The Hippo with Toothache (5 page)

Watching the fawns disappear into the woods, I felt a mix of emotions. Veterinarians can't help but become attached to the animals they work with, be they companion animals like cats and dogs or zoo animals like lions and tigers. But wildlife rehabilitation work is a special field. The goal of veterinarians who choose to work in this setting is to release their patients back into the wild, never to see them again. These patients rarely say thank you. More often than not, they prefer to strike out with tooth, hoof, and talon in an effort to escape—without a backward glance.

Wildlife rehabilitation veterinarians don't get many kisses from puppies. But that white tail held high, when a successfully rehabilitated deer bounds off into the woods on its way back to a life in the wild, is a pretty sweet reward in itself.

Ned Gentz received his doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Colorado State University in 1990 and completed an internship in zoo, wildlife, and exotic animal medicine at Kansas State University. Since 2000, he has been associate veterinarian and research coordinator at the Albuquerque Biological Park in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Previously he was director of veterinary services at the Wildlife Center of Virginia, where Animal Planet routinely filmed him at work for the television series
Wildlife Emergency
. He also served as a clinical instructor of zoo and
wildlife medicine at Cornell University. Dr. Gentz is board certified by the American College of Zoological Medicine. In his current position, he volunteers his time as the consulting veterinarian for the Zuni tribe's Eagle Rescue Program. He finds this work especially inspiring.

MARTINE CALLED ME
late on a Friday afternoon from her vacation house in Arizona.

“Becky, my dear, I need you to come right away. Something is wrong with little Kachina.”

Honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was drive five hours from California to Arizona to see a bear cub. I clicked my cell phone off and asked myself for the hundredth time, “Why do I work for this place, and why is it always on a weekend?” Plus, we already had more than enough animals.

Twenty years earlier, in 1976, Martine bought a piece of land north of Los Angeles, inside the boundaries of the Angeles National Forest, and established the Wildlife Waystation, a home for illegal or discarded pets. She took in leopards, jaguars, African lions, mountain lions, bobcats, bears,
coyotes, llamas, deer, hawks—even tortoises. When a research facility closed down on the East Coast, she built caging for dozens of homeless chimps. She made room for a pride of ligers (lion-tiger crosses) someone had bred in Idaho. Every spring, our hospital ward filled up with baby opossums.

The call about the bear cub frustrated me. The motto at the bottom of the Waystation entrance sign read “No Animal Turned Away.” That was an understatement. We needed more equipment and supplies for the clinic, to say nothing of more staff. I missed my weekends. A day off once in a while would also be cool.

It wasn't a wild cub, I learned, but a cub from the pet industry. Someone in Arizona was breeding black bears to sell as pets. I knew Martine well enough to know I had no choice but to go. She wasn't asking me to make the trip; she was telling me. On paper, I was her licensed veterinarian, even though I'd started teaching part-time. We were trying to find someone who could take over the bulk of my clinical duties, especially these emergency calls.

That Friday, still annoyed, I alerted Silvio, the other Waystation vet, and we grabbed our equipment and headed out across the desert toward Arizona. He drove as I searched for a radio station. I settled on country music, the only clear signal I could find. Silvio later told me this style of music was new to his ears; he's called it “desert music” ever since.

Why did I stay at the Waystation? I wondered again as we cruised along. Of course, the animals were the main reason. I knew them all, their names and their medical histories. I regularly walked the Waystation grounds just to visit my patients, old and new. The mostly Mexican staff was a
good group. They could rise to almost any occasion. I'd also grown attached to the place itself: simple chain-link enclosures clustered on the floor of a beautiful canyon. Martine tells a great story about how she first heard of the property from a drunk in a bar and rode up the canyon on horseback to see it.

Martine was another reason I'd stayed at the Waystation. Not only did she know her stuff, she could charm just about anyone into working his or her butt off for homeless animals. People who'd never imagined cleaning up after an animal found themselves mucking out cages, thanks to Martine. She'd never told me much about her background, only that her dad had been a diplomat and they'd traveled a lot to Africa when she was little. That must have been how she fell in love with the animal world.

Late that evening, I stood looking at a tiny black bear cub in Martine's backyard. The bear couldn't walk. When Martine picked it up, it barely responded. We guessed it was two months old and about ten pounds. The cub's stumpy little front legs were drawn in close to her chest and she whimpered whenever she moved. With each breath, her face wrinkled. She could barely keep her eyes open, and what I could see of them looked dull and listless.

Martine sat down with the cub in her lap so I could examine it. Tough as she could be, she always softened when she had an animal in her arms. She cooed at the bear but it seemed to ignore her. She insisted it had been fine during the past week, ever since a local man, hearing that Martine ran a wildlife rehabilitation facility, had dropped it off at her house. She'd named the little female Kachina, after the Hopi
Indian woodcarvings, and planned to bring her to LA when Kachina got a bit bigger.

I asked Martine for Kachina's history again. The cub had been cranky that morning, not drinking her milk, and then stopped putting any weight on her right front leg. That's when Martine had called me. Now Kachina was unable to use her left front leg.

At first, I suspected the cub had a fever. The problem could be a quick onset of some kind of bacterial or viral infection or an infectious disease affecting the joints or brain. But Kachina's temperature was normal. Palpating her front legs, I could feel they were thick and swollen. We needed an X-ray, though at that hour I had no clue where to get one. Luckily, Martine knew everyone in town. Within an hour, Silvio, Kachina, and I were being escorted into the back room of a small animal vet clinic.

The owner of the clinic seemed a bit alarmed—maybe he hadn't heard me say over the phone that the patient was a bear cub. Soon we had an anesthetic mask over Kachina's face, and after a few breaths, the isoflurane gas worked perfectly. This was the easy part. We snapped a few films and had our answer: both of the cub's front legs—the bones above her elbows—were broken.

My thoughts gelled quickly. A young animal, acutely non–weight bearing on the right and left front legs, with bilateral humeral fractures … I looked again at the radiographs. Not only were the bones fractured, they were abnormal. The outer walls give bones their strength; they should appear thick and robust on an X-ray. In Kachina's X-rays, virtually every bone in her body appeared paper-thin.
Her tiny skeleton didn't have the strength to support her weight and had fractured under the stress. Why? There must be something missing from her diet, I thought. This bear must have been getting the wrong kind of food.

I called Martine on her cell phone—she'd gone out somewhere. She was worried about Kachina but wasn't the sort of person who stood around waiting for answers. Anyway, I had Silvio with me, and she knew I'd call her with a full report.

“Martine, what kind of milk are you giving this bear?” I asked, trying not to sound accusatory. Baby carnivores require a specific type of milk. Martine knew this, of course, as she had raised dozens of young carnivores over the past several decades and was good at it.

“The same formula that came with her. She'd been taking it very well until late yesterday, as I told you before. It's in a plastic container back at the house. Why, what did you find?” The pitch of her voice rose a notch. She'd already become attached to this cub.

“Both her front legs are broken, the bones above the elbow.” While I spoke to Martine, Silvio began gathering bandage material.

“Well, that would explain why she's cranky and doesn't want to eat,” Martine answered calmly, her emotions back in check. “What do we do to fix this?”

Her optimistic tone didn't fit the situation—in my mind, anyway. It wasn't as if we just needed to suture a wound closed. I answered quickly, “We're going to have to put a cast on both legs, maybe even on her entire upper body. She's still anesthetized. I have to go.”

Silvio and I agreed that the only option for stabilizing the
thin bones was a cast. It would have to be enormous in spite of the cub's small size. After years in practice, this would be the first time we'd had to put a whole torso cast on any animal other than a lizard (but that's another story). When we finished, Kachina looked pitiful. The entire upper half of her body was encased in white casting material, with her tiny furry rear end and legs sticking out the back and her head sticking out the top. We tried to put a slight bend in the cast so her front legs were not totally straight. Our biggest worry was whether she could breathe normally, since the cast undoubtedly put some pressure on her chest. We decided the best thing we could do for the cub was to keep her calm.

As soon as Kachina woke up, we mixed some Valium in honey. No bear refuses honey. She took it readily. Two hours later, back at Martine's house, she took her bottle. A good sign. The plan at that point was to have Martine keep Kachina quiet in the cast while her bones healed. The next morning, Silvio and I headed back to LA with some blood samples.

Halfway home, I realized I hadn't looked at the milk powder label. I called Martine and asked her to check it. “Becky, as I told you, it says Commercial Bear Milk Powder. It came with the bear.”

“Does it say anything on the label?” I asked.

“Becky, it says Commercial Bear Milk Powder,” Martine repeated, sounding irritated.

A week later, I drove back to check on Kachina and to get a sample of the milk powder. We'd run the cub's blood samples and found an abnormal inverted ratio of calcium to
phosphorous. These results confirmed the diagnosis: Kachina's bones were thin from a condition called metabolic bone disease. While young carnivores need to consume both calcium and phosphorous, there is normally more calcium than phosphorous in their mothers' milk. When they start eating the flesh of other animals, they get these minerals from bones and cartilage as well as from meat. If they don't get the right proportions of minerals, their bones cannot mineralize normally. This is a classic disease that occurs in captivity when the wrong type of milk or meat without bones is fed to a carnivore. It can happen in lions, tigers—and bears.

Walking into the backyard, I expected to find a sedated and immobile bear. Instead, Kachina was a ball of energy. She'd figured out how to walk by using her cast like a sled. Propelling herself with her back legs, she took corners by tipping her cast to angle around the turns. To my surprise and great relief, Kachina had adapted beautifully to her confinement. This was an endearing animal. Encouraged by her energy, we changed her diet: no more mystery milk powder. We gave the cub a small amount of a commercial zoo diet made for bears called “omnivore chow,” a fancy type of dog kibble. She seemed to like it. Our plan was to wean her off milk with the hope that solid food—and the correct amounts of calcium and phosphorous—would help her bones catch up with the rest of her body.

I no longer minded the house calls to another state. We were definitely making progress, and Kachina was no longer in pain. On my third trip, four weeks after we'd put her in the body cast, I noticed the bandage material was starting to break down, and also that she was growing out of it. The
better the cub felt, the more stress she put on the cast; it wouldn't last much longer. But before we replaced it, we wanted to see how the bones were healing. We arranged to go back to the local vet clinic and take another set of radiographs. This time we simply laid Kachina on the table and took pictures of her front legs through the cast.

Expecting to see progress, we were stunned by the results. The bones were not healing at all. We could barely even see them. They were disappearing. Maybe our cast was too good, so supportive that it had removed all the stress on her bones, something they needed in order to mineralize.

I had a sinking feeling this bear wouldn't make it—that the bones would never heal. Though Kachina seemed to feel fine, it was only the cast that was holding her little body together. We decided to go ahead and change the cast, which meant anesthetizing her after all. Luckily, bears are pretty easy anesthetic patients, and she slept quietly while we took new pictures and replaced the cast. No one said much. It didn't seem right to put this great wad of material around the cub's small body if it wasn't going to help cure her. I left for LA with very little hope.