UP Professors Nigel Bennett and Anita Michel, who have been placed in the top 10 of Research.com’s 2023 list of researchers cited in animal and veterinary science, talk about what attracted them to South Africa and detail their research interests.

“I was conned by the BBC because I used to watch Tarzan,” says Professor Nigel Bennett, who grew up in the UK. “The BBC always made out that much of Africa was comprised of  jungle ­– but when I came to Cape Town, I said, ‘This looks like the Mediterranean.’ I had wanted to go to Africa. That's why I headed up to Pretoria, because I didn't think Cape Town looked like Africa.”

For Prof Anita Michel, who grew up in Germany, South Africa was a chance to do more meaningful work.

“I wanted to study infectious diseases and animals in their natural environment,” she says. “That brought me to South Africa – I wanted to make a contribution, and looking at management-related diseases didn’t feel like it was something meaningful.”

Today, both professors have become invaluable assets to both the University of Pretoria (UP) and their adopted country of South Africa. This was highlighted recently when they were placed in the top 10 of Research.com’s 2023 list of best scientists in South Africa in the field of animal and veterinary science.

Prof Bennett, who holds the Austin Roberts Chair of African Mammalogy in UP’s Department of Zoology and Entomology in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, was ranked second. Prof Michel of the Department of Veterinary Tropical Diseases in the Faculty of Veterinary Science was ranked sixth.

The other UP scientists in the top 10 of Research.com’s animal science and veterinary SA list are extraordinary professors Frans Jongejan (first) and Victor Rutten (fourth), both based at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and Emeritus Professor Ivan Horak (fifth).

Prof Bennett had always wanted to come to Africa and had planned on becoming a game ranger. He had even pinpointed the spot he wanted to be based in – “the frontier parks in East Africa, like Meru in northern Kenya, close to the Somali border, where George and Joy Adamson worked with lions, as represented in the movie Born Free”.

But when he went to Kenya, he was told they didn’t employ expatriates. He didn’t know the terrain and felt poachers would shoot him before he had even spotted them. His father then contacted renowned wildlife documentary presenter David Attenborough, who suggested he study further in zoology as another option to work with animals.

So he registered for a master’s degree at the University of Cape Town. Upgraded to a PhD, he worked on three species of mole rats – the Damaraland in Namibia, as well as the common and solitary bles moles of the Western Cape.

“I looked into their reproductive biology and social patterns, and I managed to get 16 papers out of my PhD,” he says.

His supervisor, Prof Jenny Jarvis, also introduced him to the naked mole rat, setting off a lifelong fascination with these rodents, who burrow underground for food and create mounds of soil in the process. Now a leading international expert on African mole rats, Prof Bennett is a National Research Foundation (NRF) A-rated scientist.

He talks about the Damaraland mole rat of Namibia with the ease of a skilled raconteur.

“A colony of no more than 16 mole rats, 1.8kg in body mass in total, threw out three metric tonnes of soil in two weeks following good rains. When I caught these animals, their teeth were worn down to their gums, but their teeth regrow, unlike ours.”

He has discovered that mole rats live similarly to social insects such as bees. One female with a longer body and narrower face is the queen, responsible for procreation. Then there are “one or two male consorts, and a huge number of non-reproductive individuals, both male and female, that are suppressed from reproducing”.

“I've spent 38 years working on mole rats,” he says. “The more I work on these animals, the more excited I get by them. They're a fantastic model to look at all sorts of things.”

His one publication, ‘African mole rats: ecology and eusociality’, has 547 citations. He co-wrote it with Dr Chris Faulkes of Queen Mary College at the University of London, where Prof Bennett is a visiting professor.

“Pretoria is a very good springboard for going to see all the unusual animals of Africa,” he says. “I've become very interested in mountain gorillas and Eastern lowland gorillas, so once every year or two, I go to Rwanda or to the eastern DRC, which is unfortunately a warzone, to look at them.”

Upcoming holiday plans include the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, Uganda’s Kibale rainforest to see the chimpanzees and Lake Mburo “to see some really unusual birds”.

“Africa is like the Garden of Eden,” he says. “It’s got the most beautiful animals. It's an amazing continent.”

Prof Michel, who grew up on a small farm outside Munich in Germany, decided to leave Europe to work in South Africa with animals in their natural habitat. She has gone back to her roots, and is again living on a small farm, this time outside Pretoria, where she has horses, dogs and cats as pets.

She left Europe in the 1980s to escape the negative impact of what she calls “animal factories” – intensified animal production systems. She believes human intervention should benefit, not harm, animals. And her research on a vaccine for tuberculosis (TB) in African buffalo is just the kind of meaningful engagement she set out to do.

Initially delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have now completed the bovine TB vaccination trial. This involved studying the effects of two different TB vaccines on 21 buffalo, donated by Phinda and Manyoni game reserves in KwaZulu-Natal.

“Now we are sitting with a wealth of data that we are analysing, and I have a PhD student who will get her degree on that topic,” Prof Michel says.

Prof Michel has always been guided by strong ethical principles, and enjoys teaching and researching according to the principles of One Health.

“One Health is all about the animal-human-environment interface,“ she explains. “One Health is an approach that involves many different, interconnected disciplines, thus enabling scientists to achieve more by working together. I see myself as an ambassador of One Health and I teach students about the importance of a holistic picture when we talk health, whether it's animals or humans.”

Her most popular publications are ‘Mycobacterium bovis at the animal-human interface: a problem, or not?’, which has 416 citations, and ‘Wildlife tuberculosis in South African conservation areas: implications and challenges’, with 347 citations.

She attributes their popularity to the fact that TB is a versatile pathogen that can affect animals and humans.

“It draws a lot of interest from researchers in both fields,” she says, adding that both publications also provide a very broad background on TB in wildlife. “TB threatens wildlife conservation, so ecologists would also use these publications as reference material.”

Prof Michel recently received a B1 rating from the NRF which acknowledges her international recognition as a researcher. She is also upbeat about her recent appointment as a visiting professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the institution where she obtained her PhD. Part of the motivation for this was her considerable work as a postgraduate supervisor. She has supervised 27 master’s and eight doctoral students.

Prof Michel says her best form of relaxation is “being outside in the natural environment”. She loves taking long walks and participating in bird ringing, a scientific activity that involves catching birds safely in nets and placing a little ring on one leg. These rings are linked to an international database and helps them track the birds’ lifecycles and migratory patterns.

“Caring for these wonderful birds is a meaningful contribution to science and relaxing at the same time,” said Prof Michel.