An Interview with Dr. Jon Hanger, Head Veterinarian of the Australian Wildlife Hospital

© 2007, Lee Barwood

The groundbreaking work of Dr. Jon Hanger on behalf of koalas covers a broad range, from his thesis on the connection between koala leukemia and the koala retrovirus to ongoing studies on the link between that retrovirus and chlamydiosis. He is also supervising research into the migration patterns of rehabilitated koalas and their success rate in forming new home ranges. Dr. Hanger founded Wildcare Australia (Australian Koala Hospital Association Inc.) in 1993, and is still the principal consulting veterinarian there.

But his expertise isn't limited to koalas or even Australian animals. Dr. Hanger treats the exotic animals at Australia Zoo, and has put his devotion to animals and his love of science to good use in work that helps wildlife not only in Australia, but in other parts of the world. He's journeyed to Banda Aceh to provide, with his team, medical care to the elephants searching for bodies in the wake of the tsunami, and he and his team also provided humanitarian aid to the forest guards who were affected. He has also taken part in many other wildlife rescue operations.

We were fortunate to chat with Dr. Hanger at length, and he gave us some insights into what drives him. His passion for the care of all wildlife shines clearly through his words.

What was your strongest motivator in going into animal medicine?

My father is a retired judge and his father was a judge, and I have uncles who are barristers. I broke the mold. I was always an animal lover from a tiny little tot, so my earliest memories are being fascinated with animals and getting upset if they were hurt. And I wanted to be a scientist. So I put the two together. Being a veterinarian is a good way to meld science and the love of animals. [That goal] came very early in life. I was strongly motivated.

There is a lot of action these days in the field of animal law. What kind of legislation do you feel is most necessary? The most useful?

I have pretty strong opinions on animal welfare things, and what we're doing to the environment and the natural world. There's the concept of intergenerational equity.

[Intergenerational equity is a concept that asserts, among other things, that future generations have the same right to a habitable planet, biodiversity, and survival that previous generations have enjoyed—that the present generation is a steward of the planet for those who will come after.]

Some of my strongest feelings are about our current system of laws, which does not adequately enable us as a society to protect the environment, natural assets, and species for future generations. And there's little long-term accountability of government for what they're doing. It galls me that people make these decisions that are not in the interests of our children and grandchildren. The fact is that our political systems have no mechanism to make politicians accountable for environmental vandalism.

From an animal welfare point of view, the state regulations that cover animal welfare are all hazy on welfare with respect to wildlife, particularly in the clearing of bushland habitat and the animal welfare impacts of that. These are huge issues when you put a bulldozer through habitat that you know is teeming with wildlife. One of the things we've done recently is write a draft code of practice for how wildlife habitat should be cleared, or attended to during the process of tree clearing. It's not good enough to bury your head in the sand and send in dozers because "we can't see the wildlife." We've been working on a land-clearing job for a rail line; two towns close to us are going through bushland, and we've been applying code. And the number of animals you can recover from those operations is huge, if you apply yourself to it [humane trapping for relocation, etc.]. It makes you realize how many individual animals are killed, and maimed, and displaced, and die of starvation, and predated, and subject to territorial aggression—the animal welfare aspects of land clearing have to be close to our hearts and minds. Animal welfare laws don't adequately deal with that. The nature conservation act and welfare act are not dealing with it.

In Queensland, it's coming way too late. The state government decided it would abolish broad-style land clearing in Queensland. Clearing any block of land over one hectare, if it was in remnant vegetation, was going to be banned by 31 Dec. 2007. [But they] warned everyone, and made a big hoo-ha. The Brigalow belt, which is fairly harsh dry scrub, runs inland from southeast Queensland and spreads up the central third to halfway up the state. It's got a very good biodiversity of reptiles and koalas—dry—harsh for humans, and fragile, that cannot recover well from damage. That was where a lot of farming lands were.

I was talking with a farmer who had D-9 bulldozers. These are big bulldozers, and they do the clearing by suspending chains between the bulldozers—each link [of the chains] might weigh 40 kilos or more, four times the size of a football. He was working those 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, after the Beattie government announced the changes in the rules. There was a massive and unforgivable amount of damage done; people had two years [between the announcement of the coming legislation and when it took effect] to get rid of the scrub. No one is held personally held accountable for that. People thought, "We might want to use the land in the future, so let's clear it now." Once [these areas are] cleared, they're considered regrowth areas and can be cleared again without permit. On the surface they said it was good, but it did such damage. There was no mechanism of limiting [the destruction]; it was unforgivable. Now the Brigalow Belt is most critically endangered. If you use Google Earth and scan from southeast Queensland to the west, to the corner of the state, it's the middle section. You'll see how little habitat there is and how fragmented it is. That's a loss of connectivity. That's extinction debt—the fact that we've created a damaged environment such that extinction is assured within five, ten, twenty, or fifty years.

[Extinction debt postulates that, once a habitat has been damaged or destroyed, the creatures that live in the remnants of the habitat are doomed to extinction. This is due to many factors, including a lack of regenerative capability in the habitat itself—which denies the remnant populations enough food, water, and range to survive.]

It's human nature; it's greed, and it's never going to change.

At this hospital, our business is patching up sick and injured wildlife. These are individuals subject to lack of regard and lack of care. They are the personal and individual tragedies of environmental degradation.

I'm not a religious man, but I find that the serenity prayer is a good one to apply to these circumstances.

[Serenity Prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.]

How sad. And so much work to be done. But since you are helping these animals, what is your most satisfying case to date?

Steve. There are a lot of Steves. But Steve is special because he came when we really only just opened up and when fixing broken jaws in koalas was sort of unheard of. I hadn't done it. We hadn't had the resources and the time to look after them. He was one of the first for multiple facial fractures. His face [was swelled up] like a balloon. It looked like a football. He was horribly banged up, and spent three weeks in intensive care. The best moment was when we took him out for a bit of sun, and he looked up and sniffed the breeze and felt the sun—he went from depression, locked in ICU, to the realization that the sun was still out and the breeze was still there and there was a gum tree. That was the turnaround for him. He was one of the first really difficult patients [in terms of extensive injuries] we had.

The first ones tend to be the most memorable. There was a turtle called Shelley, a 60-kilo green turtle. She was a floater. That happens when gases are accumulating in the bowel or in the shell cavity. When they float, they can't dive to eat and forage. Shelly had a parasitic infection of coccidiosis. We ended up keeping her for three months, and the turning point was the first day when we stuck a fish in her mouth and she ate really well from then on. We've treated a lot of turtles, but she was the first we had and she was quite memorable.

We've had ten thousand animals since we opened. We euthanize at least fifty percent of what walks in the door. Probably at least another third of those admitted will end up either dying or being euthanized later. The release rate back into the wild is probably only about a third.

I'd like to think this hospital is working best practice—but the success rate is fairly low. That's indicative of the severity of injury and illness by the time they get presented to us. Koalas have this retrovirus which I did my Ph.D. on—it's far more insidious and causes an AIDS-like condition. A lot of koalas are coming here sick, and have underlying AIDS—their illnesses are probably caused by this virus and others. It's very prevalent in Quensland and New South Wales; it's less prevalent in Victorian koalas. It impacts their ability to deal with chlamydia and other diseases. We don't have a test for the AIDS condition, so we rely on circumstantial evidence. That's a key training process not being recognized at a government level, and it should be. We're trashing their habitat like there's no tomorrow. Strong koala habitat is in areas where people want to live. Insidious diseases have the ability to wipe out remnant populations. We're fragmenting population into one or two or fifty individuals. Throw in a couple of diseases, and you have extinction debt syndrome. You just tip 95% of the population into extinction, because we haven't been mindful [of them and their needs].

Do you use alternative treatments at the Hospital (Reiki, acupuncture, homeopathy, Therapeutic Touch, that sort of thing)? If so, what do you find most effective? If not, why not? Was it a decision or simply a lack of alternatively trained personnel available?

I've tried acupuncture on a few animals and I don't mind people trying Reiki but I have to say alternative therapies—I expect them to undergo the type of testing that conventional therapies do. [That said,] koala females get pouch infections—sometimes from a joey dying or trauma—and one thing I've found effective for those is to cut off a chunk of aloe vera and mix that with antibiotic and use that.

But in wildlife we haven't explored a lot of those alternative therapies. Partly because they're not offered to us, and people who work here don't know much about them. And secondarily because I've got to be mindful of whether it's going to work. [It's tough to use a therapy that requires an] animal sitting still, or that's invasive, and [one has to consider the] perception of volunteers. I'm open to allowing them to be tried from time to time. They have not been subjected to double-blind trials. We use techniques that are proved over the years.

We encourage volunteers to spend time with the animals, holding them, and if it's done with love and compassion, like Reiki, it makes a difference.

I was in private practice and I remember a client with a cat with a spinal lesion that couldn't void its bladder. Poor cat. The owner didn't want to euthanize it and wanted to use other invasive therapies but it would cause more pain.

From a welfare point of view, I have reservations. In other things, I'm open to them.

What does it take to be a volunteer at the Hospital (training, experience, etc.)? What do they do?

We have a fairly regular flow of people who are wanting to volunteer and, as long as they present well, they're invited to come in and spend time with experienced volunteers. We've got about sixty or seventy altogether, and probably about twenty or thirty who come in regularly. They do the cleaning of cages, feeding, they spend time with the animals, take them for walks. People ring up and volunteer and fill out a sheet. The time they give can range from two to three days a week to one day a month.

What does it take to be a rehabilitator?

Generally there are wildlife rescue groups that operate in southeastern Queensland. Wildcare Australia has a network of wildlife carers who do rescues and hand rear marsupial orphans—birds, possums, gliders, bats, birds—a whole network. Sometimes people come in to volunteer for that and we send them to one of these groups. Wildcare Australia has a good program to train them. We regulate vet service; if they're rearing an animal, they'd bring it to us if it needs care. It's free vet service. Sometimes local vets are amenable to seeing wildlife, and sometimes not.

There's a feral center for [private practice] vets with [wildlife] cases too difficult for them. It requires a high level of expertise.

What's the biggest difference between being a vet in private practice and working for the Hospital?

The biggest difference in how we apply care is that we live in luxury in terms of not limited by a client's budget. An animal comes in, and if it needs blood tests or x-rays, we can apply very high standards of veterinary care that's not limited by a budget. We can practice good veterinary science. A private practice vet will get a client with a dog with a skin infection or allergy. From a vet's point of view, it's appropriate to do a skin culture to see if it's staph or something else, or a biopsy or a blood test to see if there's underlying disease. But the reality is that the customer wants a quick fix, and often you've got five or ten minutes for a dog with skin disease. [If that happened at the Hospital,] we might spend an hour working it up . Private practice is a high throughput system, with short consultations, and the client wants a quick fix. If you tell client they can spend three hundred for a biopsy, or do antibiotics, which is far cheaper, they'll take that and that's understandable. They have a limited budget. And they also have an attitude problem; they may say, "I've paid five dollars for this kitten, and I don't want to spend more than five dollars for the medicine."

Private practice vets have a huge case load, and no time to work up cases—and then there's the quality of the veterinary science. We [at the Hospital] have the luxury of a secure funding base. We can practice good standards and get a proper diagnosis and not cut corners. We give antibiotics when indicated. But if an animal's got chest disease, we do an x-ray and whatever else is needed.

If a private practice vet wanted to treat wildlife, what would be the biggest difference in how he would practice?

If a private practitioner wants to treat wildlife, the main limiting factor is the time they can spend on their wildlife cases. Wildlife needs to be worked up carefully, meticulously. Our greatest criticism is private practitioners who do a little wildlife care and don't use basic tests or microscopy to work up a case. They treat a fungal disease like candidiasis with antibiotics and wonder why it's not responding. They've made it worse. They didn't look at a fecal smear, which would have taken five minutes. And they're worried they won't know what they're looking at anyway. An animal may have diarrhea for weeks before they send it to us.

A lot of vets don't care much for wildlife. There's a negligible wildlife component in Queensland veterinary training.

How many hours a day do you devote to this? What's a typical day like?

Ten to twelve hours. During the busy season it can blow out a bit. A lot of cases are severe traumas—not the kind of thing you can put into a cage and deal with the next day. July to December is the breeding season for koalas, and also the time a lot of juveniles and two- to three-year-olds are dispersing, and it all gets back to habitat fragmentation. All the juveniles are dispersing and trying to find places to live; they get hit by cars, attacked by dogs, fall into swimming pools, run over by trains. Trauma cases skyrocket and are represented by these two- and three-year-olds.

Do you have a favorite part of the job? If so, what is it?

I guess releasing animals. You're really elated if they can go and they've suffered a lot and had the guts to come through. They're fighters. To see them climb a tree or swim away, that's the best part of it. To see a koala shoot up a tree—there's no sadness. We're thrilled that they can do that, especially if you can put them in a safe habitat. The government wants us to put them back where they came from. That's the stupidest thing—to put them back in to danger—and then you get a phone call from one of the rescuers, "We found Harry dead on the road this morning." The risk of being killed or injured is really high.

What would you most like to see happen at the Hospital? In Australia?

What I would most like to see is for us to grow to a point where we're not limited by money and where we have built up the respect of the government and the weight of public opinion. To go to governments about these key threatening processes and have the credibility to say that, and have them take us seriously. Have them take action. To have acess to higher-level politicians but not bureaucrats.

Time is the most limiting factor for me. The Hospital is such an incredible, powerful tool for changing the views of politicians. I want to make the most of it. And operate at such a level to make the politicians come and see what's happening, to see the suffering animals. Then they get it.

When they have a personal one-on-one with a victim, then they really get it. It's a really powerful thing. There's not a person who's gone out unchanged if they've had that connection.

I want to maximize its ability to do its core business helping injured and sick animals, but also to change public perception and political perceptions of the decision-makers to change things. To get them through to be affected, to have a patient touch their heart.

It's not about conservation of species or land—that doesn't have that heart-to-heart thing. A lot of people are critical of wildlife rehabilitation. You need that personal twang to make people realize what it's all about. You have to be able to make them internalize it. "How would I feel if my home was destroyed and I was starving, and my children were killed?"

Sustainable use is something else I'd like to change—the view that "as long as there's lots of possums left we can use their skins then it's okay." There's a lack of ethics behind sustainable use.

What is the most useful thing people in America can do to help Australian wildlife, other than sending money? Is there something they can do from such a great distance?

Keep applying political pressure. Vote green, live green, and apply pressure to these industries.

What would you say to people anywhere about wildlife care?

Treat them with compassion and empathy and respect. And teach children compassion.

People are too dismissive about caring about individuals.

And each one of the patients at the Australian Wildlife Hospital is an individual. When the terms of habitat loss and illness and injury are reduced to these individual terms, and the staff at the Hospital deal with traumatized individual living, suffering creatures every day, it makes the reality of the need, and the immediacy of it, so much greater.

We thank Dr. Hanger for spending the time with us for this interview, and hope that his words have moved you to a new understanding of the need for wildlife care—not just koalas, not just in Australia, but all over the world.