The wild life of wildlife veterinarians
Veterinarians work inside and outside government agencies to improve health of free-ranging wildlife
By Katie Burns
Published: 19 December 2022
Updated: 05 January 2023
Dr. Ole Alcumbrac is frequently away from his mixed animal practice in Arizona from October through March providing training in wildlife capture, particularly of Sonoran pronghorns and Mexican gray wolves—both of which are endangered subspecies. Most of the work is done in the wintertime because of heat-related issues in the summer.
Dr. Alcumbrac, star of the television shows “Wild Ops” on the Outdoor Channel and “The Wild Life of Dr. Ole” on National Geographic, served as Arizona’s first state wildlife veterinarian before he realized he wasn’t built for government work. Now he owns his mixed animal practice and contracts for a variety of hands-on wildlife work.
On the flip side, Dr. Anne Justice-Allen, Arizona’s current state wildlife veterinarian, started out in mixed animal practice but got interested in disaster management and then management of disease in wildlife. In her current position, she is mostly responsible for monitoring the health of wildlife populations in the state, including Sonoran pronghorns and Mexican grey wolves.
Dr. Justice-Allen also is president of the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians, a small group established in 1979. The AAWV members are mostly veterinarians working in government wildlife management agencies, but many members work for zoos and aquaria, academic institutions, wildlife rehabilitation facilities, and even private practices.
“People shift around,” Dr. Justice-Allen said. “You change jobs, and your duties change a little bit, but you still remain a part of the association, and it’s because we all have a passion for free-ranging wildlife and working with wildlife and maintaining a healthy relationship with wildlife as far as ecosystem health and minimizing human impact on wildlife populations.”
The SARS-CoV-2 virus probably originated in wildlife and has been documented in more than two dozen species. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the one-health concept that the health of humans, animals, and the environment is interconnected, and wildlife veterinarians continue carving out a niche working at the interface of these areas.
For insights into this line of work, AVMA News interviewed Drs. Justice-Allen and Alcumbrac as well as Dr. Jonathan Sleeman, center director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, and Dr. Patrice Klein, national program lead for fish and wildlife health with the U.S. Forest Service. Their stories will be told in four subsequent stories posted online each Monday.
The contribution of veterinarians to wildlife health
Dr. Justice-Allen worked at mixed animal practices across the Southwest for much of her career. Around the time that the former AVMA Veterinary Medical Assistance Teams were forming to assist with disaster response in the early 1990s, she became interested in disaster medicine and met people working with agriculture departments in that field.
She got her master’s degree and began work in disease management. She said: “I was really interested in the one-health field even before one health was a thing. I was interested in the spread of diseases from wildlife to people and to domestic animals and then back from domestic animals and people to wildlife.”
When Dr. Justice-Allen was in veterinary school in the mid-’80s, the concept of a wildlife veterinarian was very new. The Wildlife Disease Association was formed in 1952, and the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians was formed in 1979.
Fast-forward to 2009 when Dr. Justice-Allen joined the Arizona Game and Fish Department as state wildlife veterinarian and as supervisor of the Wildlife Health Program. Her job is to inform wildlife managers and biologists about the health of wildlife populations in the state, how that status might affect those populations, and options for responding.
She does mortality investigations when the department get reports of wild animals dying. Her program does routine surveillance of wildlife health through hunter-harvested samples and samples obtained during translocation or studies of animals. She also performs risk analyses ahead of translocation of animals.
The species of greatest concern to the Arizona Game and Fish Department are animals hunted as game such as deer, elk, and bighorn sheep and endangered species ranging from black-footed ferrets to the Sonoran pronghorns and Mexican gray wolves. The wildlife program does a lot of work with migratory birds, partly in response to reports of birds dying.
Specific health issues are pneumonia in bighorn sheep, although Arizona hasn’t seen too much trouble, and rabbit hemorrhagic disease, which is now endemic in some areas of the state. The program also has been on the lookout for chronic wasting disease in cervids and highly pathogenic avian influenza.
Along the way, Dr. Justice-Allen got involved with the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians. The AAWV has many ongoing mission objectives, starting off with “to enhance the contribution of veterinary medicine to the health, conservation, and welfare of wildlife.”
Among its efforts, the AAWV is active in governmental advocacy and educating veterinary students. Another mission objective is to stress the importance of the one-health concept.
The AAWV meets annually, usually in conjunction with the Wildlife Disease Association. As of late October, the AAWV had 317 members.
“The field has grown and matured, and now we’re seeing young veterinarians who are graduating from veterinary school and going on to get advanced degrees like master’s degrees or PhDs in wildlife management,” Dr. Justice-Allen said. “They have a much stronger management background, and at the same time they have that veterinary education and knowledge of animal health and welfare.”
Wildlife disease as a frontier of discovery
Dr. Sleeman is heading up an ad hoc committee for the American College of Zoological Medicine looking at ways to encourage more veterinarians to become diplomates in the ACZM discipline of wildlife population health. He is one of about a dozen diplomates in the discipline and center director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, close to the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The ACZM was established in 1983 and always has been a broad tent, Dr. Sleeman said. Diplomates include veterinarians in the disciplines of general zoo health, aquatic animal health, and the health of zoological companion animals—also known as exotic pets.
The discipline in wildlife population health involves epidemiology, outbreak investigation, and knowledge of wildlife diseases. It is designed to give veterinarians the skills to work in a variety of settings.
“We are seeing increasing impacts of diseases on wildlife populations,” Dr. Sleeman said. He said the National Wildlife Health Center, founded in the 1970s, did a lot of work on avian botulism and avian cholera, which could cause fairly large-scale outbreaks but didn’t usually threaten the existence of species.
Since the 1990s, the number of emerging diseases in wildlife has been ever increasing because of drivers such as climate change, habitat loss, and globalization, Dr. Sleeman said. Among these diseases are West Nile virus, highly pathogenic avian influenza, chronic wasting disease in cervids, white-nose syndrome in bats, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus in wildlife.
“We are just seeing an ever-increasing number of diseases, and these diseases are increasingly threatening the survival of species,” Dr. Sleeman said. Plus, they spread very rapidly over large distances.
These situations require more surveillance and the need to proactively manage and prevent these diseases. He said, “Veterinarians have the skills to do that work.”
When Dr. Sleeman started out in his native England, he earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology and then a veterinary degree in 1992, thinking he would combine his interest in wildlife and in medical sciences to become a wildlife veterinarian—not knowing the position was rare. Nevertheless, he went on to a residency in zoological medicine at the University of Tennessee, including studies with free-ranging wildlife.
“I enjoyed the work with wildlife. I found it very challenging just working with wildlife, and I enjoyed that challenge,” Dr. Sleeman said. “Scientifically, it is very interesting to me because it’s one of the frontiers of discovery. We know so little about diseases in wildlife populations and their implications and their impacts.”
He went on to hold positions with the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project in Rwanda, Colorado State University, and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. He became center director of the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in 2009.
The NWHC, with a new strategic plan that emphasizes a one-health approach, is looking at taking a systems approach to certain challenging wildlife diseases, Dr. Sleeman said. For example, habitat management potentially could improve the health of wildlife populations overall to increase their resilience to diseases.
The center received $5 million through the American Rescue Plan Act, one of the federal laws in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to continue developing the Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership. The online system serves as a central repository of information on wildlife health.
The NWHC also is exploring how to apply new technology such as artificial intelligence to wildlife health data. Dr. Sleeman said much of the data is messy and nonstandardized. He said the hope is to provide early alerts and devise new solutions.
Another initiative is international engagement. The center is collaborating with the World Organisation for Animal Health to improve international information sharing on wildlife health, has made information cards on wildlife diseases for other countries, and helps other countries build capacity in wildlife health programs.
Just recently, the WOAH, along with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the United Nations’ Environment Programme, and the World Health Organization, launched the One Health Joint Plan of Action, to improve the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment while contributing to sustainable development.
The versatility of the wildlife veterinarian
Dr. Klein is a wildlife veterinarian based out of Washington, D.C., serving as the national program lead for fish and wildlife health with the U.S. Forest Service. A multifaceted career led to her current position.
“Wildlife veterinarians by necessity have to be very versatile. They have to have a broad skillset so that they can fit into many different situations,” Dr. Klein said. She added, “The wildlife veterinarians have a broad understanding of all the interconnectedness between animals, people, and the environment.”
Before Dr. Klein went to veterinary school in the mid-’80s, she volunteered with her local veterinary practice in Long Island, New York, one of the early private practices willing to see exotic pets. By the time she earned a master’s degree in toxicology and her veterinary degree, she had developed an interest in all captive and free-ranging wildlife. She went on to a residency at the University of California-Davis in avian medicine and pathology, which involved mostly poultry but also the burgeoning pet bird industry.
She found her first job as a wildlife veterinarian with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Maryland, doing clinical and toxicology work. Among the programs there, biologists were breeding and rearing endangered whooping cranes in captivity for reintroduction to the wild.
Dr. Klein went on to other positions and got involved in disaster response, including becoming a commander of one of the former AVMA Veterinary Medical Assistance Teams. Along with other disasters, she participated in response to oil spills, helping determine how to best clean, treat, rehabilitate, and release impacted wild birds.
Through the U.S. Public Health Service, she worked on foodborne diseases in game meat and helped develop food safety and zoonotic risk assessments for chronic wasting disease in wild deer and elk. She subsequently joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, where she continued working on CWD disease control in free-ranging and farmed cervids. She said, “A fence line does not stop a disease from being transmitted.”
Dr. Klein also focused on highly pathogenic avian influenza at the interfaces between wild birds, poultry, and humans and helped to establish the prevention and control program for H5 and H7 low-pathogenic avian influenza in the marketing system for live birds.
She is the first veterinarian hired as a senior veterinary medical officer by the U.S. Forest Service. The Forest Service needed to establish an institutional animal care and use committee to support its wildlife research, and she had prior experience serving on an IACUC as an attending veterinarian while working with the USFWS. The Forest Service also expanded her role to national program lead for fish and wildlife health.
Dr. Klein said what she has seen over her 30-year career is an anthology of wildlife medicine. She said, “I’ve been watching this career as a wildlife veterinarian emerge and expand tremendously.”
In another role, Dr. Klein has volunteered for 20 years with her local wildlife rehabilitation center and has been involved with the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association. More of these facilities actually have hired veterinarians to be on staff.
When a member of the public finds a wild animal that’s in trouble—injured or ill—they need someplace to bring that animal, Dr. Klein said. In the case of outbreaks of wildlife and zoonotic diseases, such as West Nile virus or avian influenza, the public will find sick animals—one here, one there—and then wildlife rehabilitators serve on the front lines to provide early alerts of these diseases to their state wildlife agency.
Conserving wildlife for generations to come
A native of Arizona, Dr. Alcumbrac always has had a great passion and affinity for natural resources and animals.
He majored in wildlife biology as an undergraduate student and earned his veterinary degree in 1989 from Colorado State University. His mentor in veterinary school introduced him to wildlife capture, but he owed Arizona four years of veterinary practice, so he joined a mixed animal practice back home.
He volunteered for Arizona Game and Fish, though, and the department hired him as the state’s first wildlife veterinarian. When he realized he wasn’t, in his words, cut out for a government job, he started White Mountain Animal Hospital in Lakeside, Arizona, and became a contractor for work on wildlife.
Dr. Alcumbrac found out that he couldn’t be at every capture event, so he got involved in teaching wildlife capture and immobilization. He developed a course that has been taught internationally to provide information about drugs used in wildlife work, remote drug delivery systems, dart systems, and different techniques of catching animals based on the reason or justification for capture.
He also got involved in investigation of wildlife drugs for the Food and Drug Administration and became part owner of Wildlife Pharmaceuticals Mexico, which manufactures drugs for wildlife capture. Additionally, he is the veterinarian for Bearizona, a wildlife park where more than half the animals are rescues.
“It’s a pretty broad base, but to me it’s just a wonderful thing. I’m giving back to Mother Earth in a way,” Dr. Alcumbrac said. “At my level, I’ve always counseled the young veterinarians that want to go down this path that in the big pyramid of wildlife management, a veterinarian is a piece of that pyramid. There’s a lot of other moving parts, and so we’re kind of a cog in the wheel.”
A television producer found Dr. Alcumbrac on the internet and thought that his work in wildlife capture would make for an interesting program, which led to “Wild Ops” on the Outdoor Channel. He thought that was his 15 minutes of fame, but then he got a call from a producer to do “The Wild Life of Dr. Ole” on National Geographic, a program about both his wildlife work and his mixed animal practice.
Times have changed a lot since Dr. Alcumbrac earned his veterinary degree in 1989.
“There wasn’t really such a thing as a wildlife veterinarian. We didn’t know what we were back then,” he said. “We understood we could be helpful, but I think the management agencies didn’t really know what to do with us back then. They kind of considered us something that is going to fix the broken animal.”
Through the years, he has tried to explain the roles of wildlife veterinarians, such as training biologists how to do procedures in the field. He said, “More importantly, we are herd health managers, like production animal veterinarians, and we can actually maximize the ability to keep those populations viable and stable out there in the real world.”
Over time, wildlife veterinarians gained the respect of the management community as well as introduced a new way of thinking. For example, in wildlife capture, veterinarians helped develop ways of handling animals with less mortality and morbidity. When Dr. Alcumbrac started working with pronghorns, 40% mortality was considered acceptable because pronghorns basically run for a living and are prone to capture myopathy. Now, there is virtually zero mortality.
Dr. Alcumbrac’s goal is to keep wildlife on the landscape not only for himself but also for his grandkids. He said, “Our job is to protect and to conserve these animals, and my job is to make sure that these populations are going to be there for generations to come.”
AVMA supports wildlife conservation through policies, resources
The AVMA supports the conservation of wildlife through a number of policies, which collectively emphasize the one-health concept, and through resources including a decision tree for veterinary practices presented with a sick or injured wild animal.
The Association’s policy “Conservation of Wildlife” starts by stating: “The AVMA recognizes the vital role of wildlife in the Human-Animal-Environment complex and that wildlife conservation is most effectively addressed with a One Health approach. Such an integrated approach for the conservation of wildlife and native habitats promotes biodiversity and species preservation, sustainable and resilient populations, and healthy wildlife, domestic animals, humans, and ecosystems.”
The AVMA also has policies that cover the Association’s support for environmental responsibility, concerns to address with the ownership or possession of wild animals and exotic pets, how to handle interactions between wildlife and livestock, and the Association’s support for mitigating the risk of lead in the environment.
Among other resources, the Association has developed a detailed wildlife decision tree to help veterinary practices that are presented with a sick or injured wild animal.
“This decision tree serves as a guide for practices to assist them in navigating the complexities associated with treating wildlife species or their hybrids,” according to a description of the resource. “Basically, the chart helps your practice take care of the issues peripheral to the animal so that you can focus on treating the animal appropriately.”
The AVMA also offers links to wildlife resources under the categories of governmental authorities, bald and golden eagles, carcasses or parts, endangered species, euthanasia, federal regulations, wildlife rehabilitators, marine mammals and sea turtles, migratory birds, and specific wildlife diseases.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated that Dr. Patrice Klein is the first veterinarian ever hired by the U.S. Forest Service.
Related content:
Saving box turtles, all in a dog’s day of work
Zoo veterinarians, behind the scenes and in the field
Role of zoos is conservation, zoo veterinarians say
Conserving habitats, ecosystems everywhere key to saving wildlife
