Great Ape Veterinary Medicine
Our great-ape veterinary work supports Gorilla Doctors, the only organization in the world providing life-saving veterinary care to wild eastern gorillas. Their teams operate inside the protected forests of Central Africa, where the daily work is part medicine, part fieldcraft, and part long, patient relationship with the gorilla families they have come to know.
Rwanda, Uganda, DRC - Partner
- Gorilla Doctors
- Founded
- 1986
- Focus
- Mountain gorillas Grauer's gorillas Field veterinary intervention One Health
The work in the field
Gorilla Doctors operates across five national parks in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their veterinarians monitor close to 800 human-habituated mountain and Grauer's gorillas, conducting routine health checks alongside park trackers and intervening when an animal is sick or injured.
Many of the injuries the teams treat come from snares, traps set for bushmeat that catch gorillas accidentally. Gorilla Doctors reports a 98 percent survival rate on snare rescues, the result of decades of refined field protocol and the trust they've built with local park authorities.
A One Health approach
Eastern gorillas share roughly 98 percent of their DNA with humans, which makes them uniquely vulnerable to the diseases their human neighbors carry. Respiratory illness is one of the leading causes of death in wild gorilla populations. The teams treat the gorillas, train rangers, and work alongside community health programs in the villages bordering the parks, because the health of the apes and the people who live next to them is not really separable.
Why this matters now
Mountain gorilla numbers are slowly recovering, the result of decades of coordinated conservation work. Grauer's gorillas remain critically endangered. The veterinary teams are one of the reasons the recovery has held, and one of the reasons the Grauer's population still has a chance.
Read about Gorilla Doctors directly from the team running the work.
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