I lifted the rhino’s blindfold and peered into his big dark eyes. Even anesthetized animals have some sort of facial expression that offers a clue to their mental state. Mo stared past me, unblinking. His eyelids were stretched wide open, a side effect of the anesthetic, just as they should be at this stage in the procedure. I applied a bit more “eye goop,” a sterile ophthalmic ointment, to protect the surface of his corneas, and replaced the cover.
Checking for an ear twitch, I tickled the hairs in his upside ear. No reaction. Good. A chunk of brown wax stuck to my gloved finger. I fiddled with the hose delivering oxygen. No snort or change in breathing. Our monitors showed a steady heart rate and good blood oxygen saturation. I slipped my hands into his mouth to check his jaw tone; the muscles resisted. He’d definitely need a supplement of anesthetic before the team rolled him onto his other side. Otherwise, he might be able to kick out, or even try to get up. I also got a whiff of bad breath. Maybe we could float (file) his teeth if we had time.
“How’s it going, Paul?” I asked. A large animal veterinarian, Dr. Paul Anikis had long since become a vital member of our zoo’s consulting team. He’d driven ninety miles into the city from the Virginia countryside early this morning. It was now just past seven-thirty AM.
“These feet are a mess, Lucy, they really are. We’re gonna try perfusing him today, the way we do in horses. The back feet, anyway. I don’t think oral antibiotics will even touch this stuff.” Paul shook his head. “It seems like these toe pads are the problem. They’ve got to be really sore. If we can get a cephalosporin IV in there, it’ll reduce all that swelling. We’re mixing some up now.”
When Mo’s feet needed trimming, the rhino’s entire demeanor changed. Normally, he never missed a chance for a food treat or a belly scratch. Erin, one of his keepers, had trained him to stand next to the bars of his indoor enclosure, close enough that she could reach in and work on his feet. While the other keepers distracted him with bits of sweet potato, Erin could give him a mini-pedicure.
But she could only trim bits of the overgrown tissue. Rhinos have three hooved toes on each foot. The skin between Mo’s toes and the soles of his feet grew abnormally. At a certain point, this tissue fissured and cracked, allowing dirt and bacteria in and causing infection. Then it swelled. Mo couldn’t stand without pinching this infected skin. It hurt. Because the problem affected all four feet, we didn’t always see lameness, but his overall behavior changed. He avoided standing for long periods of time. Instead of enjoying his shower for an hour, for example, he would lie down in the middle of his enclosure. His eyelids and ears drooped. He would rarely come over to the bars. At that point, we’d schedule him for a complete trim under anesthesia.
I knelt back down next to the rhino’s huge head, and watched again as Paul worked on the feet. He used a rope to fashion a tourniquet just below the rhino’s tarsal-metatarsal (ankle) joint. Using a short piece of tubing with a needle on the end, a butterfly catheter, he quickly found a vein and injected the medicine. It would flood the tissue of the foot and stay there until he removed the rope. He followed that with some lidocaine, a local anesthetic, to ensure that Mo wouldn’t feel anything.
For the bandage, Paul started with a combination of cotton and gauze wrap, covered by stretchy material called Vetwrap. We’d been through a fair amount of trial and error with this last step. Our first set of bandages stayed on for only a few hours. Mo got his feet wet and kicked them off. We wanted the bandages to last a day or two, long enough to keep his feet clean immediately after the trim. The answer? Duct tape, of course: the wide gray sticky tape used to patch holes in just about anything. The brand in our kit that day had a clever brand name, Duck Tape, with a picture of a yellow duck standing in a puddle of water.
The team waited for me to give the rhino a bit more anesthetic and then pushed him up onto his sternum and over onto the other side, folding his legs under his body. Mo’s heavy head rested in my lap during the shift, temporarily pinning me to the floor. Adjusting the blindfold, I checked his eyes again: no change. The extra dose had worked perfectly. I couldn’t resist giving his neck a light pat. His rough skin felt like concrete with a little flex, reminding me of Rudyard Kipling’s description: bumpy plates of armor.
Thirty minutes later, just as Paul finished bandaging the second rear foot, the rhino blinked and opened his eyelids extremely wide. The initial narcotic anesthetic had begun to wear off at just the right time. Minutes later, with most of the staff and equipment cleared away, I gave Mo a drug that would reverse the remaining effects of the anesthetic, took a last set of vital signs, and removed his catheter. Erin stayed with me at his head. Her shoes spattered with blood, she looked tired, having spent most of the time bent over, helping to hold Mo’s feet.
“He’ll feel so much better in a few days,” I said quietly as we waited for the effects of the reversal drug to kick in.
“I know,” Erin responded. “I just wish we didn’t have to put him through this much, at his age.”
As the anesthetic reversal took effect, the rhino took a huge breath and lifted his nose. We pulled out the ear gauze, removed the blindfold, and backed out of the stall. Mo heaved himself to his feet, wobbling. Watery blood dripped from his elbows. He took a few steps, shaking his bandaged feet. The duct tape held. Once again, he’d sailed through the anesthesia. When I stopped by to check him two hours later, he appeared remarkably normal.
From past experience, we knew the rhino’s feet would improve after the trim. We also knew we hadn’t solved anything. The infection would return within several months. In fact, Mo had been suffering from this problem for much of his life. It started long before he came to Washington, DC, while he lived at a zoo in Florida. Maybe the antibiotic perfusion would knock down the bacteria and keep them away for a bit longer this time. Like Erin, I wondered how many more times we could anesthetize him safely.
Some months later, at a veterinary conference, I attended a presentation about foot problems in rhinos, expecting to hear the familiar advice: trim and trim again; try antibiotic footbaths. Instead, the speaker, Dr. Mark Atkinson, focused on what he had learned about greater one-horned rhinos in the wild. Throughout India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Thailand, this species—also known as the Indian rhino—lives in swampy grasslands and mud wallows.
Mark recommended that zoos dramatically change the way they housed these rhinos. A pool isn’t enough, he said; give these animals the swamps and mud their feet need. Take the pressure off their soles by getting them off gravel and cement floors. He also pointed out that many zoo rhinos were overweight, compounding the problem. Why weren’t zoos providing the proper conditions? It was partly due to lack of understanding of what this species needs to be healthy, partly the cost of adding wallows, and partly the weather.
For nine months of the year in Washington, Mo had access to his outdoor pool and the mud around it. And he spent most of his time there. During winter, however, he lived mostly inside, protected from the cold. Mo’s feet worsened within weeks of the start of wintertime housing routines.
While he spoke, Mark flashed images of normal feet from wild rhinos in Nepal alongside images of abnormal ones living in captivity. Rhinos have three toes and a main foot pad. They naturally bear most of their weight on their toenails, each analogous to a horse’s hoof with a hard outer wall that extends well below a concave sole. Healthy wild rhinos are “toe walkers.” Since they naturally walk on soft ground, their toenails show very little wear. Captive rhinos have short nails with flat soles that fall even with the main foot pad; they are “pad walkers.”
Suddenly, Mo’s real problem became crystal clear: his toenails were completely worn down from a lifetime on hard ground, exposing his soles—and then his main foot pad—to excess weight. Swampy ground might have prevented this problem, and it certainly had to be part of the long-term solution, but for now this rhino’s feet were caught in a painful vicious cycle. Every time we cut the overgrown sole tissue back, it barely came even with h
is nails. He walked mostly on his sore soles.
I arranged for Paul to stop by to see Mo so I could show him some of the photos. He reacted to Mark’s findings with a new idea.
“Okay, so let’s put shoes on him,” he said.
“Shoes?” I was surprised. “Paul, you’re crazy. How do we do that?”
“We’ll just glue ’em on. No problem. I’ve been putting these aluminum shoes on the US Equestrian Team dressage horses because they’re light, and you don’t have to put nails through their feet to keep them on. We use epoxy and a fiberglass patch. You know, the way you fix broken turtle shells. If we can just get him up off his soles and give his nails some relief, they might have a chance to grow out more normally.”
“But won’t we have to go back and take the shoes off at some point?” I asked, worried about the number of times we’d have to put the rhino (and ourselves) through anesthesia. The more I thought about an aluminum shoe glued onto the bottom of a rhino foot, the crazier it sounded. I imagined two scenarios: the rhino would wake up from anesthesia, tap around inside his enclosure, and throw off the shoes. Or the glue would hold them in place forever.
“Nah, he’ll wear ’em off eventually. Most people probably won’t even notice he has them on.” Paul thought for a moment. “Send me measurements of his back feet—the really bad ones—and some tracings of his footprints, if the keepers can get them. I’ll make a prefab set of shoes so the whole thing goes quickly. I think we should do this sooner rather than later, before his feet get really bad again.”
We were all excited when the time came to give Mo his new shoes. Once again, there was extensive secondary infection in his rear feet, though the front feet were not so bad. After the trimming and antibiotic perfusion, Paul pulled the shoes out of his bag. I’d visualized thick pads of some sort. Instead, they looked a lot like standard horseshoes, without the holes, and shaped a bit differently. Of course, the other difference was that Mo would wear three shoes on each back foot, one for each of his three toes.
Paul started prepping the shoes for the epoxy. He checked each one for size and shape. The shoe for the middle toes was a larger C shape than those for the smaller inner and outer toes. Since rhino toes spread out when the animal stands, the three shoes would support a fair amount of Mo’s weight; his main foot pad would support the rest. The combined surface of the shoes would function as surrogate toenails.
Working at his usual rapid pace, Paul applied a thin layer of glue to the underside of each shoe. The bitter smell of adhesive filled the air. He pressed the shoe onto the sole close to the edge of the toe, and covered it with Kevlar fiberglass strips slathered in more glue. This patch acted like a Band-Aid to create a better seal and extend the life of the shoe.
Paul pressed the shoes in place for several minutes, allowing the adhesive to take hold, and then wrapped the foot lightly: no need for the heavy gray tape today. We wanted Mo to shed these bandages by nightfall so he’d be walking on his new shoes. As Paul finished side two, I said, “Hey, wow, snazzy shoes! Bet this is a first for a greater one-horned rhino.”
“Yup. I’m happy with them. He should feel a lot better. Let’s see how he wakes up.”
Later in the morning, I came back to check on Mo. He stood drowsily eating hay. Erin smiled at him. Good old Mo—another uneventful recovery.
His bandages already off, Mo walked over to us, his feet making a light tapping sound on the concrete floor. He pushed his great one-horned nose between the bars for a piece of carrot. The eye ointment from the procedure had seeped into the skin around his eyes, making them look even rounder and darker than usual. Mo seemed exceptionally calm and relaxed, and we thought the shoes were already giving him some relief. Erin joked that he might start tap-dancing at any moment.
The shoes lasted longer than I’d imagined. Though the ones on the smaller inner and outer toes fell off by three months, the central toe shoes were still in place and doing their job for another six weeks. And although the chronic infection began its slow recurrence, Mo’s nails did grow out. When he and Mechi left the zoo for a wetter, swampier exhibit and a warmer climate, we felt we’d given him a better footing for what remained of his captive-rhino life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucy H. Spelman grew up with a menagerie of animals on an old dairy farm in rural Connecticut. While in middle school, she looked forward to “old clothes Wednesday,” a day set aside by one of her teachers to explore the nature trails across the street. She earned a bachelor of arts in biology from Brown University, then her veterinary degree from the University of California, Davis, and completed her postdoctoral training at North Carolina State University. Board certified by the American College of Zoological Medicine in 1994, Dr. Spelman’s work experience includes nearly ten years with the Smithsonian National Zoo, half as a clinical veterinarian and half as its director. She joined the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project in October 2006 as its Africa-based regional manager. Dr. Spelman enjoys sharing her work with others through all forms of media. In addition to writing, she has been filmed at work with animals in more than a dozen cable television documentaries, and has served as a consultant for various media and education divisions of Discovery Communications, Inc. “We’re all in this together,” she says of today’s conservation challenges.
Pandas in Their Own Land
by Carlos Sanchez, DVM, MSc
IN 2005, I was in Chengdu, China, preparing to perform a colonoscopy on a female giant panda with an undiagnosed intestinal disorder. This visit was the latest of several I’d made to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. My Chinese colleagues had picked out several animals with chronic illnesses, and we’d planned to give each one a complete physical under anesthesia—including endoscopy and abdominal ultrasound. This particular panda, Yaloda, had been losing weight, her coat had lost its shine, and she hadn’t come into heat in several years.
In my capacity as staff veterinarian at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC, travel to China is part of my job. I like foggy Chengdu, despite the challenges of working in a place where the language and the culture differs so much from mine. And I’ve gotten into a regular routine when I visit the Panda Base, which houses 35 or so of the world’s 260 captive giant pandas. Even so, it’s impossible not to feel a bit nervous the night before a scheduled procedure on a giant panda. I know that I’m one of very few veterinarians who will ever have the chance to take care of the animal many people consider the world’s rarest and most loved.
I still remember the day in July 1981 when the first living cub was born to a giant panda outside China, at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City. I was twelve years old. A few months later, my mom took my brother, my sister, and me to see the cub, Tohui. We stood in line for almost five hours before reaching the viewing glass that framed the panda’s night-house. Because of the great number of people, we were allowed to watch for only a few minutes. We waited anxiously until the mom turned around. Then we saw the fuzzy little black and white baby panda, moving about and trying to climb up his mom’s arms. When I saw Ying Ying with her cub, I realized that we were in the presence of an amazing creature. But I never imagined that this exotic species would become a focal point of my career, and indeed of my life.
By the time Tohui turned fourteen, I’d finished veterinary school. That year, the Chapultepec Zoo hired me as staff veterinarian. Working there was a dream come true—the zoo had six giant pandas by then. And yet I wanted to learn more. Unfortunately, no program in my country could offer me further training in zoo animal medicine. Though it was a difficult decision, I decided to leave Mexico in order to become a better veterinarian. I moved to London to do my master’s at the Royal Veterinary College under a full scholarship from the British government. Next came a three-year zoo medicine residency at the National Zoo.
Washington’s favorite old panda, Hsing Hsing, had just died when I started my program. But two young giant pandas, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, were on their way from China
. Playful and dramatic, they stole the show at the zoo. As in Mexico, people couldn’t get enough of watching giant pandas. And they wanted more. So did the zoo staff and its scientists. After some seasons of trial and error, Mei Xiang became pregnant via artificial insemination and gave birth to their first cub, Tai Shan. This was an exciting time for us all, and especially for me: I finished my training that year and was hired by the National Zoo as staff veterinarian, a second dream come true.
On this trip to Chengdu, we planned to examine eight pandas—several with intestinal problems, including Yaloda—over the course of three busy days. Our first day went well. But as we prepared for the next, someone accidentally pushed our endoscope stand. Our fiberscope (a very specialized and expensive piece of equipment) fell to the concrete floor. I reached for it, but wasn’t fast enough; as if in slow motion, I watched the delicate instrument land on its base and saw three pieces detach themselves from the lens. A long silence filled the room. No one had to say that we needed the scope tomorrow, when we were scheduled to examine Yaloda.
I evaluated the damage. The piece that attaches the camera to the scope was broken. Without the camera, I could not attach the TV monitor, making it impossible for me to show my Chinese colleagues how to interpret what we’d be seeing inside the panda’s stomach and intestines. Nor could I make a recording to document the exam. Without the camera, the scope was virtually useless.
Determined to solve the problem, I gathered my tools: medical tape, scissors, and hair clippers. My improvised fix didn’t result in a perfect view through the lens, but it was better than the alternative, which was to cancel the exam on Yaloda. She’d been suffering from some kind of gastrointestinal disease for months. I didn’t want her to go any longer without a diagnosis and treatment.
The Hippo with Toothache Page 6