The Hippo with Toothache

by Lucy H Spelman

  First, I needed to determine the cause of the little bull’s anorexia. Was this the “classic” confinement-related response? Given his subadult age and the good appetite of the adult male, we thought not. Could his wounds be causing a diminished appetite? There was no way to assess his injuries at this point without further anesthesia, and I was not ready to risk additional postanesthesia inappetence or to further disturb him or the other animals by darting him and working inside the boma. Besides, The Little Guy was not showing other overt signs of being a sick animal: no lethargy, no depression. He was plenty active, appearing to be seeking rhino-to-rhino interaction. We decided to give the little bull the social contact he seemed to want.

  There were two choices: put him with the mother and calf or with the adult bull. Both were risky options. If we put the young bull with the family pair, we could upset the cow, potentially interfering with her care of the calf. There was also the danger that The Little Guy would injure the calf. On the other hand, if we put the two bulls together, we ran the risk of extreme injury to the younger bull. Wild-caught rhinos from different social groups and different ages/size classes tend not to get along when put together in tight spaces.

  Yet the two bulls could now see each other (since the rhinos had ripped down all of the shade-cloth that had been serving as a visual barrier between bomas), and the big bull did not seem disturbed by The Little Guy’s presence. We decided the lesser risk was to remove the barrier between the two bulls—and to be prepared to separate them again if all did not go well.

  Twelve days postcapture, the gate between the two males was removed. Nothing happened at first. We watched nervously for an hour. Finally, the young bull crossed over to his senior’s boma. I held my breath. Initially, he was escorted back out by the big bull (“Ol’ Boss” is what we were calling him at this point). But, much to our joy and relief, there was no aggression. The Little Guy headed right back into the older bull’s boma and followed him around constantly. And the old bull let him.

  The Little Guy had now all but stopped charging the fence, a clear departure from his previously agitated behavior. And when Ol’ Boss went to eat, The Little Guy ate with him! Over the course of the day, the older bull would occasionally horn his new boma-mate in the axilla (armpit), but this seemed more a reminder to let elders eat or drink first than a serious attempt to dominate him. Eventually, Ol’ Boss even let The Little Guy lie next to him when they rested.

  On the second and third days of the housing experiment, days thirteen and fourteen postcapture, the young bull continued to eat small amounts. He even defecated on day fourteen. (We veterinarians love the arrival of a long-awaited bowel movement!) The Little Guy seemed content for those three days. And then came day fifteen: the little bull appeared weak and depressed. Given how well he’d responded to companionship, I now considered bullet-related infection to be at the root of his symptoms. He was now refusing to eat again.

  When the rhino first refused to eat, we’d considered additional antibiotic therapy. But an animal of his size would need a large-volume dart delivered periodically into thigh or neck muscle, something that very much disturbs the patient on the receiving end. We also didn’t want to disrupt his acclimation period in the boma. Plus, antibiotics can induce their own gastrointestinal disturbances, and I had not wanted to risk adding to the little bull’s as-yet-unexplained anorexia when he looked so bright and alert otherwise.

  Whether your patient is a wild animal or a pet—or even a person—every treatment option comes with an implicit cost-benefit analysis. This calculation is especially tricky in a case like this where getting even basic laboratory or other diagnostic work done easily and safely was impossible. We had no clinic, no rhino-handling facilities, just our experience and intuition. Now that the young bull clearly appeared ill, the risk of upsetting him was less than the risk of losing him to infection. He was started on a broad-spectrum antibiotic by dart. We also began supplementing his drinking water with dextrose, sucrose, and B-complex vitamin syrup.

  On the following day, I added electrolytes to The Little Guy’s water and darted him again with antibiotic. It was now seventeen days postcapture, and the little bull was doing poorly. We had been observing him around the clock, and had not seen him eat anything. I made the decision, in consultation with the on-site board members of the Khama Rhino Sanctuary, to immobilize him that day for more intensive care.

  I administered a low dose of etorphine hydrochloride to anesthetize The Little Guy. He responded quickly to the narcotic. While constantly monitoring the rhino’s heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood oxygenation (by pulse oximetry), I gave him oxygen intranasally as an extra precaution, given his debilitated condition. A flexible tube passed into his stomach allowed for the administration of a calorically dense multisource carbohydrate/amino acid/vegetable oil/vitamin/ electrolyte liquid mixture. I also administered intravenous fluids to treat dehydration, more antibiotics, and an injection of vitamins and minerals. When anesthesia was reversed with an injection of the antidote, the little bull immediately sat up, shook his head, and walked away.

  On day eighteen postcapture, on March 5, 1993, at five pm local time, Botswana’s bravest rhino died. I was devastated, perhaps more so by this loss than by the loss of any other patient I’d ever had. Fifteen years later, I still feel a bleak numbness when I think about seeing him dead in the boma. Saving him had been a moral imperative. His death seemed like an affirmation that all was not well with the world—that the bad guys had won.

  I thought back to my small animal internship days and to my days as a zoo veterinarian as well. The truth is, people cause much of the suffering we deal with as veterinarians. Whether it’s cats hit by cars, or dogs that have eaten rat poison, or seals that have swallowed the coins zoo visitors carelessly throw into their pools, the veterinarian constantly finds him- or herself trying to pick up the pieces, figuratively and literally, because of thoughtless, selfish, cruel, or stupid human acts. This little rhino with bullet wounds was no different. He was another animal who had been perfectly healthy the moment before he ran into a member of our species, one who happened to have a gun.

  Emotionally drained, I performed the necropsy in the boma where The Little Guy had spent his last days. I found that the bullet that had entered the right shoulder prior to capture had passed all the way through the chest and abdomen, where it had caused further damage, leading to diffuse infection and his death. From the start, I had hoped that those bullet wounds did not go as deep as it was now obvious they had. The 7.62mm–caliber round, which I found in the rhino’s abdomen, came from the type of semiautomatic weapon regional rhino poachers were famous for.

  This was no zoo or university setting—I had no X-rays or MRIs and even had to scramble to find some of the drugs we’d needed. But I knew I had done my absolute best in this remote setting. My veterinary colleagues in the region were astounded that a wildlife vet kept an emergency oxygen tank and equipment like endotracheal tubes on hand, never mind a portable blood oxygen monitor. But this was still ultimately bush medicine, and doing my best had meant making do with locally available materials, just as I’d envisioned years earlier.

  Everyone at the sanctuary was saddened by the loss of The Little Guy. We had rooted for him day and night and come to know him. He had tried so hard to make it. But we took great solace in the fact that he hadn’t died alone. Instead of following the rules laid out in capture books and lore, we’d read the rhino’s desires and provided him with the companionship he craved. I believe his last days were made more bearable because we’d taken a calculated risk to let him be with Ol’ Boss. I could only guess that Ol’ Boss must have been wondering what had happened to his little gray shadow.

  Although we’d managed to capture and transport him to a safe place, and had helped him acclimate to captivity with an unorthodox intervention, the poachers who were decimating his kind got him in the end. At least they did not get his small horn. Posthumously, we renamed him Lerumo, �
��bullet” in the local Setswana language. I felt that this name fit him, and the sad situation, best.

  Overall, the 1993 rhino translocation project was a pioneering success for the DWNP in terms of accomplishments and the staff training it provided—success that would not have been possible without our Natal Parks Board colleagues. The Khama Rhino Sanctuary continues its conservation and education mission. An additional male was captured in 1994, calves have been born, and South Africa has donated several more rhinos to Botswana, some of which are back in the wild, this time under much more intensive protection than in the past. I think of them as Lerumo’s legacy.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Steven A. Osofsky is a wildlife veterinarian with a long-standing focus on international conservation. His first experience in Africa was as a Harvard University Traveling Fellow in 1984. He attended veterinary school at Cornell University, receiving his doctor of veterinary medicine degree in 1989. Dr. Osofsky went to Botswana in 1991 to serve as the government of Botswana’s first Wildlife Veterinary Officer, a post he left in 1994. He has also worked as a clinical zoological veterinarian, as an American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow and biodiversity specialist for the US Agency for International Development, and as director of field support for the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF-US) Species Conservation Program. The author of more than thirty scientific papers and book chapters, he is currently senior policy advisor for wildlife health for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), with a focus on the wildlife/domestic animal/human health interface. He and his veterinarian wife, Dr. Karen J. Hirsch, have two young children who so far seem to like animals.

  The Bugs Have Bugs?

  by Maryanne Tocidlowski, DVM

  I HAD MIXED emotions when a supervisor from the children’s zoo—part of the Houston Zoo, where I worked as staff veterinarian—called to say that their collection of dung beetles had red spots on them. Could I come take a look? There were seven beetles, from the Canthon genus; they’d been collected locally in Texas. I thought to myself, I don’t do bugs; I don’t know anything about insects. I guess I could go look at them at least; maybe I can do something, but what?

  Like most budding veterinarians, I had a small collection of my own pets as a child, I loved science and animals—at least, most of them—and if I found an injured or sick wild creature, I’d try to take care of it. But insects and spiders had never interested me. I don’t like being surprised by bugs landing on my shoulder or getting caught in my hair. I’m actually a little afraid of them. At best, they are nice to look at—through glass.

  The beetles needed to be examined, however, and it was in my job description to pay them a visit. I began by doing some research on my soon-to-be patients. The Internet (in 2000) had no information about the medical management of dung beetles, nor any reference to beetles with red spots, but I did learn that dung beetles are very interesting creatures. Sometimes called “tumblebugs,” most species are between 1 and 1½ inches long; the color of their carapace, or body, ranges from dull to shiny black. Considered environmentally beneficial and medically harmless, these beetles recycle animal feces. On a Texas ranch, they can recycle up to 80 percent of the cattle manure in a pasture, improving soil nutrient levels and structure, and supporting forage growth for the cattle to eat.

  Different species of dung beetle found in other parts of the world play a similar role, ensuring a healthy environment for animals as varied as gazelles, rhinos, and elephants. Adult beetles use the liquid portion of manure for nourishment, sort of a dung Slurpee (sorry, but that’s the image this fact created in my mind). Then they work in male-female pairs to roll a ball of dung away from the manure pile, and the female lays an egg in the middle of the ball. They bury it in a deep burrow. The egg develops into a larva, which then eats its way out of the dung ball and to the surface, to start the life cycle all over again.

  I also got a bit distracted reading about ancient Egypt. The dung beetle was once considered sacred by the Egyptians. The beetle’s behavior of rolling a huge dung ball during the day, disappearing into a hole at night, and starting again the next day symbolized renewal and a connection to the god of the rising sun. There was also a belief that all dung beetles were male, reproducing themselves out of nothing by depositing sperm into the dung ball. Had bugs been my hobby growing up, maybe I would have known all of this.

  After learning what I could, I met the children’s zoo supervisor to go look at the beetles. On our way, I kept thinking—hoping—that maybe we’d find nothing wrong with them. But I soon saw that all seven dung beetles actually did have red spots and that the spots moved. They appeared to be some type of millimeter-size red insect riding around on their backs. My best guess was a mite.

  At that point, I realized that the difference between a beetle and a mite confused me. Both are in the kingdom Animalia and phylum Arthropoda, which makes them generically “bugs.” They diverge from there. Mites belong to the class Arachnida, same as spiders and ticks, and dung beetles belong to the class Insecta, along with wasps, ants, grasshoppers, butterflies, other types of beetles, and—just to confuse the issue—a particular type of insect called a “true bug.” So both were bugs: the mites were arachnids and the beetles were insects.

  I had plenty of questions about this case. I’d never had to work on a bug infested with bugs. Were the red bugs harmful to the beetles, or were they symbiotic bugs just hitching a ride? Would they go away on their own? Where had they come from? How would I handle these animals if I needed to?

  I remembered seeing mites on other types of animals, like chiggers that bite humans and cause a rash. I’d seen little red mites on the bodies of birds and reptiles; these are harmful to the animal because they bite and suck blood, potentially causing anemia, or passing bacteria or viruses to their hosts. But even if these beetle hitchhikers were similar to those seen on humans, birds, or reptiles, the treatment would have to be completely different. For animals infested with mites, we use commercially available insecticides—carefully. A more appropriate name for such chemicals might be “bugicides.” In this case, they would undoubtedly kill my patients as well as their red spots.

  I asked more questions about the history of the zoo’s beetles and the red mites: were the dung beetles behaving, eating, and moving around normally? The responses were not helpful: “We’re not sure” and “They don’t seem to be eating as much as before.” Given the number of red mites observed on each beetle, I decided reluctantly that this was a problem that needed taking care of. The supervisor and I discussed the situation and came up with a plan—several plans, actually.

  First, we would try to change their environment. The mulch substrate for the beetles could be the source of the infestation; maybe the red mites normally live in this soil. So we brought in fresh dirt, hoping the hitchhikers would prefer it to the beetles. After a few days, we saw no difference. The beetles still had red spots, mostly congregated around the midbody, near what I would call the neck region. Next we tried freezing the soil for several days before using it. Maybe this step would kill the mites already in the substrate and reduce the numbers on the beetles. But when we placed the beetles and their red friends on the thawed-out soil, the hitchhikers still did not disappear.

  Okay, on to the next step.

  The conservative approach had failed. I would need to manually remove the red mites from the beetles. But this strategy presented yet another set of questions: How could I get the mites off without harming my patients or myself? If I put the dung beetles in an anesthetic chamber to anesthetize them, then removed them to work on them, would they stay asleep long enough? If I dispensed with the chamber, was there any way I could use anesthetic gas on the beetles without putting myself to sleep as well?

  Since I couldn’t think of a way to keep the beetles under anesthesia long enough to work on them, that option was out. I would have to contain my fear of bugs and somehow immobilize the beetles myself while I picked off the red mites.

  The
removal operation was scheduled for one quiet afternoon, and the dung beetles were brought up to the clinic. I didn’t know how they’d react to the stress of my handling and fussing over them, so we split the beetle collection in two. One group of three would go back to the children’s zoo exhibit to be the “control group”; the four others would be the “experimental manual removal group.”

  The day before, I’d asked my technicians to sterilize some dirt so that it was free of all possible contamination. Even more surely than freezing, the sterilization process would kill any bacteria, fungi, or bugs that might be lingering in the soil. Once they were cleared of the red bugs, the beetles would be kept in the sterilized dirt in a clean cage at the clinic for monitoring. I’m pretty sure this was the one and only time we purposefully put dirt into our clean sterilizing unit.

  Now the fun part began. What should I use to restrain these little buggers? Even if the beetles could tolerate the stress of hands-on handling, I feared my instruments or clumsiness might damage them beyond repair. We might need to modify my technique as we proceeded, depending on the results, good or bad. The supervisor and staff understood the risks. Ready to proceed, I chose a pair of large blunt-tipped forceps (surgical tweezers, about six inches long, with rounded tips) to handle the beetles, allowing me to control the pressure on the body. I chose a pair of small delicate forceps about four inches long, with pointy tips, to remove the red mites from the beetles. I set a shallow plate in front of me to serve as a catch pan in case the dung beetle fell from my grasp, or in case one of us needed a break.

  The first procedure on any animal is always a learning experience. I grabbed the first beetle and it jumped! Startled, I gasped, and half rose from my chair. Everyone in the room laughed, including me, even while I thought, Please don’t jump or fly onto me. Luckily, the first beetle didn’t go far; it jumped just enough to let me know it wasn’t happy with my touching it. At least it didn’t fly. These beetles have large wings that enable them to move from dung pile to dung pile in the wild. (My worst fear was of a beetle flying around my treatment room, pursued by people running after it with nets.)