Well, I think the veterinarian’s role is multifaceted, because the veterinarian I think should probably, one of the major roles that usually people think about is the person that you know is evaluating the health, and the animals and keeping the animals alive, and doing, you know, finding diseases, and I kind of coined the term I think and published a little talk on it as reintroduction medicine, and that opened up a kind of a whole new concept, you know, everybody was just dumping animals or releasing animals into the wild, and doing things like that. And so I took the stance that, you know, it was part of our role was to look at the resident population if there was one, where we’re gonna release the animals, and are we releasing animals that have a good chance of surviving, because of skills or diseases or problems, and the classic thing of that was that golden lion tamarins that we were releasing in Brazil, we identified a diaphragmatic defect, that was causing some problems and we traced it back, and found that it had a genetic basis that was from a few founders, and then we wanted to figure out, well how do we diagnose it, so we had to develop a radiographic technique with contrast material, where we could diagnose the diaphragm defect in the animals that we were gonna release, but that was only part of the question, because we didn’t know what the situation of the diaphragms were in the existing free-ranging animals. So then we set up a field study, where we went down to Brazil, captured free-ranging golden lion tamarins, subjected them to the same screening to get a baseline there. So we established a baseline, we graded the defects from one to five, and we found no defect greater than three in the resident population, so therefore proposed that no animal should be released that had a defect four or five, so that we didn’t introduce something into the delicate, balanced normal population. And we also looked at some parasites that were specific to Golden lion tamarins, we wanted to make sure they were clean, before we put them out into the Brazil. And so that’s kind of one of the roles, and I think many veterinarians that contribute to conservation aren’t all clinically, you know, oriented like myself, I think I’m probably more clinically-oriented. Many are probably oriented toward epidemiology and studying other subspecialties, which are important in considering the habitat, and the overall picture, so veterinarians have a role other than just what I’ve explained on the clinical aspect.
