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 counts, whose stories get told. From butterflies that are half male and half female to lizard species with no males at all, they reveal a natural world far stranger and more diverse than mainstream science tends to admit, and they make the case that inclusion isn't a side note to One Health. It's central to it.

Link

Follow Genevieve on Instagram and learn more about their amazing bat rehab work:
@night_flight_rehabilitation

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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, they found a cocktail of zoonotic bacteria in that same water people were taking home to drink. The public health implications are hard to ignore.

Sabrina also gives us a candid look at what it means to be a pioneering female wildlife veterinarian in a male-dominated field in Bangladesh, and shares a story from a research trip that nearly ended her career before it began. Spoiler: she was back in the field within two months.

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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 social media shapes public behavior toward wildlife and what that means for disease transmission, animal welfare, and conservation. From naturalized Amazon parrot flocks over San Diego to the psychology behind why people anthropomorphize wild animals, she makes the case that the same platforms driving dangerous encounters can, in the right hands, become powerful tools for change.

Links

Learn more about the Project Wildlife of the San Diego Humane Society

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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 detective story behind a troubling spike in elephant deaths on the slopes of Mount Kenya, where an invasive plant quietly transformed a lush forest into a nutritional trap, and reflects on the growing pressures of climate change on Northern Kenya's wildlife and communities. She also discusses her research interests in zoonotic disease and antimicrobial resistance, and what it means to build a career as one of very few female wildlife vets in the region.

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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. Her approach isn't to shut anything down, it's to build trust, one conversation at a time.

In this episode, Wendi shares what it takes to gain the confidence of traders who have every reason to be suspicious, why talking about COVID's economic impact opens doors that talking about viruses never could, and how a local tribe's ancient village-closing ritual turned out to be a remarkably effective form of quarantine.

Links

Learn more about Yayasan Inisiasi Alam Rehabilitasi Indonesia (YIARI), the nonprofit organization Wendi is working for here.

Read the story of 10 years of YIARI's work in slow loris conservation here.

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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 themselves. By establishing healthcare and education centres in remote villages, his team tackles the deeper drivers of habitat loss, because when communities thrive, lemurs have a fighting chance too. This is One Health conservation at its most grounded: built on community trust, shaped by personal experience, and driven by the conviction that Malagasy people are best placed to protect Madagascar's natural heritage.

Links

Learn more: 

The Dr. Abigail Ross Foundation for Applied Conservation (TDARFAC)

The Lemur Freedom Project

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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 share what drew them to wildlife health and what they've had to navigate along the way, the subtle daily realities of male-dominated spaces, alongside the genuine optimism that comes from seeing more women enter the field and rise into leadership. Warm, funny, and deeply human, this is the kind of conversation that reminds you why community matters in this work.

Watch this episode as a video podcast on our Youtube channel here. 

Learn more about our panelists:

• Dr. AiMei Chang, wildlife veterinarian and academic at the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology in Taiwan, and Secretary of the WDA Asia-Pacific section
• Dr. Sharon Mulindi, Senior Veterinary Officer at Kenya Wildlife Service and a Masters student of Conservation Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and Vice Chair of the WDA Africa and Middle East section
• Dr. Aricia Duarte-Benvenuto, veterinarian and postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Wildlife Comparative Pathology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil
• Dr. Kim Gruetzmacher, Wildlife and Conservation Veterinarian, working for the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation as Head of the Division for International Nature Conservation
• Dr. Samantha Allen, Supervisor of the Veterinary Service unit (Wyoming Game and Fish Department), State Wildlife Veterinarian for Wyoming, and President of the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians
• Dr. Fransiska Sulistyo, wildlife veterinarian and consultant specialising in orangutan conservation and rehabilitation in Indonesia, and a PhD student at Adelaide University.

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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 management of foot and mouth disease risk has allowed for a paradigm shift in southern African livestock disease management for the first time in over 70 years. He also points to how reviving the lost art of herding is helping to open new markets for farmers living alongside wildlife, reducing losses to lions, and offering the possibility of restoring wildlife corridors through less reliance on fencing. 

This is a story about bio-diplomacy, breaking down institutional silos, and finding win-wins in one of conservation's most stubborn standoffs. After 30 years, Steve is cautiously optimistic, and his reasoning is hard to argue with.

Links

Profile on the Cornell website

Program websites of AHEAD and the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health

Cornell Chronicle news piece: Removing Southern African Fences May Help Wildlife, Boost Economy

Most recent paper on the issue: Using Qualitative Risk Assessment to Re-Evaluate the Veterinary Fence Paradigm within the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area

Related paper from 2013: Balancing Livestock Production and Wildlife Conservation in and around Southern Africa's Transfrontier Conservation Areas

The Manhattan Principles on “One World, One Health”: https://www.oneworldonehealth.org/sept2004/owoh_sept04.html

Watch the video version of the podcast interview here.

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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 rising globally.

Discover how a Minnesota veterinarian triaged 60 cases in under two hours, why Toronto's skyscrapers now go dark during bird migration, and the staffing ratios that prevent both animal mortality and veterinarian burnout. Andrew shares transformative insights on why collaborative long-term strategies, not individual heroics, are reshaping wildlife rehabilitation worldwide.

This podcast episode is also available with the video:

https://youtu.be/7ND_jGhnMVY

Links

Learn more about Andrew's findings here. 

Check out Andrew's work place, the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital here. 

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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 and courts females across his territory.

Discover how movement data is reshaping Costa Rica's reforestation efforts and transforming local communities from viewing these apex predators as threats to becoming conservation allies in one of Earth's most biodiverse places.

Links

Learn more about the NGO Dennise works for: https://osaconservation.org/

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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 Wildlife Research, is training local women as conservation leaders and breaking centuries of exclusion from the field.

From the shocking realization that communities don't see themselves as owners of their own wildlife, to her vision of expanding women's involvement across Madagascar, Ny Aina offers a refreshingly honest perspective on what real conservation change looks like and why it starts with listening to the people closest to the problem.

Links

Learn more about Ny Aina's NGO 'Women rise wildlife research' here: https://wr-wildliferesearch.org/

Want to share your work with the wildlife health community? Email us (communications[at]wildlifedisease.org) and become a guest on the show!

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.