometimes miss the fact that that the local vets may not have any training in wildlife medicine and they’re often just learning on the job without anyone there to support or guide them. So that’s where WVI comes in. Before joining them, Olivia worked with the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums and she explains how people working with both captive and wild animals share the common aim of preserving and increasing biodiversity in the world.

Olivia: So I worked for about, nearly 10 years...was it? Eight years or something for the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums. And they are a membership organisation for good zoos in Great Britain and Ireland. And we used to, it's like a stamp of approval and a certain level as standard of a good zoo, but it's also acknowledging that some people want to bring their zoos, or their collections up to that standard, so there's...so great to have colleagues that are very experienced working with other colleagues that are less experienced. And actually it's very similar idea, this transfer of knowledge, WFI works in exactly the same way. And we're all really enthusiastic about what we do within the conservation community. And delighted to be able to help somebody else and at the end of the day we all want to increase biodiversity in the world and also ensure that the welfare of the animals that we look after both in the wild and in captivity are to the best of our knowledge.  And even, you know, within the zoo community, there are...we do question ourselves quite a lot as to whether this is the right thing to be doing because inherently you feel like these animals should be in the wild but it is very stressful being a wild animal, and getting more and more so. So we work, WVI works on that interface between humans and wildlife and that interface is increasing exponentially.

And in India, where I was earlier in this wonderful Tiger Reserve, where there are people living in the villages and they're having to live alongside tigers and leopards. That's not easy to do that, to live like that. Generally speaking, it's kind of okay, but the pressure on the people to get as much as they can out of that land, and they are living next to a tiger that needs various resources out of that land as well. And if the pressures for the people aren't too severe then they all muddle along and that's fine. But with the increase in the number of people and the degradation of the land quality - it's not producing as much food-wise etc, it kind of is this horrible spiral. And India have been incredibly successful with their tiger conservation, they've been brilliant. They have 3,000 tigers. But that's across that vast area which is India. That's not a sustainable, particularly a sustainable population, and each tiger reserve, which includes national parks and other types of protected areas, is completely surrounded by human habitation. So they're like little islands in this sea of human habitation. And they are going to, they're beginning to have to already have to manage them in the same way that we manage animals within a European zoo population. So they're picking up tigers from one reserve and moving them to another reserve, and they will have to start soon managing the genetics of those populations so that they don't have, they don't become too inbred because none of the populations are sustainable in their own right. They're not big enough, they can't have enough animals within them. So I think it's very depressing, but basically, there is no wild anymore, there's just varying sizes of zoo enclosures. They're just, you know, some are bigger than others and none of them are big enough really. There's one thing I will say is biodiversity is key to our survival, both for our health and for the planet, the climate and for our food security. So we are one tiny little piece of a really complex and very important puzzle that's everybody has got a part to play in.

Host: This is a good time to take a little poetry break and listen to Ian Richardson reciting The Tyger by William Blake.

SOUND CLIP, THE TYGER:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat. What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp. Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Host: I asked Olivia to give us some more detail of how Wildlife Vets International actually share and exchange knowledge with the different conservation groups on the ground that they want to help.

Olivia: It's quite hard to explain what we do because you instantly think, a wildlife vet, oh, you must be saving animals from snares or....you know, there's always that sort of rescue assumption to it, that we fly vets around the world to save the tiger that's caught in the snare in the Sumatran jungles or something, and that isn't at all what we do. We tell the people on the ground how to do it themselves. And therefore it's not quite as glamourous and not quite as, uhm, you know, fundraising therefore is difficult because we have to get over this fact that we aren't the people who are doing the actual work, but we enable them to do their job better. And we do have long term partnerships but we have also come out of the end of partnerships because we're not needed, because the people that we are partnering with have all the knowledge that they need. So we create a partnership between the field project, and a veterinary expert who has the right kind of knowledge. So they have a day job, as it were, and this is there kind of conservation work. They might be full time wildlife vets or they might be vets in practice, it very much depends on...because we don't need their expertise all the time, so they do it as a consultancy type thing. And they will go out to visit the field projects, or the organisation once every 12 to 18 months and in between it's remote support.

And if a workshop is needed, then we organise...our in-country conservation partners will host it, they organise it, we just turn up with the expertise, as it were, and we try and bring in as many people as possible to that, and do as much as we can on the ground when we're there. Yes, and then the remote support is in between - so the rest of that 12 to 18 months, and it is lots of WhatsApp messages and videos and conversations about how about this and what to do about that. So you have to remember there'll be clinical cases. Like physical animals with a...that are ill or injured, but it's also we're talking about disease on a population level. So it's also about how those conservation organisations put in mitigation plans, so that the populations that they're protecting, through community work and anti-poaching and habitat restoration and all those other things that conservation organisations need to do is not destroyed by the outbreak of a disease. You know, what are the threats from diseases? We need to accommodate that within our overall strategy.

Host: I think it's a really efficient model, what you do. Instead of going out and setting up your own whole project, you're working with people who are already out there. It's brilliant.

Olivia: Oh definitely. And they're the people on the ground who are the experts on the day-to-day issues and the species that they're working with and the threats to those particular populations so it's really...it's definitely a two-way thing as well, the vets always say they come back having learned as much as they have given, knowledge as they have transferred over, so the vets love doing it. And it works really, really well. And I kind of manage the network to ensure that the...that knowledge is constantly being increased, and also that that knowledge is being passed on to our colleagues who don't...who aren't sitting there reading academic papers, or who aren't right at the forefront of that academic kind of knowledge. That they are getting the nuggets that they really need to do their jobs better. But also in a way that they can take it home and implement it immediately.

So you know like, when you go on a course - and we've all done it - and you've got...and you come out and you go, wow, that's amazing, I've just learned this...I'm going to change the way that I live, everything...and then you get home and you've got 600 emails that are unopened, you know, the cat's been sick, you've got...you know, life just is there and it's already hectic, and it's very hard to implement all those amazing things you've learned. So both at BIAZA and at, particularly at WVI, we really try to deliver that knowledge in small piecemeal bits so people can take that away. We help them implement it, at WVI, immediately, and then they're ready to implement the next bit. So we have these long, long-term partnerships and we just support their knowledge growth, as it were, and that meanders around and it evolves, you know, as the needs evolve.

[music playing]

Host: As well as sending vets to help the conservation groups on the ground – sometimes it works in reverse, with WVI bringing a local vet back to the UK for specialist training in something which a UK vet may take for granted, as we spoke about earlier, like intubation and anaethesia. Olivia explained the importance of this kind of training because animals in the wild are not like the small patients who are resting quietly in the back room at a vet clinic.

Olivia: I went very recently on a course...well, I wasn't on the course, I went to observe a bit of the Interventions in Wild Animal Health course that we have recently started supporting...Nic Masters, who was one of the tutors for field anaesthesia, and I listened in on the lectures. I'm a conservation biologist by training, not a vet, so I don't really appreciate it, but listening to what they're talking about, about how different anaesthesia drugs, what they do to the animal being anaesthetised...I'm not entirely sure I want to be anaesthetised.

SOUND CLIP, DRACULA VOICE: Look into my eyes, your eyelids are getting heavy. (Sound of snoring). You feel the...Renfield, you fell asleep too soon, I have more to tell you, wake up! (sound of a slap). Now, you are feeling drowsy (sound of snoring). (Sound of a sigh).

Olivia: It's absolutely incredible what the drugs to and what the animal's bodies do. So complex and so nuanced, and in the...what happens after the animal wakes up. So in the wild, you want them to go to sleep as soon as possible, so you've got to give them a pretty heavy dose. They can't gently go to sleep because they could be running and they could injure themselves through running away and, let alone, then - if it's a prey species, be predated by another animal, cause an accident, all these things. So you want them to go to sleep very quickly. And then when they're revived, they also, you want them to be awake and up, able to walk and able to run and able to be totally present and that's a very, very difficult, nuanced thing to do with the drugs that you have available to you.

Host: And all different animals. I read a lovely quote, ahm, what is it, a doctor is a vet that only treats one animal. [laughing]. Vets, you know, one day you're a tiger and the next day it's a bird or a turtle or...

Olivia: And even within the mammalian species, you have different drugs on different types of animals. So the big cats have one particular type of mixture of drugs and on large hoof-stock you use opiates, but you use them in a concentration that, if you stabbed yourself with the needle, you're history within seconds.

Host: Have you been...? Do you get, do you have to spend most of your time in an office, or do you get to travel?

Olivia: Yes, I spend most of my time in the office, and, I have to, obviously, I have to justify it quite well if we do go...but I have been to Greece to visit the turtle project in Greece and I did go to Zimbabwe and help with a, one of the vaccination and neutering clinics that we did with Painted Dog Conservation and, this year, very luckily went to India where I was on this Interventions in Wild Animal Health, a bit of their course. And I went up to Nepal, where we saw Dr Amir Sadaula, who is a Nepalese wildlife vet we'd brought over to the UK for some intensive gas anaesthesia and X-raying experience. Because he'd managed to acquire all this kit for their first ever wildlife hospital in Nepal and they don't use gas anaesthesia for... I'm not even sure they use them for domestic animals, but...so, there was nobody in Nepal for him to learn from and it's a kind of thing that all final year vet students can do standing on their heads with their eyes closed because they've done so much practice at intubating dogs and cats so we gave him five days of intubating dogs and cats and - with a lovely practice down in...down in Surrey, it's our veterinary advisor, Jane Hopper, it's her husband, and...ya, five days of gas anaesthesia and X-raying of dogs and cats and had a fantastic time and really embedded that knowledge so he... it is very, comes secondhand to him, and then he spent a second week with another of our veterinary advisors, Nic Masters, who was a vet for the International Zoo Veterinary group, and he went around Colchester Zoo, Chessington Zoo, and the Big Cat Sanctuary, anaesthetising all sorts of animals. So everything from an anteater and orangutan to various big cat species. And I think that was a real eye-opener for him as well. So, just, you know, but again, a very controlled environment. He does a lot of anaesthesia of conflict animals and translocating rhinos, they did quite a lot of that, and it's all intramuscular so they dart it with a syringe full of some kind of anaesthesia drugs. So he's very, very good at that. Okay, it needs a combination of bla and bla, and it's 150 kilos so I need that amount of it and then darting these animals. So it's quite ironic that that's what he's good at, and what he's not good at is when it's sitting in a cage in front of him [laughing] quietly doing it and then transferring it into his surgery in the wildlife hospital coz he just has never worked like that.

So Nic and I went to go and visit him in his wildlife hospital and look at all his kit and see...Nic ran through all the stuff that he needed to know, and did he have all the right equipment etc etc. And so we can continue that support but ya, he's good.

[music playing]

Host: In order to fund all this great work WVI have supporters who seem to enjoy taking on adventurous challenges. Skylo the dog recently raised money by walking with his companion human, Nick, across the UK from coast to coast. That’s a distance of nearly 200 miles in just 13 days. There are also two sisters, Jessica and Maxine Van Damme, who cycled the LEJOG to raise money. What’s the LEJOG? L.E.J.O.G. Land’s End to John O Groats, a distance of over 16 hundred kilometres which they completed in 14 days. At the time of recording this, they have just finished and it’s been a really enjoyable two weeks for the rest of us watching their progress on social media and enjoying the beautiful photographs and scenery and stories, without having to do any of the work.

If you don’t want to walk 200 miles or get on your bike, there are other ways to support WVI. You could enter the lottery on their website.

Olivia: The idea about the lottery as a fundraising enterprise...we do it through a company through Sterling lotteries and they run a lot of lotteries for charities and every pound that is put into the...so,  one ticket costs a pound, it is drawn weekly and you set up a direct debit and I think one pound a week is a minimum number of tickets you can have. 50p of that comes to WVI. So there's a cash prize of up to £28,000. The cash prize comes around quite regularly so your...the odds of winning something are better than playing the national lottery.

Host: I thought that, and I just think it's a great direct debit that you put there and you forget about and then, maybe in five years time you win something, you're like, that's cool.

Olivia: Exactly and you can always donate to us on our website and set up a regular donation...

Host: You've got cool t-shirts as well.

Olivia: We've got great t-shirts, and really good quality. I'm very particular about the quality of the products that we have and also that they are as sustainable, or have as little impact on the environment as possible. So the ones we've got are embroidered. They last...my son has one that he didn't take off for about a year and it started fading after about 10, 11 months of me washing it weekly, so ya, they're really, really good quality and I was talking to somebody yesterday in fact whose son, we gave one to her son because he raised £300 for us and as a thank you, we will always give people something. And she said, oh where can I get another one because he loves it. And the quality of the cotton, it's organic cotton so much less water used. And because it's embroidered there's no dyes involved, or much less dyes. Ya, they're great, they're a really good product so I highly, highly recommend it. The hoodies are really snuggly. We all have one in the office and we have these meetings and we're all sitting there in our...because we all work remotely, we're sitting there in our hoodies. Yes, they're very good.

[music playing]

Host: The team will be getting out of the office this September to undertake the Chiltern challenge which is a 50k loop through the Chiltern countryside – and they’ll be joined by their patron – vet and TV presenter, Steve Leonard.

SOUND CLIP, STEVE LEONARD: As a practising vet, I know that many of my colleagues are absolutely passionate about wildlife and conservation. And I'm sure you'd be as horrified as I was to hear that many endangered animal species have very little veterinary expertise in their conservation efforts. This is why Wildlife Vets International needs to exist. Is to be able to get the right vet into the location to where these animals are, where they're desperately in need of training...expertise in terms of immobilisations and research, and also leaving veterinary equipment behind. These endangered species really need veterinary input. We cannot just allow them to dwindle away through lack of research on subjects that we know so much about. We have epidemiologists, we have anaesthetists, we have all the people and all the resources here but what we need to do is parachute them into those areas where they're desperately needed. You could really get behind Wildlife Vets International and really help us push the veterinary side of conservation. We're an important role in preserving these fantastic animals for the future.

Host: We all know that animals and wildlife today face so many threats to their survival and it can be very easy to get depressed.  Olivia and the whole team at WVI have tremendous enthusiasm and as we finished up, she told me about some of the people and stories that motivate and inspire them.

Olivia: I absolutely adore that the vets that we work with are all just incredible people and we all [yah] and there's just a really nice family of vets and, our conservation partners. We all really enjoy it and get a huge amount out of it, and quite often you can really improve an animal's welfare very simply by knowing the right piece of knowledge. And a really good example of that is the help we're doing with turtle rehabilitation centres. Turtles are extraordinary creatures. They are prehistoric. They've been around for milleniums. And we...with getting their husbandry right, hugely increases their welfare and it's very simple. Nutrition, pain relief - because obviously they come in with some kind of injuries or illness if they're coming into a rehabilitation centre - and UV lighting and temperature. And if you get those four things right they tend to fix themselves. Suddenly they go, oh great, you know, everything can kick in. And the wounds management and the antibiotics and surgery, if they need it, are kind of like on the, would be nice bits almost. They're just amazing animals. And I think for animals in captivity, that we have in zoos, we have such a huge role to play in ensuring that their welfare is as good as we can get it. And our knowledge as to what good welfare is for a particular species is developing all the time. There's a huge amount of research in animal welfare.

[sound of tiger growling]

And there are numerous examples of where people and wildlife live incredibly successfully alongside each other and those communities are embracing the difficult questions like, you know, living alongside large carnivores that will eat their goats and possibly their children too, you know, that potential is there. And there are...and those kind of people are always incredibly inspiring to listen to, and you have people like Chris Bowden talking about vultures, who's dedicated his, the main part of his career to a particular species and is their champion.

[sound of vultures at a carcass]

You know, he has pulled together all these different people and keeps them all going and keeps the network going and keeps the enthusiasm going and talks to new people and...it's an incredible story. I mean it's an absolutely amazing - I mean, awful - but amazing brilliant story that people just don't know [Yah]. Uhm, because it's vultures, everyone goes uh, I hate vultures, they're disgusting, and then they come out just going they are the most incredible animals ever [they're beautiful]. They are, and they are hilarious to watch. I was lucky enough to be in Nepal recently and they are just hilarious to watch on a carcass. They're like kind of a whole pile of squabbling four year olds [laughing]. Or not even four year olds necessarily, you know, people at a finite resource and everybody wants what everybody else has got. And you've got the young cheeky ones taking on the massive Griffin vultures or another one goes running off with a little bit of morsel [laughing] and there's a breakout group and they all go running after the one that's got, like, this tiny little morsel, and there's a massive carcass there, but anyway [laughing]. And they're all squabbling over this carcass and fighting each other and shrieking at each other and they've got their wings out and they're flapping at each other, that's hilarious, absolutely hilarious. It's very entertaining. And I love working in an industry that is just full of people that are so knowledgeable and passionate about what they do. So there is loads and loads of hope out there.

[music playing]

Host: I really enjoyed hearing about this group and their work, and I hope you did too. And I hope you'll pay a visit to their website and their social media. My thanks to Olivia and everyone else at WVI, and thanks to you for listening. That's it for now, see you next time.

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