Four Weeks. Where Health Meets Habitat.
When elephants drink from the same water as Maasai cattle, health becomes a shared question. This program brings you to the Amboseli landscape where zoonotic disease, parasites, and environmental change converge.
Based in Kimana, you'll survey wildlife on road counts across Amboseli, work through capture, immobilization, and euthanasia protocols alongside the welfare ethics behind them, and trace disease from clinical signs in primate populations to the zoonoses moving along shared grazing land.
What You'll Do
Capture, Welfare & Animal Health
Learn capture and darting procedures and the welfare and euthanasia ethics behind them, then study how disease is recognized and diagnosed in primates at the Kenya Primate Research Institute.
Livestock-Wildlife Interface
Visit a Kimana cattle dip and livestock market to observe animal-health and disinfection practices, mapping how shared grazing raises disease-transmission risk.
Wildlife Population Surveys
Count and identify wildlife on road-count surveys across Amboseli National Park, building the population data that underpins disease-ecology research.
Field Sites
Your fieldwork centers on the shared rangelands and water sources where wildlife, livestock, and human health converge.
Amboseli Grazing Lands
Shared rangelands where wildlife and Maasai livestock graze side by side.
Kimana Cattle Dip & Market
Community animal-health sites where students observe livestock disinfection and management.
Maasai Mara
An expedition to study how tourism-generated wastewater affects wildlife and the ecosystem.
The Pathogens Don't Respect the Fence Line
Elephants and Maasai cattle drink from the same water. Wildlife and livestock graze the same rangeland. At the livestock-wildlife boundary around Amboseli, zoonotic disease, parasites, and environmental degradation converge, and the health of one herd shapes the health of the other. Students survey wildlife on road counts, observe livestock disinfection with pastoral communities, and learn wildlife capture, handling, and darting alongside the ethics of animal welfare. Between field days the syllabus turns clinical: disease epidemiology and surveillance, diagnosis and care in primate populations, snakebite epidemiology and antivenom research. Four weeks reframes conservation through the lens of the pathogens that move between species.
Learn by Doing
One integrated course drives your four weeks, blending wildlife health with ecology and community health. Alongside wildlife survey and One Health observation, you'll cover capture and immobilization procedures, welfare and euthanasia ethics, disease epidemiology and surveillance, wildlife nutrition, and pesticide toxicology, with a full session on the role of veterinary education in wildlife medicine. Students pursuing veterinary medicine, wildlife health, or public health will find much of it directly relevant, though the course approaches animal health through conservation and One Health rather than clinical practice. The four weeks close with a sustainable waste-management pitch connecting your findings to the broader One Health framework.
Course
One field course bridging wildlife health, disease ecology, and One Health science.
Studies wildlife health through the One Health lens, spanning emerging disease and surveillance, capture and welfare ethics, primate disease management, and the veterinary dimensions of conservation practice.
View Syllabus (PDF)Make Conservation Health Your Summer
Four weeks of One Health field research in Kenya's Amboseli ecosystem.
Dates & Costs
4 weeks, 4 credits. Financial aid and SFS scholarships available.
