Indy Zoo vet to treat African gorillas

A veterinarian at the Indianapolis Zoo is preparing to take on an assignment of a lifetime on the other side of the world. Dr. Jan Ramer leaves Sunday for Africa.

"I'm going to miss a lot of my friends both human and non-human," said Dr. Ramer.

Dr. Ramer is one of four veterinarians at the zoo. It's a position she's held for the past 10 years. Now, she's taking a 2 year leave to work for the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project in Rwanda. Known as the "Gorilla Doctors," she's the only American doctor on the team which will care for the primates that live in the wild.

Dr. Ramer explains, "We go up on the volcano twice a week and monitor the health of those individuals and we provide health care if there's an injury or an illness that we think needs veterinary intervention we provide that care for them."

Her research and care will be hands-on. The mountain gorillas are not tagged and tracked.

"They're individually identified, much like we're individually identified. The trackers and the veterinarians that know those individuals by their nose patches, their lines on their noses and just by their facial characteristics," said Ramer.

Her environment will be a long way from Indianapolis, a city where she grew up. She's no stranger to central Africa. In the eighties, she had a chance to meet the Gorilla Doctors' founder, late anthropologist Dr. Dian Fossey.

"At that point, I knew that this was a project that I would love to work on at some point," said Dr. Ramer.

When Dr. Ramer returns to the zoo in two years, she hopes to bring her expertise to a future Gorilla exhibit. Right now, it's on the zoo's wish list. The closest primates coming to Indianapolis will be the "aye-aye" in 2011.

In the meantime, she said e-mails and webcams will be how she'll communicate with her husband and college kids. Dr. Ramer said they encouraged her to take this unique opportunity.