Wildlife Darting and Anesthesia (Wed - Thurs, June 24-25)

We began our two days of wildlife immobilization and anesthesia with a morning full of lectures. Honestly, a lot of it was either over my head or just hard to follow, since I was just hearing names of drugs that I'd never heard before. It was tough because I've had some physiology and pharmacology, but not with respect to anesthesia. Our lecturers and teachers for these two days are Scott Citino, the vet at White Oak; Jeff Zuba, the vet at San Diego Wild Animal Park; and Greg Fleming, the vet at Disney's Animal Kingdom (and a Canadian, eh!).

Scott and Greg lectured on anesthesia and monitoring before throwing us out into the field with dart guns....to practice on hay bales. We had some target practice with all the different kinds of rifles, pistols, and even blowdarts. My favorite was the DanInject JM CO2 powered rifle, but the blowpipes were pretty fun too--and seemed to take a lot more skill to actually hit anything. We learned a lot about different darting techniques, practiced filling and unloading darts, and Scott demonstrated all the different types of dart guns.

Me shooting at a bale of hay....I had a pretty good shot on these CO2 powered rifles!

Thursday morning Scott had two zebras that needed hoof trims, a rhino with a recheck on a wound, and a gerenuk up for semen collection. We split into teams, and each team was responsible for monitoring one of the animals during anesthesia. We all watched as Scott and Greg shot the two zebra simultaneously in the field--both good shots, obviously. A few minutes later the zebra darted with carfentanil was showing signs, but the M99 zebra was still looking totally normal. Scott ended up darting both a second time, and the M99 I beleive a third time. But eventually both went down, and we checked vitals and the zebra teams ran blood gases and end-tidal CO2 readings, and collected blood while the keepers did the hoof trims.

The zebra while under anesthesia

I was on the gerenuk team, so while the rhino was down I got to watch Scott examine the wound site--after they used a forklift to raise the rhinos leg enough to visualize the site. The male rhino had gored this female right in the perineal region, and Scott had closed the wound about a month ago. On this recheck, he cleaned it and said everything looked fine.

Posing with (on?) the anesthetized rhino

It was finally time for the gerenuk, and the keepers grabbed him from the enclosure and Dharmaveer hand injected the anesthetic agent. We rushed in to set up the monitoring equipment, and Linda Penfold set up her electroejaculation machine at the...ahem...other end. I drew blood from the ear for a lactate test, and from the saphenous vein for the blood bank. The gerenuk was stable the whole time, although the lactate skyrocketed following the electroejaculation owing to all the muscle clenching the little guy was subjected to. But they got the sample successfully, and reversed the gerenuk. An exciting day all around.

The keepers struggling to restrain the gerenuk as it was waking up

Me taking lactate readings from blood from an ear vein before the electroejaculation