Published: 12 Dec 2024 | Last Updated: 12 Dec 2024 16:43:04

Research from the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) has identified a new approach to assessing and managing health in wildlife populations. Taking learnings from well-established practices in managing livestock, this proposed model will help more effectively structure monitoring and intervention approaches, thereby maximising the health of wildlife populations and supporting conservation and human and ecosystem health.

Health planning provides a structure for the application of epidemiological data to manage populations in support of their health and wellbeing. Historically, the majority of wildlife health work is undertaken through epidemiological studies looking for the presence of a single infection in a population. While this approach plays a crucial role in animal disease control, it is rare for this type of research to be converted into surveillance schemes that manage wildlife health and inform plans for risk mitigation.

Conversely, when managing health in livestock in, for example, the dairy, beef, sheep and poultry industries, applying a structured process provides a framework for linking data and interventions to population outcomes. This approach also highlights knowledge gaps and research needs to support more proactive health management. It is also common practice for farm management teams to monitor agreed criteria that defines health in these species, and the risk factors associated with them.

Published in frontiers, this research, led by Dr Stuart Patterson, Senior Lecturer in Wild Animal Health and Associate Dean at the RVC, identifies six strengths of livestock herd health plans that could be applied to wildlife health planning. These include:

1. Being outcome driven, and thus having applied rather than theoretical applications
2. Being structured and repeatable, allowing for efficient usage by different individual managers and in different populations
3. Incorporating both health and welfare considerations thereby, establishing multidisciplinary management teams
4. An evidence-based approach, allowing for the prioritising of key risk factors
5. Encompassing both population and individual metrics, a differential which is often lost
6. Offering the opportunity for accreditation schemes, which offers potential processes for giving confidence to funders.

While some challenges would arise were livestock health planning simply copied across to a wildlife context, such as availability of baseline data and overall objectives being different to production animals, the strengths identified are significant enough to merit the development of wildlife population health planning for active management of individual populations. This approach also builds on the RVC’s leadership in the development of a One Health approach, which acknowledges the interdependence of human, animal and environmental health in effective disease prevention, preparedness and response management. It also further enhances the RVC’s courses that explore One Health, such as its MScs in Wild Animal Health and Wild Animal Biology, both of which focus on why health matters in wild populations, how it can be monitored and how it can be positively influenced.

Dr Stuart Patterson, Senior Lecturer in Wild Animal Health and Associate Dean at the RVC, said:

“Having worked as a cattle vet I have seen the advantages of herd health planning. Wildlife health work does not have that uniformity of approach, and I wanted to explore the potential for cross-disciplinary learning. Funding is often limited for working on wildlife populations and so a structured approach is important in terms of ensuring that work carried out is focussed on population outcomes.”

Notes to Editors

 Reference: Patterson S (2024) Utilising a livestock model for wildlife health planning. Front. Vet. Sci. 11:1466740. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2024.1466740

The full paper can be accessed at: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2024.1466740/full

More information regarding the RVC’s postgraduate courses, including One Health, is available at: https://www.rvc.ac.uk/study/postgraduate 

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About the RVC

• The Royal Veterinary College (RVC) is the UK's largest and longest established independent veterinary school and is a Member Institution of the University of London
• It is one of the few veterinary schools in the world that hold accreditations from the RCVS in the UK (with associated recognition from the AVBC for Australasia, the VCI for Ireland and the SAVC for South Africa), the EAEVE in the EU, and the AVMA in the USA and Canada.
• The RVC is ranked as the top veterinary school in the world in the QS World University Rankings by subject, 2024.
• The RVC offers undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in veterinary medicine, veterinary nursing and biological sciences.
• The RVC is a research-led institution, with 88% of its research rated as internationally excellent or world class in the Research Excellence Framework 2021.
• The RVC provides animal owners and the veterinary profession with access to expert veterinary care and advice through its teaching hospitals and first opinion practices in London and Hertfordshire.