Wildlife disease management

To have a population that shows a fast rate of growth, a large capacity to resist changes in its environment, and an enormous resilience to recuperate from changes, we need to keep the population healthy and free from diseases. Thus, management of wildlife health is one of the primary objectives of wildlife management. To this end, it is important to understand the factors that make individuals healthy and free from diseases, together with the means of monitoring the health of animals and providing them timely, sufficient, and appropriate interventions when the populations are getting diseased. In this chapter, we discuss the management of wildlife diseases to keep wildlife populations in the prime of health. Diseases result from an interaction between host, pathogen, and environment, and arise due to a combination of predisposing factors, precipitating factors, perpetuating factors, and an absence of protective factors. We discuss these aspects and elaborate the classification of diseases — acute vs. chronic, communicable vs. non-communicable, and outbreaks, enzootic, epizootic, panzootic, and sporadic diseases. The management of diseases requires a sound understanding of the disease characteristics — morbidity, mortality, incidence, and prevalence — which are governed by the characteristics of the pathogens — infectivity, transmissibility, pathogenicity, virulence, lethality, and infective dose. We discuss the horizontal and vertical modes of direct and indirect transmission, the assessment of animal condition, and the principles of disease management in wildlife settings. Case studies of common wildlife diseases such as tuberculosis, anthrax, rabies, ringworm and tapeworm are used to elucidate the concepts.