OVC prof visits Africa to teach game immobilization to wildlife managers
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Prof. Dale Smith, Pathobiology, and several of her students were running to find the immobilized black rhino calf when an adult rhino came snorting and stamping out of the bush only metres ahead of them. In the thick undergrowth, the animal — obviously the calf's mother — had managed to elude the dart team intended to keep her at bay.
Looking back at last month's incident from the relative safety of a microscope lab at the Ontario Veterinary College, Smith laughs as she recalls the immediate reaction of the team members. Arcing her hand and arm, she says: “They all did beautiful swan dives into the acacia bushes.”
She followed suit. When moments later they emerged, bleeding from the sharp thorns, the adult rhino had trundled off.
That was the most harrowing moment Smith encountered during her two-week trip in early February to the low veldt of Zimbabwe. She had been invited as the lone Canadian to join an instructional team of veterinarians to teach methods of immobilizing game to wildlife managers from several southern African countries. Her trip was partly supported by Canada's newly created Veterinarians Without Borders.
About 30 students took part in the course, held at a training camp on a reserve run by Zimbabwe's Malilangwe Conservation Trust about five hours' drive from Harare. Numerous animals, from wildebeest and elephants to zebras and giraffes, roam freely around the park.
“There were lions outside our camp roaring every night,” Smith says.
She helped teach the classroom component, including sessions on animal anatomy and physiology, how to use equipment — primarily dart guns loaded with powerful tranquillizing drugs — and how to handle animals in the field.
She also took part in those field sessions, where students learned how to immobilize animals and work safely with them while collecting blood samples, attaching radio transmitter collars and monitoring their condition under anesthetic.
The Zimbabwe Veterinary Association runs the annual wildlife immobilization course for veterinarians, park wardens and others handling animals in the country's preserves.
“The ability to handle and move animals, whether for simple management reasons or for disease investigation and control, is extremely important,” says Smith.
And appropriate training in the use of immobilization methods is vital to reducing the stress and possible injury to animals that must be handled, she adds.
(About half of the students were actually foreign visitors interested in zoos and wildlife who paid to attend the session. Smith says the country is desperate for foreign currency. Tourism to its lush game preserves has virtually bottomed out since Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, began a controversial land-redistribution program about five years ago that has led to political and economic unrest.)
“It was very cool,” says Smith, who has racked up considerable experience in animal capture and immobilization here in Ontario and during time spent in Africa. In 1984, she was the second person to complete the graduate program in zoo animal medicine and pathology involving OVC and the Toronto Zoo.
Conditions vary, of course, between southern Ontario and southern Africa. Here, Smith has been called on to anesthetize deer for the Humane Society or even to help control unruly animals like horses posing a danger to handlers on campus.
Some of that experience — including figuring out how to prevent potent drugs from freezing in the field during a Canadian winter — didn't translate readily to summer conditions in Zimbabwe, where temperatures of 30 C-plus required her to keep popping salt tablets and downing water. (They generally worked early in the morning and late in the evening to avoid the worst heat.)
Smith also provided advice on the course curriculum. For that, she drew on years of experience in curriculum development at OVC.
She teaches a third-year course in avian medicine at Guelph and works in the avian and exotic clinic program through the Veterinary Teaching Hospital.
She helps teach a short course in animal immobilization run by the Canadian Association of Zoo and Wildlife Veterinarians for Ontario park employees, dealing mostly with black bears.
Smith has been a faculty member at U of G for 15 years. Following her own studies at Guelph — she earned her DVM in 1980 and her D.V.Sc. in 1984 — she worked for two years at a veterinary school in Zimbabwe in the late 1980s.
She's now considering opportunities for collaborative research projects, perhaps involving Guelph students in ecosystem health or wildlife diseases and pathology in exchange visits to Africa.
“Now that I'm hooked, I'd like to go back every year.”
