Aiming for Adventure

My name is Jane Riner and I’m the 4th free-ranging wildlife health veterinary resident in a collaborative training program with the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center and California Department of Fish and Wildlife. One of my favorite aspects of the program is getting to share what we do with students and hopefully inspire future generations of wildlife veterinarians.

Recently, I had the honor of working with the OWCN’s wildlife veterinarian Dr. Jamie Sherman and UC Davis One Health Institute Executive Director Dr. Mike Ziccardi to help teach a darting wet lab for veterinary students visiting from all over the country for the 2025 SAVMA Symposium. This exciting, hands-on lab teaches students about some of the fundamental tools used in wildlife medicine: remote drug delivery systems in the forms of dart guns, CO2 pistols, blowpipes and more. It’s not in your everyday veterinary school curriculum that you learn what options you have when you can’t get close to your patients, but for us it’s our bread-and-butter!

While much conservation work is done behind a desk in the form of meetings, reports, and grant applications, the truth is that many of us wildlife vets are ‘field junkies’ at heart and will never pass up an opportunity to get outside and practice important skills. You never want to get rusty when you could be called to action at a day’s notice. This wet lab highlighted the versatile nature of the work we do – whether it be using a blowpipe to anesthetize a mountain lion in a captive setting or using a Daninject rifle to immobilize a free-ranging Roosevelt elk (personal highlights from year 1 of my residency). Setting the scene with posters of California native species as our targets, we transported the students to the humbling world of a wildlife vet, where learning to use all the tools in our kit is like learning a new language and takes lots of practice, but no matter how good our skills are we are always at the whim of our wild patients.

The students had a wide variety of interests, from a handful of wildlife enthusiasts to several shelter medicine hopefuls who I may have convinced to keep a blowpipe on hand! They were engaged and curious participants, plenty with impressive darting skills already blossoming.

All of them had a blast trying out the various darting equipment, with most choosing the Daninject as their favorite – the quintessential black and green sidekick of a wildlife vet.