Antonie Marinus Harthoorn

Antonie Marinus Harthoorn, or 'Toni' Harthoorn (August 26, 1923 - April 23, 2012) was a veterinarian and environmentalist known for his role in the development of large-animal tranquilizers and their impact on the conservation movement. Additionally, Harthoorn's animal sanctuary was the inspiration for the television series Daktari.

Harthoorn was born in Rotterdam and grew up in England. His father was an economist employed by Unilever who worked during the second World War as an economic adviser for the Dutch government in exile. He studied veterinary science at the Veterinary College in London. During the Second World War he was trained as an officer at Sandhurst and Aldershot and became a commando, being one of the first to parachute into Arnhem during the relief of the Netherlands by Allied troops. After the war he graduated and continued to study at the universities of Utrecht and Hannover. He took a PhD in the physiology of mammalian shock.

After his Ph.D., Harthoorn then went to Kenya and Tanzania. There he studied the effects of various sedative drugs on wild African mammals and with a team invented the M-99 (etorphine hydrochloride) capture drug and refined the tranquilliser gun, or 'Capture gun', for darting animals. This was an enormous breakthrough in animal transport and enabled the safe movement of many rare animals from places in which they were at risk from poaching or development to game sanctuaries. The research effort and its eventual triumph is recorded in Dr Harthoorn's first book: The Flying Syringe. Capture gun technology is today used extensively in wildlife parks, urban animal management, criminal human capture and zoological gardens. Before the invention of this technology animals were usually caught manually by being rounded up, penned, and transported without sedation, resulting in the death from stress of many hundreds of animals.

...
Wikipedia