While the last 700 mountain gorillas in the world live under constant threat in central Africa, their guardians are headquartered continents away in Baltimore.
The director of a team of "gorilla doctors" who is based at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore will speak Wednesday in Columbia on working in the wild to rescue the species from the brink of extinction.
Dr. Michael Cranfield will give a free presentation on the mission of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project to provide treatment for the powerful primates in their natural habitat in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"This [situation] is the perfect storm - highly endangered great apes, susceptible to nearly 100 percent of human illnesses, existing in a tight habitat with 800 people per square kilometer living in unhygienic conditions right outside their parks," said Cranfield, who will speak at the Central Library.
"We have an ethical responsibility not only to the gorillas, to whom we are so closely related, but to the millions of people whose livelihoods tie into these animals' sustainability," he said.
MGVP was founded in 1986 by the Colorado-based Morris Animal Foundation after the much-publicized murder of renowned primatologist Dian Fossey the previous year. Gorillas in the Mist, a 1988 film based on Fossey's book by the same name, brought the scientist's story into the mainstream.
Cranfield, 57 and a Toronto native, took the helm of MGVP in 1998. During his tenure, there has been a 17 percent increase in the population of mountain gorillas and the number of veterinarians in the program jumped from two to seven, he said.
While he said these strides are heartening, so many factors that could threaten the primates' existence remain out of the group's control, such as an outbreak of the often fatal Ebola virus.
The veterinarian credits the group's advances to a concept called One Health, which he said has become a buzzword among animal conservationists.
For MGVP, this model translates into monitoring all health risks to mountain gorillas. These include trauma from in-fighting, human and livestock diseases, habitat loss due to deforestation, and poachers' snares, he said.
In this way, the project widens its grasp on all factors contributing to potential decline, he said, adding that the One Health model they began developing in 2000 can also be applied to other highly endangered species.
