Do you know what we do?

“WVI makes sure conservation programmes can get the veterinary help they need to save species.”

This is often how we describe the work of WVI in one sentence.

But what does it actually mean?

In the first of four articles looking at the aims of our upcoming Big Give Earth Raise campaign, we’re looking back to the early years of WVI and the work of two of our co-founders, and how that has influenced what we do today. The focus is on the first of our four Earth Raise aims:

To provide targeted veterinary expertise to conservation programmes, including hands-on clinical support when necessary, tailored to local circumstances; training local teams and helping embed best practice wildlife medicine techniques, and producing comprehensive Disease Risk Analyses for translocations of animals as part of conservation planning.

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Hands-on support to embed best practice and build local capacity in the health of free-living wildlife

Back in 2006, just after WVI was first established as a charity, a team of young American and Russian conservation biologists and local vets working for the Wildlife Conservation Society needed an experienced wildlife vet to join their fieldwork mission, researching the health and behaviour of Amur leopards and tigers. At the time, there were only an estimated 30-40 Amur leopards in the wild, and 400-500 Amur tigers. Given the endangered status of both species, it was vital to have expert veterinary input to minimise risks from capture and anaesthesia, ensure correct sample collection and processing, and respond to any injuries or emergencies that arose during handling. WVI co-founder and passionate big cat expert, the late Dr John Lewis, volunteered for the job.

For the next six years, John spent extended periods with the WCS team in the forests of the Russian Far East, tracking, immobilising, collaring and sampling big cats. He also caught and sampled smaller carnivores in order to help build a fuller picture of what diseases might be present locally. He was able to improve the team’s anaesthesia protocols by introducing his own field anaesthesia kit which allowed a leopard or tiger to transition to gas anaesthesia following initial darting, giving the team greater control and ensuring a faster and therefore safer recovery for the animal.

According to Dr John Goodrich, then a young conservation biologist and now one of the world’s most eminent tiger biologists and Chief Scientist of Panthera, John Lewis also picked up on potential genetic issues that would otherwise have been missed. Most importantly of all, he trained the team of young Russian biologists and vets in all the techniques he was using, and was always generous in sharing his experience –although equally delighted to learn from others too. He continued to mentor one young Russian vet, Dr Mikhail Goncharuk for many years. Misha himself now trains other vets and forest rangers in tiger and leopard management, capture and rehabilitation, and has advised on the reintroduction of tigers to Kazakhstan. Dr Lewis was also responsible for producing the vital Disease Risk Assessment, published in English and Russian, for the Amur leopard reintroduction programme – the first of its kind for a large carnivore.

John, who died unexpectedly in 2020, was deeply proud to have played his part in the conservation of Amur leopards, which today number an estimated 130. The area where the captures were carried out is now part of the Land of the Leopard National Park. His experience of supporting the WCS team is in many ways a blueprint for much of the work that WVI continues to do today. By providing both regular (typically annual or biannual) in person visits supplemented by ongoing remote support, the vets and vet nurses we work with make sure that the skills and knowledge they are transferring are both truly relevant to the situation on the ground (e.g. any drugs can be locally sourced and their use is therefore sustainable), and delivered at a pace which allows people to take them on board in a way that means they become genuinely embedded.

Big cats have remained key to our work, and since 2024 we have been supporting the Corozal Sustainable Future Initiative in Belize by training their ranger teams in safe capture, immobilisation and translocation of jaguars and pumas, as cats come into increasing contact with humans and their livestock. The next stage of this project is to look at how CSFI can build suitable holding facilities for cats that need to spend a period in captivity due to illness or injury.

Endangered birds have also featured since the very earliest days of WVI. WVI co-founder, avian expert Dr Andrew Greenwood, worked closely with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, alongside conservation biologist Carl Jones of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, for over twenty years, helping to bring back unique species from the brink of extinction. In the 2000s, for example, Andrew was able to guide the local team through a potentially catastrophic outbreak of a serious virus; Psittacine Beak and Feather Disease (PBFD), which threatened to wipe out the echo parakeet, advising on interventions and disease testing and sampling that played a vital role of the species’ recovery. Numbers were once thought to be as low as 20 birds in the wild. Recent estimates suggest there are now over 800.

Today, our tradition of supporting avian conservation continues. Avian vet, Dr Johanna Storm, recently trained conservation teams in the Seychelles to survey some of the islands’ most unique bird species for avian influenza and other diseases, presenting catching and sampling techniques that are both effective and safeguard the welfare of the birds. In January, we partnered once more with local animal rescue RAKSHA Jaipur in India to help deliver the third Operation Avian seminar and workshops, which brought vets, vet students, professional rehabilitators and volunteers from across more regions of India than ever before to learn about avian medicine, from anaesthesia and orthopaedic surgery, to wound management and nutrition. While this knowledge benefits all bird species, it also means that those vets and rehabbers likely to encounter endangered species like the white-rumped vulture, the great Indian bustard and the Bengal florican, are better equipped to treat these birds, giving them the highest chance of a successful return to the wild and breeding in the future.

The Role of Rehabilitation

As our registered office is in Yorkshire in the UK, we find that we quite often get calls about injured or stranded wildlife. Of course, we always do our best to refer people on to their local wildlife rescue (we don’t have any vets working on site), and have huge respect for the many fabulous and skilled wildlife rehabbers working both in the UK and around the world. However, in the context of conservation, the approach to rehabilitation is a little different and it’s therefore not the primary focus of our work, which sometimes surprises people. We do train rehabbers, but this tends to be focussed on organisations working with, or likely to encounter, clearly threatened species, including sea turtles and vultures.

Sea Turtle Medicine

With six out of seven species of sea turtle now listed by the IUCN as between Vulnerable and Critically Endangered, they are a good example of animals where rehabilitation of individuals can have a real impact on the longer term survival of the species. For five years from 2019 onwards, WVI Veterinary Partners, Matthew Rendle RVN and marine vet Tania Monreal, worked closely with the ARCHELON turtle rescue centre in Greece, in order to embed best practice in care of sick and injured turtles, including pain relief, anaesthesia, wound management and nutrition. During regular in-person visits, they were also able to undertake some of the more challenging procedures, including removal of swallowed fishing hooks and the placing of feeding tubes. As the ARCHELON team grew in confidence and self-sufficiency we co-hosted a conference for rescue centres around Greece, as well as as far away as Dubai, helping build sea turtle medicine capacity more widely.

Having helped grow the competence and confidence of the ARCHELON team to the point where they are largely self-reliant, we are now focussed on a new problem for the UK – the stranding of cold-stunned turtles. We are seeing an increasing number of turtles diverted off course by severe storms, strong winds or powerful currents, and finding themselves in waters well below those to which they are accustomed. Encountering water below 10 degrees Celsius can cause a turtle’s heart rate to slow to as little as one beat a minute; they become lethargic and lose the ability to swim, leaving them adrift until they are washed ashore in a critical condition, suffering from traumatic wounds, pneumonia, starvation, and other health issues. Rehabilitation takes months of painstaking care. Matt recently proposed and facilitated the International Sea Turtle Society Symposium’s first ever cold stunned turtle workshop in Hawaii, and is now facilitating a series of workshops in the UK to equip marine rescuers and rehabbers with the essential knowledge to respond to cases effectively. He is also involved in the development of a ‘living handbook’, which will be an online peer-reviewed guide to the rescue and rehabilitation of cold-stunned turtles.

Translocation and Disease Risk Analysis

Before animals can be translocated – either from captivity to the wild, or from one wild location to another – it is essential that a Disease Risk Analysis has been carried out, in order to assess and manage any health threats, not just to the introduced species, but to existing wildlife at the release site, domestic animals and people. It may not seem like the most exciting aspect of wildlife medicine, but it is an absolutely vital one. The DRA is essentially a living-document which addresses questions about infectious diseases and is updated as new information becomes available.

WVI has a wealth of experience in this area, and has been responsible for producing not only the DRA for Amur leopards mentioned above, but also DRAs for the reintroduction of pine martens and choughs (small corvids) in the UK, as well as endangered white-naped mangabeys in Ghana. More DRAs are in the pipeline, and in particular we hope to be involved in some invertebrate work in future – a reminder that every creature, great and small, contributes to ecosystem resilience and health!

All of these elements – demonstrating best conservation medicine practice and building local capacity, training rehabilitators, and assessing disease risk - are key to embedding wildlife health in conservation. Together, they go a long way to answering the question about what it is that WVI actually does. But sometimes it’s about making sure that those people working on the conservation frontline can get other valuable training opportunities which may take them away from their normal place of work, helping to widen their perspective and professional network, as well as giving them new skills and knowledge. Look out for more on how WVI makes this happen in our next news story.

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