Day 10

7-26-10

Last night in Salt Lake City was lots of fun! We ate dinner at a really great brewery and our food and drinks were absolutely delicious! We walked to the movies afterward, and the walk back to the hotel after that, was a nice little exercise before bedtime.

Breakfast at our hotel was delicious this morning! We got up bright and early in order to arrive at the zoo before it opens. We called Dr. Erica, and she let us in one of the gates near the new hospital building. After all the numerous introductions, Dr. Erica led us to the exam room where she was beginning anesthesia on a capuchin monkey. There were two volunteers in the room, the head keeper, a technician, a veterinary student, another keeper, a couple more spectators, Dr. Erica, me, and Dr. Guthrie. It was quite a menagerie, even before the animals arrived! Dr. Guthrie and I observed for awhile and then took a little tour of the new hospital. They had a quarantine hall with large holding pens, an ICU room, a laboratory, a conference room, three to four offices, a necropsy room, a fluoroscopy room, a storage room, and lastly, an exam/x-ray/surgery suite all rolled into one large room. They had tons of neat toys too! Their shiny new equipment was likely very expensive and obviously state-of-the-art!

After our tour, the head keeper set us up with the elephant keeper four a tour of the elephant barn! She took us to meet the new baby elephant, Zuni and her mother. Zuni was the cutest tiny thing you’ve ever seen, weighing in at 842 pounds!

Even at birth, she was about 230 pounds, and has been growing quickly ever since. She is now about 14 months old and is learning all kinds of new training behaviors to make it easier for her keepers and veterinarians to safely care for her. We toured the hay barn also.

Each of the two full grown elephants eats about six square bales of hay per day, so they stock the barn completely full to last the whole winter.

After the elephant tour, we met up with the keeper in charge of the Asian Highlands section of the zoo. We watched a quick demonstration of training behaviors of the Amur Leopard. He is trained to open his mouth, present his belly, touch a target, and present his paws. Afterwards, we toured the indoor tiger runs that back up to their outdoor enclosures. We saw the large male Amur Tiger, the female Amur Leopard, the male Snow Leopard, and two Pallas Cats. Because these cats are solitary animals, mating pairs are not housed together unless the female is in estrous. This increases the chances of successful mating because the animals actually anticipate being allowed to mingle, rather than being annoyed that there is some other cat in their space all the time.

After the tour, we walked around the zoo observing all the different animals, and I was really impressed with their exhibits. There were very few, if any, concrete exhibits, and many were “open-air” exhibits where the animals weren’t behind any barrier. It was really neat to see all the birds, bats, and even the giraffes, without the solid barrier between you and the animals. The zoo and the weather were absolutely beautiful today, and the animals were active and seemed very comfortable. I really enjoyed visiting the zoo and talking with the vet. The whole experience was definitely worth the five hour drive it took to get here.

Day 9

7-25-10

Today is the start of our weekend! We are heading to Salt Lake City to visit the Hogle Zoo! Tonight, once we get settled in at our hotel, we are planning to walk a couple blocks to a restaurant, and then go to a movie. I’m especially excited about going to the zoo because Dr. Guthrie has contacts there! I’m totally pumped about seeing their new baby elephant, touring the new veterinary facility, and meeting the associate veterinarian, Dr. Erica Travis.

Day 8

7-24-10

This morning we did our normal rounds around the zoo checking on the animals and saying hello to everyone. We got a call on the radio from Amy saying that the waxy monkey frog didn’t make it through the night, so she brought it to the clinic for a necropsy.

I did a quick rough necropsy and discovered that the frog likely died because of some kind of urinary tract problem because the urinary bladder was filled with a sludge-like material. We put the entire frog into a formalin vial to send it to the lab for a more definitive diagnosis.

After lunch, a couple came to the zoo with a delivery. The zoo got a new female Golden Pheasant today. There is already a male on exhibit, and he is one of the most colorful birds I’ve ever seen!

Dr. Guthrie led the couple behind the scenes to a quarantine pen for the new female. She dewormed the bird and released her to her new enclosure. She seemed indifferent to the whole ordeal and seemed to be doing just fine so we left her to explore her new pen. We took the couple to see the other birds they had given to the zoo in past years, and they seemed pleased to see they were doing well.

Day 7

7-23-10

This morning we walked around the zoo for a long time observing the animals and making sure they were all active and normal. We checked on an adult prairie dog that had been trapped, but it wasn’t the one with the hurt leg or the tooth problem, so we let him go.

This afternoon, we took some time for target practice with the dart gun! Earlier this week, Dr. Guthrie gave me a book to read called the Handbook of Wildlife Chemical Immobilization. After reading the sections she pointed out, she gave me a short tutorial on how to load a dart with drug, and how to charge the dart with pressure. When I felt like I understood everything she had told me, we went to get the CO2 pistols and barrels, and the blow dart pipe. We set up a target on a piece of plywood and placed it in the sand pit on the backside of the zoo. I got a lot of experience loading the darts and pressurizing them, which is very confusing the first few times you do it. After a little while, though, it got easy, and I was ready to shoot. After some coaching tips from Dr. Guthrie, I loaded a dart into the barrel, attached the CO2 pistol, and pressurized the CO2 canister. My first few shots were absolutely horrible! I am a decent shot with a regular gun, but this thing was completely foreign to me. Moreover, in a zoo or wildlife setting, you can’t spend any time getting set and aiming your gun. You really can’t even take the time to put it up to your face and look down the barrel. If you hesitate for the amount of time it takes to aim, you’ll miss your chance because the animal will either get agitated and spooked, or he’ll figure out what you’re up to! In all actuality, shooting the target has nothing whatsoever to do with aiming. It has to do with lots of practice and knowing the feel of your gun. Dr. Guthrie gave me a few more tips such as holding the barrel farther away from my body, pointing my finger down the barrel, and turning to fire instead of standing there and aiming.

It worked! My next few shots in a row were on the paper, and I even got a few of them close to the bull’s-eye! Once I felt it work correctly once, it’s almost as if it became easy and sort of second nature to me. Now I know what she means by saying “you just have to get the feel of it.”

At the end of the day, we went to check on a waxy monkey frog that was acting very sick, not moving around, and was emaciated. Dr. Guthrie took a quick look at her and is currently thinking about what she might want to do for this frog.

Day 6

7-22-10

Today is discount admission day at the zoo, so it’s pretty packed! We did two programs this morning with 10-12 year olds. Dr. Guthrie did a talk on parasites and the things we can learn from poop! Then we took everyone to the clinic where they could look at poop under the microscope, and told them about the transponders (or microchips) we use to identify each animal.

Shortly after we finished with our programs for the morning, Andrea brought us two more prairie dogs they had trapped. Unfortunately, they were both repeats, again! This time however, we marked them on the shoulder with a big black sharpie so we wouldn’t have to waste time bringing the same ones to the clinic again today.

After lunch, I did some bookwork cataloging the animal deaths for the year 2010. I had to record the date of death, species that died, and the reason of death. It was very interesting for me to review the pathology reports and medical records of each case. I spent a lot of time reading the notes prior to reading the final diagnosis and I was pretty impressed with how close I could get to diagnosing the condition. Vet school IS paying off!

At the end of the day, I went with Dr. Guthrie to check on Zeus, the North American Porcupine. His keeper thought she noticed something funny with his teeth, however, we couldn’t see it when we looked so she said she’d let us know if she saw it again. Zeus is incredibly cute and friendly. I fed him some honeydew melon which he very gently took from my hand with his big orange teeth, and then used his long-clawed fingers to hold it and eat it.

Day 5

7-21-10

First thing this morning, we had to catch all the llamas to vaccinate, draw blood, and collect fecal samples. For the most part, they were fairly easy to handle and three out of four are already somewhat halter-broke. We corralled the last one, and the three of us managed to get the halter on him with no problem. Dr. Guthrie vaccinated each llama, but decided not to draw blood because it was not a necessity and it is very difficult to find a vein on a llama that is bouncing around. I collected fecal samples from the enclosure, and we headed back to the clinic to begin setting up shop for the ring-tailed lemur visits.

The lemurs were fairly easy to capture, with minimal stress to them and us. After corralling each one into a holding pen, Corinne (Dr. Guthrie’s assistant) caught each one in a towel to allow Dr. Guthrie to administer an injection of Telazol to make them go to sleep. At the clinic, we used gas anesthesia to keep them asleep long enough for us to examine each one, administer tuberculin in their right eyelids for a TB test, vaccinate for rabies, draw blood, obtain a rectal swab, and record their microchip numbers.

On the two females, we palpated their scapular areas to locate their birth control implants. We were planning to remove the old implants; however we could not locate them. Dr. Guthrie even shaved their backs to try to visualize an incision scar, but found nothing. Therefore, after performing full physical exams on each, and administering their vaccines, etc., we placed them back in their respective crates and returned them to their keeper.

Day 4

7-20-10

Today, we vaccinated and trimmed feet on some of the goats at the farm exhibit, and we also castrated a young male goat. Dr. Guthrie talked me through the whole procedure, and now that I have watched and helped with multiple goat castrations, I think I could do it myself!

After that, the keepers brought in a fifteen-year-old Rewenzori Long-haired Fruit Bat. He has had some old age changes occurring in the bones of his wings, so his fingers are getting crooked and raw from rubbing on the walls of his enclosure. He is also extremely skinny. Dr. Guthrie cleaned his wounds, gave him fluids, pain meds, and antibiotics, and told the keepers to watch him for the next week to make sure he is still eating and his quality of life is still good. She suspects some other disease process is causing him to go downhill, especially because it took him a long time to wake up. Sometimes liver or kidney problems can cause the anesthetics to be metabolized much more slowly. Therefore, in about a week, we will examine him again to check his body weight and possibly draw blood to assess his condition more fully.

For the rest of the day, I reviewed the papers that Dr. Guthrie is in the process of getting published. She is on the track to becoming board certified in zoo medicine, and one of the requirements is that you have to be the primary author on at least five publications! Therefore, she spends a lot of her downtime writing, submitting, and reviewing her papers. She explained the process to me today, and showed me the guidelines that the different journals require for submitting a paper. They are all different and very specific, so it’s really just one big headache.

While we worked on different things in the office, we took breaks to run back and forth to the clinic to examine the prairie dogs that the zoo volunteers were trapping. We need to examine three specific babies that have not yet been micro-chipped, and one adult that has a tooth problem, however, the same dumb prairie dogs get trapped every time, so getting the ones we want is proving to be a slow, frustrating process. Dr. Guthrie has decided to mark each one we catch by either dying their hair or painting their toenails so that the volunteers will know if they need to bring the caged ones into the clinic, or just release them and try again. Surely that will save a lot of time and energy… but we’ll see.