Published by Ontario Veterinary College (519) 824-4120, Ext. 54401

October 20, 2006

Think like a mountain

Veterinarians are uniquely equipped to play a vital role in managing the global crisis facing humanity, according to Dr. Ted Leighton, who delivered the 2006 Schofield Memorial Lecture recently.
“Crisis does not necessarily mean ‘disaster’,” said Leighton, a professor of veterinary pathology at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM) in Saskatoon and executive director of the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre (CCWHC).
“Crisis means a critical turning point, when the right decisions can affect the future in truly spectacular ways. And when the wrong decisions can be fatal, or at best will return us to the Stone Age.”

Leighton said the crisis is largely environmental and ecological, a simple question of how many people the planet can support and at what quality of life in terms of access to resources, safe and nutritious food to eat and clean water to drink.
That’s why veterinarians, with their training in basic science and broad understanding of the mechanisms of health and disease in wildlife and domestic animal populations, have an important role to play in managing the crisis to a favourable outcome for human beings.
Leighton said the roots of his wide-angle “view from the wild side” are found in the work of Rudolf Virchow, a 19th-century German physician, and ecologist Aldo Leopold, whose philosophy laid the foundations for modern wildlife management in the United States.

Virchow was a true father of modern medicine, Leighton said, because he demanded scientific evidence and doubted easy explanations. For example, he embraced the discoveries of Louis Pasteur but doubted the cause of disease was as simple as pathogen coming into contact with an organism. While investigating an outbreak of typhus in Poland in the 1840s, Virchow reached the then-astonishing conclusion that the cause of the outbreak was poverty and that future epidemics could be prevented with freedom, improved roads and good schools.
Leopold, who witnessed the profound changes in the American landscape caused by European settlement, pioneered the science of applied ecology aimed at reversing the worst of the destruction.
He taught that it was possible to intervene in nature to improve damaged ecosystems, but that to do so it is necessary to “Think like a mountain.” That is, to understand the complexities of cause and effect in nature and to plan and act on time scales of decades and centuries.
And in the spirit of Dr. Frank Schofield — who ardently believed that each individual had a moral obligation to address the social issues facing the world — Leighton urged his colleagues to take up the challenge.
“This is only a crisis. It is not yet an irreversible global disaster.”
Leighton said the prescription for action can be found in the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development.
This is a prescription for multiple, complicated disease issues of multiple, complicated causes, for which environmental factors are the predominant variables. And there are crucial applications for veterinary medicine in almost every one of those goals, Leighton said.
“Future veterinarians must have the ecological savvy to ‘think like a mountain’ and they must understand how an epidemic of a disease like typhus can be caused by poverty and cured by schools.”

Photo: Dr. Ted Leighton receives the Schofield Medal from Domenic Sanzo, OVC ’09, president of the Central Veterinary Students’ Association.