How do some people face incredible tragedies and find within these experiences inspiration to improve the lives of others? Our guest today lost her grandfather, who was the assassinated Prime Minister of the Buganda Kingdom, and her father, who was disappeared by Idi Amin, and yet she went on to become a leading conservationist.

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is Uganda's first full-time wildlife veterinarian and the Founder and CEO of Conservation Through Public Health. Interested in animals from a young age, she pursued her studies at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London before returning to Uganda. In the time since, she's worked tirelessly to preserve the animals of Uganda, being awarded the Whitley Gold Award, Sierra Club Earth Care Award, Edinburgh Medal, National Geographic Explorer, and most recently an appointment to become a United Nations Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation. She is author of Walking with Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet.

GLADYS KALEMA-ZIKUSOKA

I was really excited to win the UN Champion of the Earth Award for our One Health approach to conservation. I was so excited when Dr. Jane Goodall wrote the foreword of my book, and she really has a big focus now on the younger generation through Roots and Shoots. And being that I developed my career by setting up a wildlife club at high school so that from a young age teenagers should know that they can make a difference. They don't have to be much older to make a difference.

Even as a teenager, you can make a huge difference. I'm excited. My son wrote a book Zookeeper for a Week, which he wrote during the pandemic because he had spent a week at the zoo when he was 13. And when he was 16, he was able to write this book. 

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So you're never too young to make a difference. And I think what I would like to tell many young people is to follow your dreams and the rest will follow. Even if what you're trying to do is something that no one has ever done before. Or let's say women are not considered, it's a male-dominated profession. Wildlife conservation, veterinary medicine in Uganda is still very male-dominated. And you shouldn't really worry about what people think about you, what culture, or society expects you to be doing. If you feel that it's an important thing to do, you should go ahead and do it. And it's so important to protect the natural world, to protect nature and the wildlife because we, we protect nature, we protect nature. We are ultimately protecting ourselves. Gorillas are so few numbers still. I mean, we are happy that the numbers are growing because of so many successful conservation efforts.

The government, the NGOs, the two operators, the numbers of mountain gorillas are going up, but there's only just over 1000 left in the whole world. So that's still very few. And they still need a lot of care and protection. We need to expand their habitat. There's so much we need to do with the gorillas, but I'm a vice president of the African Primate Society, which is building African leadership in primate research and conservation because we need more African leaders, African leadership, in order to protect all the primates in Africa.

The gorillas are a success story. The mountain gorillas only actually the other gorilla subspecies aren't, the numbers are going down, the chimpanzee numbers are going down. All the other primate numbers are going down most of the other primates. But if you have enough African leadership, you can turn it around.

So I do tell a lot of young people that you know, you should. It's important to protect your wildlife because the future of the wildlife depends on you and your future depends on the wildlife. And so we all need to. We are not too young to make a difference.

We've actually started engaging youth more. And we've recently got funding from National Geographic to support 10 to 24-year-old children, both youth and school groups. And it's a STEM project with art. And they're coming up with their own projects for recycling, removing rubbish, all kinds of things, reducing firewood use in the forest. And all of that is helping. And from a young age, these students hopefully will end up becoming conservationists in the long term. So even if they're in Parliament, they're the kind of people, if someone says, " Let's cut down trees, plant sugar cane." They will be the first to say, "No, this won't happen." And if you have a critical mass of people who can stop such decisions from being made, then wildlife has a very secure future. And so do the people who are living in the countries where the wildlife is found.

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I have always wanted to be around animals and growing up, I cannot remember a time when there were no pets at home. My elder brother Apollo Katerega, who was 10 years older than me, also liked animals, especially dogs and was always bringing stray dogs and cats home. I was the last born of six children. My sister, Veronica Nakibule, who I followed, was five years older than me so were just outside each other's age bracket for playing. Thus the pets at home became my main companions, and we developed a strong bond.

Along the way, I eventually fulfilled my lifelong dream to not only become a veterinarian, but a wildlife veterinarian. In 1996, I began to take care of the critically endangered mountain gorillas of Uganda. Since then, they've increased in number from six hundred and fifty to 1,063 individuals in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC). There are no mountain gorillas surviving in zoos outside their range countries, and their only hope is to keep the population thriving where they are naturally found.

The gorillas have shaped my life's calling since I first studied them as a student at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. I've treated them as the first full-time wildlife veterinarian in Uganda and supported them as Founder and Chief Executive Officer of a grassroots NGO and nonprofit, Conservation Through Public Health, more commonly known as "CTPH," that promotes biodiversity conservation through not only improving the health of gorillas and other wildlife, but also the health and wellbeing of the people and livestock with whom they share their fragile habitats.

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So over time, there were four Ugandan families that went to Dollar Academy. But what was so important for me to go to Dollar Academy was that I saw how much people loved animals and how veterinary medicine was really revered. If you're a vet, you're considered a very important person in British society, unlike Uganda, where, if you're a medical doctor, yes, but a vet doctor, not really.

So I think all of that kind of shaped and made me more determined to want to become a vet. And I focused my studies on veterinary medicine in the UK. I went to the Royal Vet College, University of London. That's where I did my vet school. And in the vet college, I was allowed to work with animals of my choice.

So I came back, and I worked first with captive chimpanzees in Entebbe Zoo. And they were victims of the bush meat trade. They were basically orphans. Their mothers had been eaten, and they were too small to eat across in DRC, so they sold the babies, and there were quite a lot of them in the zoo.

They were being looked after by the Jane Goodall Institute. So I got to understand more about primates, how intelligent they are, how much they miss their mothers, and how the bush meat trade can be really devastating for species and the animals themselves, for animal welfare. Then two years later, I got to study wild chimpanzees in Budongo Forest, which was really amazing.

It was my first time studying animals in the wild and Professor Baron Reynolds. I went to the Budongo Forest Project and that was great for me. I was studying parasites in the fecal samples of the chimps, and I got to understand potential disease issues in primates. And then finally two years later, I got to study the mountain gorillas, which I had heard about when I revived the wildlife clubs at my high school because somebody came and told us when I was volunteering at the office that we have mountain gorillas.

And when I said I wanted to see them, he said, "They're not habituated." Later when they became habituated, I finally got to study the mountain gorillas. And when I went there, it was a totally life-changing experience for me because I saw that there were only about 300 mountain gorillas left in Bwindi National Park and only half of the total mountain gorilla population, which is only around 600.

And I saw how they were threatened by a lot of human population growth. It was a really hard edge. When you get to Bwindi, suddenly there are people, then suddenly there's a forest. There's no buffer zone. And so you could see the gorillas as well. There was a lot of human-wildlife interaction, a lot of pressure on the forest habitat of the gorillas, but at the same time, we could easily make them sick.

When I arrived in the forest, I got sick, I couldn't visit the gorillas for a whole week, and I felt so upset. I was like, "Oh no, I may never get to see them after wanting to study them for all these years." But fortunately, I got better. I stopped coughing and sneezing, and then I finally had a chance to see them. And when I got to see them, and I saw how closely connected we are, I could see how it's so easy for us to make them sick. And I felt, why don't I become a full-time wildlife vet? Because up to that point, I thought I wanted to be a vet who also works with wildlife, making sure the gorillas are not getting diseases from tourists, and they're safe. And also bringing the other wildlife back, through translocations moving animals.

I did manage to write a letter to the executive director of the National Parks, and I said to him, "This is what a vet does in wildlife conservation. You need to have a wildlife vet, and I want to be your first wildlife vet in Uganda." And this was snail mail because there was no email at the time. And a few weeks later, I was pleasantly shocked to get a letter from him saying, "Come back." He said, "Your job is waiting for you. We look forward to seeing you after you finish your studies!" I was like, wow, he's convinced by what I wrote. And in January, I started as Uganda's first wildlife vet, which is a very exciting first job. 

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Ethan Nshakira with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sam Myers and Ethan Nshakira. One Planet Podcast & The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).