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PODCAST

Wildlife Health Talks

WDA Communications Committee

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

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All Episodes

29:04

#93 Amelie and the Taming of a Lyssavirus Panic...

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/10/04

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...

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26:29

#92 Jacopo and the art of wild bear anaesthesia...

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/09/20

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...

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27:55

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

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/09/06

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...

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28:55

#90 Billy Karesh and how the One Health term was born

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/08/23

The term One Health didn't come out of a strategy meeting or a peer-reviewed paper. It came out of an interview with a journalist who wouldn't drop a question. Dr. Billy Karesh was explaining why Ebola killing gorillas mattered, and the reporter kept pushing: is this a human disease or an animal one? Eventually Billy said there's just one health, the pathogens don't care about our categories. Recorded in Chicago for the WDA History project, Billy looks back on building WCS's field veterinary...

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24:25

#89 'Waking Up the Snake' by Anne Poelina (Australia)

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/08/09

Who could believe a blue-tongued lizard can teach you how to be a good human being? Professor Anne Poelina can, and by the end of this episode you might too. For International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, we're re-playing Anne's Carlton Herman Memorial Lecture from the 2024 WDA conference in Canberra. A Nyikina Warrwa woman, scientist, filmmaker and poet, Anne is the inaugural chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council in Western Australia's Kimberley, and she has spent decades a...

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29:35

#88 Maria Teresa and a single drop of finch blood...

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/07/26

What if the birds you walked past this morning were quietly fighting off bacteria that have been devastating poultry farms for decades, and you'd never know, because they show absolutely no signs of being sick? That's what Dr. Maria Teresa Reinoso Perez discovered when she started looking inside seemingly healthy house finches in Mexico. More than 70% of the birds she sampled were carrying Mycoplasma gallisepticum - a pathogen that causes severe disease in US bird populations, yet not one of ...

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18:43

#87 Arman and the wild birds of Iran

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/07/12

In Iran, there is no established path for a veterinary student who wants to work with wildlife. So Arman Nourishirazi and his teammates built one. Based in Ahvaz, in the province of Khuzestan, Arman is a final year vet student in one of the richest bird regions in the Middle East, where the Persian Gulf coast, vast wetlands and the Eurasian African Flyway all converge. Working with his university's veterinary hospital and the local Department of Environment, he helped create a system that tr...

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21:54

#86 Cody and Trichinella in Canada's Arctic North

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/06/28

What happens when a parasite learns to survive the deep freeze? In this episode, host Cat Vendl talks with parasitologist Cody Malone about Trichinella, the tiny worm behind your grandmother's warnings to cook pork through, and a real hazard for Canada's northern communities who rely on wild game. Cody shares how this strange nematode completes its entire life cycle in a single host, why freezing meat won't kill it, and how it can lurk in a frozen carcass for years. Along the way: a new...

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23:54

#85 Elizabeth and the Blood Feeding Network (Mexico)

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/06/14

How do you find out which animals a mosquito has been biting? You start by thinking like one. In this episode, biologist Elizabeth Linares Alcántara takes us to a public park in Mérida, Mexico, where she hunts blood-fed mosquitoes in their hiding spots and reads the DNA in their tiny abdomens to reveal who they have been feeding on, from humans and iguanas to feral cats and a neighbour's grazing goat. The result is a "blood feeding network" that helps anticipate outbreaks of dengue and other ...

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25:56

#84 Genevieve and the Wider Lens of Queer Ecology (USA)

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/05/31

Genevieve Barnett spends their nights caring for one of the world's most misunderstood animals. From Night Flight Rehabilitation, the bat rehab NGO they founded in Colorado, they nurse little brown bats through white-nose syndrome and gently untangle myotis caught in fishing line, one patient at a time. But Genevieve is also asking bigger questions. Through the lens of queer ecology, they explore what we miss when we view the natural world through one narrow perspective: whose knowledge count...

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25:21

#83 Sabrina and the Turtles of the Holy Shrine...

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/05/17

This episode takes us to Bangladesh, a first for the podcast, where Dr. Sabrina Ferdous is doing wildlife health research in one of the most unusual field sites you'll ever hear about: a centuries-old religious shrine, home to a critically endangered turtle found almost nowhere else on earth. The shrine pond is visited by thousands of devotees who consider both the turtles and their water sacred. But when Sabrina and her team started investigating a troubling decline in eggs and hatchlings, t...

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25:48

#82 Briana and the Social Media Epidemic (USA)

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/05/03

Every day at Project Wildlife in San Diego, Briana Eisan sees the consequences of a scroll: baby raccoons scooped up by well-meaning strangers, people reaching bare-handed toward bats, wildlife encounters going viral for all the wrong reasons. As a veterinary assistant at one of the largest wildlife rehabilitation programs in the US, she's on the front lines of both disease surveillance and an quieter epidemic: the spread of wildlife misinformation online. In this episode, Briana explores how...

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24:23

#81 Sharon and Wildlife on the Edge (Kenya)

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/04/19

Northern Kenya is one of Africa's most biodiverse landscapes, and one of its most demanding places to be a wildlife vet. Dr. Sharon Mulindi, senior veterinary officer at Kenya Wildlife Service, covers a vast stretch of this arid, wildlife-rich region where a 24/7 on-call schedule is less a job requirement and more a way of life. From darting wounded lions before breakfast to treating elephant calves in the midday heat, her days rarely go as planned. In this episode, Sharon shares the detectiv...

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28:25

#80 Wendi, Slow Lorises and lived One Health in...

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/04/05

What happens when a wildlife vet who spent years nursing slow lorises back to health walks into a live animal market, not to rescue animals, but to sit down with the vendors selling them? That's exactly what Dr. Wendi Prameswari does. Based in Indonesia with conservation NGO YIARI, Wendi works across two of the country's most pressing wildlife-human interfaces: the live animal markets of West Java, and the forest communities of West Kalimantan where hunting wildlife is woven into daily life. ...

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24:42

#79 Justorien and the Fight for Madagascar's Lemurs

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/03/22

Dr. Justorien Rambeloniaina grew up in northeastern Madagascar watching lemurs captured and killed, not yet knowing they were among the world's most endangered primates. Today he's fighting for them on every front, reconnecting fragmented forests with a five-kilometre wildlife corridor, combating the illegal pet trade, and sharing a quietly powerful encounter with a family keeping two mouse lemurs in a yellow water container, and what happened next. But his approach goes beyond the animals th...

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37:29

#78 Conversations with Women of Wildlife (A Panel...

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/03/08

Six women. Five continents. Decades of experience spanning wildlife veterinary practice, disease research, government policy, and international conservation. Recorded for 2026 International Women's Day, this episode brings together an extraordinary panel to celebrate women in wildlife health, their journeys, their achievements, and their honest reflections on working in a field that hasn't always made space for them. From Taiwan to Kenya, Wyoming to Brazil, Indonesia to Germany, our guests sh...

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29:27

#77 Steve and Some Good Gnus in Southern Africa

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/02/22

What if the very fences built to protect livestock have been quietly driving one of Africa's greatest wildlife crises? Professor Steve Osofsky, one of the architects of the One Health movement, has spent over 30 years trying to solve exactly that problem in the vast five-nation Kavango-Zambezi Conservation Area, home to the majority of Africa's elephants. Steve shares how WOAH’s breakthrough recognition that a biosafe beef value chain can be considered equivalent to fence-based manageme...

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28:52

#76 Andrew and the Future of Wildlife Hospitals...

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/02/08

What if the key to saving more wildlife isn't treating more animals, but preventing them from ending up in hospitals in the first place? In this episode, host Dr. Cat Vendl speaks with Dr. Andrew Hill, a senior veterinarian at Currumbin Wildlife Hospital, one of the world's busiest wildlife facilities treating over 16,000 animals annually. Through his Churchill Fellowship, Andrew traveled 75,000 kilometers visiting ten major wildlife hospitals, uncovering a sobering truth: admissions are risi...

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21:55

#75 Dennise and the Wild Cats of Costa Rica

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/01/25

Journey to Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula with wildlife veterinarian Dennise Ortiz, who tracks pumas and ocelots to answer a critical question: do biological corridors connecting fragmented forests actually work? From midnight captures to analyzing GPS data, Dennise reveals how these cats navigate between national parks, farmlands, and dangerous roads. Meet Jerry the ocelot, who survived a car strike and reappeared days later, and experience life through Tico the puma's camera collar as he hunts ...

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19:48

#74 Ny Aina and the Women Leading Madagascar's...

Wildlife Health Talks ·

2026/01/11

From Madagascar's forests to the heart of conservation: meet Dr. Ny Aina Tiana Rakotoarisoa, a veterinarian on a mission to save critically endangered radiated tortoises while transforming how women lead in wildlife conservation. Ny Aina reveals the hidden crisis driving thousands of tortoises into illegal trade. It's not just about their striking beauty. She explores the local beliefs, economic desperation, and gender inequality that fuel the problem, then shares how her NGO, Women Rise Wild...

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93 results

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