It’s a familiar situation for any dentist: a patient calls with an acute toothache that requires immediate attention. What is less normal is that the person who suffers from it is a 185 kilo silverback gorilla.
That, however, was the situation that Professor Katja Koeppel of the University of Pretoria (South Africa), wildlife health expert and senior veterinarian, when contacted by the National Zoological Gardens in Pretoria.
Binga, a 23-year-old male western lowland gorilla, was in excruciating pain after refuse oral antibiotics for an abscess discovered in his lower right jaw last month.
Like the surgical intervention was the only option, Koeppel joined a team of six veterinary experts as they put Binga to sleep with a tranquilizer dart before extracting an infected tooth.
“This gorilla weighs 185 kilograms of pure muscle and can go from unconscious to fully awake in a matter of seconds, and there’s nothing you can do to keep it on the table,” said Kopeppel, who has worked with more than 400 gorillas throughout his career, in statements reported by the Daily Mail.
“That’s why I have to make sure the anesthesia is exactly right, because if Binga woke up, there would be little we could do; that’s why “There is a weapons team on full alert”he explained.
“Taking a gorilla to the dentist is very different from taking a human. When I calmed down Binga with a shot through the bars From his cage, he rushed towards me at full speed and stopped a few meters away. “I was just praying that those bars would hold!” continues the expert.
After becoming unconscious, Binga was taken to an operating room, where the professor Gerhard Steenkampa veterinary dentist who also teaches at the University of Pretoria, performed a two-hour operation to restore the silverback’s smile.
Given the risks inherent in gorilla anesthesia (a period of unconsciousness lasting more than two hours is potentially dangerous), much attention was paid to Binga’s well-being, including an echocardiogram and an advanced ultrasound of your heart.
While the animals’ health is carefully monitored at the zoo, with routine dental, vision and blood tests, as well as heart and abdominal imaging, chest x-rays and even reproductive evaluation, Binga’s obvious pain stressed the need for action.
“Gorillas in the wild do not normally show signs of distress, as their rivals They would consider it a sign of weakness. in a dominant male,” says Koeppel, who added that it is not uncommon for anesthetized animals to wake up.
Only through periodic health checks carried out in zoos can these conditions be discovered in wild animals, to then evaluate and treat them.
“Binga is now healthy and pain-freeand he has been told to always floss and brush his teeth before bed when he returns to his enclosure,” the doctor said.
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