Liza Dadone

I am a vet at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, where I have worked with one of the largest giraffe herds in North America for the past six years. Because of our award winning giraffe training program, I have unprecedented hands-on access to our 16 giraffe. This has helped us develop techniques to better manage arthritis and other conditions in giraffe. I have presented on our giraffe medical care at multiple national and international conferences, and our Zoo now hosts an annual Giraffe Care Workshop to help advance giraffe medicine. My hope is that by keeping zoo giraffe healthy and happy with advances in veterinary care, our guests will have more opportunities to interact and fall in love with these beautiful creatures.

In the past few years, I have also become involved with giraffe conservation. Wild giraffe are having a "silent crisis" in that their populations have decreased by about 40% in 30 years and yet this receives relatively little media attention. A career highlight for me was helping with a Rothschild's giraffe conservation project earlier this year, called "Operation Twiga." I was part of a multinational team that captured 18 wild giraffe and moved them by boat across the Nile River, back into their historic home range. This was done because almost all of this subspecies (1,500 giraffe) live in a park where oil mining is about to begin and will likely impact that ecosystem. The project was featured in the PBS documentary Giraffes: Africa's Gentle Giants http://www.pbs.org/video/23658...(I'm the vet in the blue Zoo shirt).

By working with both zoo and wild giraffe, my hope is to help both groups and ultimately to make giraffe conservation more effective. Zoo vet expertise could be invaluable for diagnosing and managing wild giraffe health problems such as Giraffe Skin Disease. Likewise, understanding if there are differences in foot shape for wild vs zoo giraffe could help us find ways to manage zoo giraffe differently and ideally prevent arthritis.

October 2016