Animal Health Matters - Applying Lessons Learned

Applying the Lessons Learned at Home to Foreign Assistance Programs:

Development agencies can promote health as “the ultimate ecosystem service,” an indicator of development initiatives that a priori acknowledge that their sustained success depends on environmental stability. If we are to successfully reconcile the needs of people with the challenges of saving wild species and natural spaces in an increasingly human-dominated world, we must develop a keen understanding of how disease interactions influence human, domestic animal, and wildlife health. Although we often hear media reports about the transmission of wildlife diseases to people, the reverse has received little attention while devastating wildlife populations. Improving the health of people and their domestic animals is not only key to raising living standards and enhancing food security, it is the single most effective way to reduce the incidence of disease transmission to highly susceptible wildlife populations. Qualified human and animal health experts should ideally be involved at all levels of development and conservation project planning, implementation, and monitoring to ensure that people, domestic animals, wildlife, and the environment are not negatively affected by new activities. To that end, the Wildlife Conservation Society is working towards integrating the health sciences into its landscape-based conservation approach.  What follows are snapshots of key landscapes around the world that WCS feels are true “wildlife health hotspots,” places where investments at the livestock / wildlife interface are likely to pay significant development as well as conservation dividends.