DECATUR, Ill. (AP) - Bud, a capybara, wouldn’t take kindly to having his teeth meddled with by a veterinarian, so he had to be sedated for his checkup.
Dr. Kenneth Welle of the University of Illinois, accompanied by fourth-year veterinary medicine students and an intern, made his regular rounds at Scovill Zoo recently.
Bud hasn’t been eating well, and Welle spent considerable time with him after he was out cold. The exam took so long that even Eden, the zoo’s sloth, who was napping in her laundry basket suspended in the enclosure she shares with Bud, came out to have a look.
“This is about being proactive about the animals’ health and getting them a once-a-year checkup to make sure they’re doing well,” said Ken Frye, zoo director. “The tough part with an exotic animal is, in the wild, if you show you’re injured or hurt, you become the target of prey.
“They always look for the weak and the injured, so a lot of animals suppress that, and unless you’re actually seeing a wound or a spike decrease in their food intake, you really don’t know they’re sick a lot of the time.”
He depends on the animals’ keepers to know each animal’s personality and normal, healthy behavior and appearance, so they will notice if something’s a little off. Even a slight variation can indicate an illness, so the keepers have to be very alert. Animals in captivity tend to live longer than those in the wild, and sometimes old-age issues crop up, such as arthritis, that would never be an issue with a wild animal.
“Just being in a zoo setting, where we can help them, and give them medication and treat injuries, most of the animals’ lives are extended well beyond what they would be in the wild,” he said.
Jafari, the eldest of three cheetahs at Scovill, is 15. The zoo’s chinchilla is 18.
It was Heather Purdeu, Bud’s keeper, who noticed he wasn’t eating as much as normal and seemed to have trouble chewing, so Welle knew where to start in examining him.
Capybaras resemble giant guinea pigs, and like smaller rodents, their teeth grow throughout their lives. Usually, normal eating keeps Bud’s teeth from getting too long, which is why Welle did a thorough exam to rule out other possible causes.
She checks the animals in her care visually at least once a day, more if she suspects an illness or injury. Keepers also watch the amount of food consumed and the animals’ droppings. Changes in poop can be an early indication that something is wrong.
Several of the zoo animals are used to being handled, including Bud, but when an animal is sick or in pain, and if the treatment is uncomfortable, it’s just safer and less stressful for humans and animals if the animal is sedated. Bud had a nice nap while Welle worked on him, with a towel over his eyes so he wouldn’t be upset if he started to wake up and saw a lot of strangers gathered around him.
During the most recent visit, Welle also checked on one of the zoo’s kookaburras, who had a broken beak and was cooperative during her exam, and visited the new outdoor rabbit hutch. Some of the bunnies are losing weight, and Welle said the adjustment to living outdoors might be too much for them, in spite of their new, roomy quarters.
Welle visits the zoo twice a month, to make sure every animal gets an annual checkup and any animal with medical needs gets treated.
“We will try to look if we have some concerns from the keeper,” Welle said. “We’ll also do a number of just health exams. Sometimes that’s done annually, sometimes spread out a little bit longer than that, depending on the difficulty of the animal. Some species, sedation is more risky for them, so we spread it out. We try to identify health problems as early in the process as possible.
“Obviously, we don’t have that full hospital here, so there are some limitations to what we can do. We can’t do radiographs and things like that, but we do full exams. We do blood work.”
They trim hooves on the goats and other “maintenance work,” as he calls it. Some of the animals are prone to periodontal disease, so they do dental cleanings for those. Not all of the animals require sedation to be examined or cared for, like the kookaburra, who only had to be held by one of Welle’s students.
With older animals, he said, geriatric issues arise, and he monitors their quality of life as well as how that animal’s health is affecting the group dynamic if the animal lives with others.
“It’s really a wide variety of things we do when we’re here,” he said. “Sometimes, we talk about diets, and we have a keeper training program where we talk about diseases that humans and animals share.
“It’s very much like we’d do with any pet species, except it’s more complicated because many of these animals are not approachable. At least, they’re not handleable in the same way.”
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Source: (Decatur) Herald & Review, https://bit.ly/2jWHlEw
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Information from: Herald & Review, https://www.herald-review.com
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