UWEC Day 14

The last of the carnivores:

Pregnant!

To finish up, we were working on the Spotted hyenas today. They have a pretty large exhibit so it was actually easier for all of us to go in there to corner them so Hameed could take his shot. Our first patient was Rafiki, the female. Once she went down, we carried her to the holding pen to weigh her. Hameed noted that she seemed quite heavy for a female hyena. Surprise we discovered that she was pregnant! It was quite rewarding to perform a preg check on a hyena I must say! We then began our usual health check routine: blood, stool, injections, monitoring. Remember these are canids, so it was interesting to learn that they needed to be treated the same in terms of drugs, just like dogs. I finally gave her the reversal and we put her back into the enclosure. 

Beautiful creature

We then proceeded to try and knock down Ralph, the male. He was very excited and running around a lot. This made it quite difficult for Hameed to get a clean shot. Also, because he was so excited, once Hameed hit him, he did not go down. He metabolized the drugs in that dart faster than you could blink an eye. There was no point in trying to hit him again as it would just stress him out even more, and make it less likely to work.

We also needed to deworm the lion cubs. This was a serious challenge. Yes, we could be in the holding pen with the cubs, but getting near them was the hard part. It took 2 keepers to restrain one cub. Hameed and I each took a syringe and gave the injection as fast as we could. They each growled and screamed quite loudly. This also agitated Bisa, their mother, who was on the other side of the fence. She started to lunge at the fence, so we really needed to be quick so as not to make her worry.

See how many of us it took?

The last thing to do before lunch was that we needed to perform a health check on the male Serval cat. For convenience, Bruce (animal keeper) and I went to the Serval cat enclosure to bring him to where we were working on the other carnivores. Hameed gave me the syringe of ketamine to give to him once Bruce netted him. It took about 6 minutes for the effect, then we brought him back. For him, we did not have much time to work on him. He was starting to wake up as we got him off the scale. After Barbara got blood from him, we had to put him back in the net and I had to give his remaining injections through the net before he was brought back to the clinic

Cat in the net

He was quite large

Post mortem: 
Just after lunch, Hameed got a call from Bruce saying that he thought the Serval cat we worked on had died. So we headed over to his enclosure only to find out he was right. Apparently he woke up fine and was moving around for a while, then went into a corner of the enclosure and stopped moving. Hameed and I could tell right away from his tongue that he was cyanotic, meaning he was not getting enough oxygen in his blood. We thought he had died of asphyxiation, probably as a result of complications with the anesthetic. Unfortunately things like this can happen. We seem to take for granted that most people or animals are fine under anesthesia, but there is always a risk and every person or animal is different. It seemed as though the ketamine he got, pushed him over the edge. So, immediately after, we brought the cat to the hospital to perform a post mortem. The findings were not overtly obvious, but it seemed like there was an underlying cause for the complications of the anesthesia, possibly heart related from what we found. 
 

Abnormal findings in the heart...

Close up

More work on the sick python:
The very last thing of the day was some more work on the sick African Rock Python we admitted last week. Because he was not really eating the best thing we could do for him was to provide nutritional supplementation. He was administered fluids into his body cavity to help with the dehydration. Electrolytes and glucose to be exact. I gave him a shot of multivitamin; couldn't hurt him. Then, it was my job to tube feed him! So I placed a feeding tube down his throat and began slowly injecting a liquid egg mixture. Every so many millilitres of food I stopped and his body was gently rubbed to encourage the food to go into his stomach. This snake was about 5m long so it was some distance to make it there. Once I gave the last of the food, I gently pulled the tube out and we left him on the ground to relax a bit and digest what he was just given. 

The end to another busy day in my last week here for sure!