My SAWorldVets Conservation Experience

Brian Tighe, Ross University

Experiences, Honorable Mention 

Often times when a person says you’ll have the opportunity to collaborate with a multimillion dollar industry, the opportunity to take care of animals that run into the tens of thousands of dollars per individual, a lot of feelings can come rushing towards you.  Excitement at the opportunity, disbelief in the trust placed upon you, anxiety over the possibility of a single mishap ruining your entire career, but the one emotion you would never expect is complacency.   Sable antelope, Hippotragus niger, is a species of antelope found in the savannahs of Africa.  Its rarity is dependent on the subspecies, spanning the spectrum from critically endangered to least concern, but that “least concern” label didn’t happen by itself. 

The farmers of South Africa have learned what valuable assets these animals can be, allowing offers from wealthy folks all over the world to spill in to purchase them for a variety of reasons, the most being hunting.  This gave great incentive to increase their numbers.  So when this student says he grew complacent seeing these creatures, he wasn’t bored or uninterested in them.  It was the sheer fact that on any given day as he drove threw the country, visiting farm after farm, these animals were everywhere.  Ever been to Pennsylvania and seen all the white-tailed deer?  Or how about sheep in New Zealand?  Or castles in Ireland?  It was kind of like that.  By the end of the trip we had seen so many Sable antelope we stopped taking pictures of them.  And you know what other emotion that made us realize on our journey back?  Pride in the efforts of conservationists, farmers, and veterinarians who were able to take an animal who used to have such low numbers and blow them up into a common sighting.

            I was one of fourteen students who went on an excursion to South Africa to follow a wildlife veterinarian as he worked to help farmers and maintain conservation of the animal species there.  The group was called SAWorldVets and was worth every penny.  Essentially we were following him on a day to day work schedule, awakening each morning before sunrise to whatever was scheduled, lunch, going out to calls, and then finally coming back in the evening to crash around the campfire.  Luckily for us, we just so happened to arrive two weeks before a giant auction that would involve many of the farmers in the area and, of course, they all wanted their animals in top shape.  Every day consisted of darting an animal, checking it out and making sure it was healthy, transporting it to a different holding pen or onto a truck to travel to the auction site, measuring it and find its net worth, pregnancy checks on the females, etc.  The actual work the students got to perform were mostly injections of antibiotics and vitamins, monitoring respiration rate, the all important task of monitoring correct positioning of the head and body to deter the animal from swallowing its tongue or lying lateral on important organs, replacement of a bandage, actually giving a rabies vaccine, and one time an abscess drain.  Although any of that sounds like grunt work for any trained veterinary technician, couple it with the fact that we performing it all on exotic animals some people never even get to see, much less touch, and as students and alongside the hardcore veterinarians there, it was well worth it.

            While the above was typical work of the wildlife vet, there were other events we got to partake in that were hands down the highlights of the trip.  There’s a bit of a tie as to what my favorite part would be, either a necropsy on a giraffe or shooting a dart gun out of a helicopter.  The necropsy definitely appeals to anyone’s intensely focused science side.  Necropsies happen all the time and going through vet school you have to conduct at least one during a pathology course.  But how many times does a person get to cut open a Southern Giraffe?  To see the actual length of that tongue, huge blood vessels, a rumen one of us could climb into, a heart bigger than my foot, and surprisingly smaller lungs than you would expect.  The wildlife vet down there does necropsies as well, but it’s always a surprise so there was almost no way of telling that this would happen.  The guides just kept telling us over and over again “It’s a surprise” until we rounded to the back of the building and our heads exploded.  But as with everything on the trip having a conservationist tone to it, we also got to see how the animal helped with that.  First, the fact that a hunter paid so much money to shoot it, more money than it would have brought in while alive.  Then, the meat was saved for the locals, the organs for education, and so on.

            Tied with the necropsy was the darting.  The whole experience was about students learning the tools of a wildlife vet’s trade, and that included learning how to properly dart and tranquilize animals from the ground and the air.  After tutorials about gun safety and proper handling of supplies and equipment, we had some target practice, a little contest, and then the chance to go up in the air.  Now as a person who has shot before, there wasn’t much difficulty except for making sure to keep both eyes open.  One eye would look through the sight while the other eye had to follow the dart and make sure it actually hit the animal.  Otherwise you have a dart full of drugs, that all cost money, just lying out in the wild waiting to harm something.  This part of the trip definitely catered to the adrenaline junkies, anyone who gets off of excitement and danger since the pilot, whom without a doubt loved his job, was doing tricks such as whipping around and going sideways.  The hard part was remembering to stop enjoying it and actually shoot at the target.  Most of us completely missed but a few good ones, such as yours truly, actually hit their mark, possibly heading their future careers in that direction.

            An elephant hadn’t been eating or drinking for days because of hard tissue building up in her joints leading to pain while she walked to the river.  A genetic line mutation had lead to a farmer now breeding Golden Wildebeasts and Black Impalas.  Laws are a little different down there so some of the students actually got to inject a rabies vaccine into a Lycaon African Wild Dog, the second rarest canine species in Africa.  Our day off we got to tour Kruger National Park.   At the Hoedspruit Endangered Species Center we saw the extremely rare King Cheetahs and a mane-less male lion.  We got to pet a cheetah and a rhino.  As one goes through the memories of this excursion, as well as the photos, it is just one amazing event after another.  And to think of all we learned while over there, not only information to help further our own careers, but to help further the protection and promotion of these wonderful creatures.  The trip was a great learning experience coupled with opportunities most people never have.  SAWorldVets is in due of a huge “thank you” to all their hard work and amazing skill.