50K and counting at Wildlife Center
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
What if it was a possum? Or a fawn whose mother had not actually abandoned her, but would soon miss her just the same? There was dread and anticipation heading into the spring as the ticker edged closer and closer to the 50,000 plateau.
And then the Wildlife Center of Virginia got a call from someone about a common loon seen walking around the parking lot at the Green Valley Book Fair in Rockingham County.
No, I’m not talking about a crazed book lover here.
“Fifty thousand animals. My God. No wonder I’m tired,” said Ed Clark, the president of the Wildlife Center, which treated its 50,000th wildlife patient, the aforementioned common loon, in May.
The center, based in Waynesboro, treats on average more than 2,000 patients a year, though it does a lot more than that. “The mission of the organization is teaching the world to care about and care for wildlife and the environment. And the syntax of that - people say, Teaching to care about and for, for and about, whatever. The process is, if we don’t teach people to have concern for wildlife, to care about it, they’re never going to be inspired to do what it takes to care for it. And in the case of our role as a hospital, we fix broken animals. That’s what we do. But in so doing, we learn an awful lot about what’s going on in the environment that affects wildlife. And then we’re in a position to go back to the public and say, Here is what you are doing, public, here are things you can do to lessen your negative impacts. And sometimes it’s a matter of going back to the state legislature or to Congress and saying, This law needs to be changed, or that law needs to be written, in order to address this problem that we’re seeing affecting wildlife,” Clark said.
The Wildlife Center also coordinates education programs that have reached 1.5 million people across the United States and across the world, and has a thriving veterinary-studies program that has trained 600-plus veterinary students from the United States, Canada and 29 foreign countries.
The center has come a long way from the dream that Clark had when he opened the doors in 1982.
“There are some days when I wake up and I still can’t imagine that I am where I am and that the Wildlife Center is what it is,” Clark said. “A lot of the things that we’re doing are things that didn’t even exist in 1982. The fact that we just completed a contract with the Pentagon on bioterrorism surveillance. The fact that we are developing epidemiological models that will link veterinary hospitals nationwide and even perhaps worldwide to a centralized database. Those are things that we couldn’t have imagined back then. Our technology back then was a 40-pound portable computer with a seven-inch screen that didn’t even have a hard disk in it. And I had to personally sign the note for the Wildlife Center to be able to borrow the money to buy the computer. And from that very early time, back in 1983, when we got that first computer, we have embraced technology, so now we have a worldwide impact. And truly we have gotten a good start on a journey that still has a long way to go.”
Filed under: 1-July 2008 Issue
