When he visits dogs infected with a deadly parasite, entomologist Matt Wolkoff sees his work in a new light.
My name is Matt Wolkoff, and I’m a biologist who studies insects that spread disease. I think bugs are just about the coolest things ever, and beautifully demonstrate how even tiny things can profoundly shape and color our world. More broadly, I am endlessly curious about all things nature – how animals and plants evolved; how they interact with one another and their environment; and how we can use that understanding to forge a better future for all who get to share this incredible planet. When I’m not nerding out about bugs as a post-doc researcher, I can often be found nerding out about bugs while hiking or kayaking with my friends; nerding out about bugs’ ocean-dwelling cousins while snorkeling with my wife; or briefly shelving my nerdiness to wrestle with our dog Boomer. I am also on a lifelong quest to perfect my mac & cheese recipe.
Story Transcript
For a lot of my professional life, I feel like just a big kid running around. That's because I'm an entomologist, which means that I get to study the most objectively interesting things in the world, bugs, for a living.
This is great for me, at least, because I have loved bugs since as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories of my life are running through the woods near my house, toddling over roots and rocks, and pushing over old, rotted logs as big as I was, and just being completely transfixed by this amazing cornucopia of bizarre life forms that are creeping around everywhere just below the surface.
So I've chased that love of bugs kind of my whole career, all the way through my early academic years, ultimately pursuing a PhD in entomology.
As a big kid in, ostensibly, a man's body, one of the other things that I get really animated about is dogs. I'm a complete dynamo dog person. I love dogs. I have dogs. I see a dog on the street and I point at it, and I yell, “Dog.”
I did a little quantitative analysis of the pictures on my phone. I have four pictures of my parents in my phone, and something like 40 of their dogs. I don't know what it says about me, but I think it says a lot about my love for dogs. So you get the idea.
So you can probably imagine how completely stoked I was to be offered a postdoc position shortly after graduating my PhD program in a lab that studies diseases that dogs catch from bugs. It's my two great loves together at last, bugs and dogs.
So I'm at this job. I'm loving it. It's great because I spend about half my time in the lab nerding out about these little insects called sandflies. They kind of look like a mosquito, but smaller and weirder.
And then the other half of the time, I'm out in the field all over the country, visiting kennels with a bunch of my veterinarian colleagues. I get to do all sorts of work directly with dogs that are naturally infected with various diseases that they catch from the many wonderful bugs that live all around us.
So for a couple of months, I was just on cloud nine. We were just having a ball, going out to these kennels. I'm getting to work with these dogs, learning the ropes of that whole process. And even better, the dogs that we work with are these dogs called foxhounds. Even if you've never seen one in person, you've probably seen one in an artistic depiction. Have you ever been to a pub or a fancy restaurant, and you have one of those oil paintings of a very dignified‑looking British person in a red coat on a horse? All of the brown and white dogs running around the hooves of the horses are foxhounds for the most part.
And contrary to their extremely stodgy artistic portrayal, they are some of the goofiest animals I have ever encountered in my entire life. They are the most quintessentially‑dog dog you could ever want. So, yeah, I'm loving my work and loving going out to these kennels and working with these animals.
But back in fall of last year, as we're gearing up for one of our kennel visits, my boss takes me aside and lets me know that this visit is going to be a little bit different. You see, some of these dogs are infected with this really insidious parasite called leishmaniasis. It can infect people, too, not usually in the U.S., fortunately, but elsewhere in the world. It's spread by insects, which is why I'm involved in this process.
Unfortunately, she had heard from the manager of this kennel that some of these dogs that had leishmaniasis were really not doing well. They had taken a really steep decline in the last few weeks. The kennel owner had asked us if, when we were out there, we could humanely euthanize these dogs.
So, as a dog person, of course, that just hit me like a gut punch and planted this knot in my stomach. In the ensuing weeks, as we're planning this visit to this kennel, this knot in my belly is just getting bigger and bigger. And before I know it, it's the trip and we pull up to the kennel.
It's this appropriately miserable fall day. It's pouring rain. It's cold. It's super foggy. You can barely see the tree line on this farm as we pull up to this kennel building. And we're soaked through to the bone in the five minutes it takes just to unload the equipment from our cart.
We get started, as we do. We're in this big kennel room in the middle of all of these dogs. The kennel owner, this really nice, super cheeky Irish guy named John, is coming in. He's bringing the dogs in. We're doing kind of normal veterinary things with these dogs. My colleagues are giving them physicals and taking blood draws to measure their blood levels and see how they're doing.
As a non‑veterinarian, I get the best job, which is restraining the dogs which, in my case, is bear‑hugging the heck out of a bunch of 80‑pound foxhounds, which is a blast, of course. But you know, this whole day, I just have this growing cloud over my head, knowing that as much as I'm loving working with these animals, what we're ultimately going to have to do.
Finally, we finish up everything we need to do with the healthy animals, and we move out of the main kennel room into this little side room. The kennel owner, John, brings in the first dog, Risky. Risky is this four‑year‑old foxhound female. The last time we saw her, she was like every other foxhound I had ever seen. She was bouncing off the walls, running in circles, jumping up on the little table where we have our clipboards and our equipment, and getting into trouble and all this stuff. And that wasn't the Risky that came in that day.
The Risky that came in that day was being ravaged inside and out by this parasite. Her kidneys were shutting down. Her liver was failing. She's on death's door, basically. So, despite it all, she's still a foxhound. She still kind of makes the rounds, does her best to give us a good hello, but it's clear she's not doing well.
So, we lay down a blanket for Risky. My veterinary colleagues prepare a mild sedative to give to this dog. We sedate her and we lay her down on this blanket, and I sit right next to her. I'm petting her to keep her calm. And as the resident sandfly guy, one of the other things I have to do is, or get to do, depending on the U.S., is I have a cup of live sandflies with mesh on one side. I hold it up to this dog so that the sandflies can bite the infected animal, take up the blood meal and, by doing that, we can actually investigate how it is that dogs are transmitting parasites back to these flies. And then those flies go on and spread it to us or spread it to other animals. It's one of the things that we're trying to figure out how to stop, basically.
On the other side of this kind of wall, in the main area, I can hear all of Risky's cousins and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles, her whole foxhound family, in this kind of canine cacophony of barks and silliness and whatnot. Then, in such stark contrast, here in this room where we're at, it's so quiet. We've dimmed the lights. We're all talking very quietly to avoid exciting Risky as she's sedated. So all I can really hear is the pounding of the rain on the roof of this old farm building and this whistle of the wind in the windowsill and, super subtly but so insidiously, this little tinny trill as the sandflies buzz in this cup and gorge themselves on this dog's blood.
Finally, it was time to say goodbye to Risky. And John, the kennel owner is there, usually super jovial. He's weeping. My hardened veterinary colleagues are all teary‑eyed. I'm blubbering uncontrollably, still sitting next to this dog and petting this dog.
I suppose in maybe kind of a way to emotionally get a hold of myself and put an arm's length distance between myself and this sorrow that I'm feeling for this dog, I try to rationalize away the situation and what I'm feeling. I think to myself, “Matt, of course this is a sad situation. A dog dying is objectively very sad. But this isn't even your dog, and it's one animal. It's one dog in the grand scheme of the whole world. So why are you so, so upset right now?”
Suddenly, all of the images I had ever seen in textbooks and journal articles, whole herds of animals with communities that depend on them wasting away from this disease, and stray dogs all over the world rotting in alleyways, and children with distended bellies, and young women with disfiguring sores all over their faces, went from this realm of pure, unemotional, scientific abstraction, with which I had regarded it my entire career working with insects, and it crystallized. It became so real and so immediate, and it just fell into my lap with a thud.
I realized in that moment exactly just this one animal being taken away from us before her time by this disease is causing so much sorrow for her owner, for all of us in the room who have worked with her, for me. And now take that nugget, that kernel of suffering, and multiply it, exponentiate it by a million or 10 million or 100 million, 100 million humans, 100 million animals with people who care about them and depend on them for their survival and for their community’s survival. That is the scale of the problem of this disease and diseases like it every day, all over the world.
So we got through that day, and we have gotten through other tough days. Despite those tough days, I still very much feel like a big kid running around and chasing this self‑indulgent love of insects throughout the course of my life. But now it's not the only thing I'm chasing.
Thank you.