Kia ora, I'm James. I'm the manager of the Vet Department here at Auckland Zoo.
During your visit to the zoo, you can come and visit the Vet Hospital and see what we get up to.
Come this way and we'll go and have a look.
So we're in the Vet Hospital Gallery here, so this is open to the public whenever the zoo's open,
and we have procedures going on. So behind me is the main treatment room,
we do procedures such as vet dentistry, sometimes x-rays and surgery.
It gives a chance for members of the public to come and see what we do up close.
And so you can see here in our main treatment room we've got a procedure going on today.
And so this is our female serval Sharni who's having a root canal.
So we've got a specialist, a veterinary dentist in doing the actual root canal procedure,
and so now we're going to go through the back of house and we'll go and have a closer look at what's going on with Sharni.
About a year ago Sharni fractured her lower left canine and that exposed the living tissue inside the tooth,
and so a year ago that root canal was filled, a very similar procedure to what people have.
And so over the last few weeks she's actually just broken the top of that filling.
Obviously Sharni isn't going to sit in a chair while we inject local like a human would.
So we give her a general anesthetic, which is why she's asleep on her side with a tube into her throat
helping her breathe. And she's got some iv fluids running and lots of monitoring equipment.
We had Russell Tucker come from Kohimarama Vets because he has special expertise to replace the root canal filling.
So you can see here this is a dental x-ray machine that Russell's got in his hands.
This is the same if you go to the dentist yourself, this is just a bit more portable for our purposes,
and you can see the little tiny dental plate inside Sharni's mouth there.
So you're all good with that tooth? All done.
So there's a lot of kit we have here to make sure our animals stay asleep and that they're safe,
and so this is a multi-system monitor. Basically this can tell us how fast she's breathing,
how much carbon dioxide she's breathing out. You can see a little tube into a windpipe, so that is down into her trachea,
and that has oxygen and anaesthetic gas going in it. That allows her to breathe more easily through the procedure.
And she's also got another little tube into her front leg which is a catheter into her vein, and we've got her on some iv
fluids and so that keeps her hydrated make sure that the anesthesia is as safe as possible for her.
So this is the image from the dental x-ray that we saw being taken of Sharni's tooth.
But this is her two lower canines, and so this is the healthy one and then this is the one and you can quite
obviously see the filling there. On x-rays the whiter something is the more dense it is.
In a normal tooth you have running along the middle you have a pulp cavity,
so that's the living tissue of the tooth that provides the nutrition to the tooth and keeps it alive.
But if you break your teeth and expose that pulp cavity, bacteria can crawl from the mouth and from the outside.
So what we do is that we get Russell because of his expertise to come in,
and he basically drills out that living tissue and replaces it with a filling, and so it's now sealed to the outside world.
So this tooth should stay healthy and happy for the rest of Sharni's life.
Being a zoo vet is a really broad discipline, so we have to be the anesthetist, we have to be the radiographer,
we have to be sometimes the surgeon, and I think we're close to matching the level of care
that you or I might get if we go to the hospital.
So this is the x-ray room, as well as x-rays we do endoscopy and ultrasound in here so lots of diagnostic imaging,
and it's one of the three rooms that's on show to the public. And this is obviously the second room,
the main treatment room, and then we've also got this third room. So we often have hospitalised animals in here.
So again this is the third room that's on show, and we've had things from little sea turtles,
to little finches, to kākāpō, and even tuatara being hospitalised in here.
Lots of people think that we as vets have our own special equipment,
but actually what we usually use is all the stuff that's designed for people. When we're as humans anesthetised,
the anesthetists have tried and tested methods for keeping us warm.
We know that we need to keep our patients warm, but how we do that is very different.
For some species we have to keep their hands and feet really warm such as primates,
and so we have little kiddie socks and bubble wrap. For other animals like the serval we had a hot air blanket over them,
and actually for some animals such as rhinos on section we often have shade structures that we can bring in
and put over them once they're anesthetised, and we sometimes have to slosh water over them to keep them cool.
We have to really think outside the box to maintain the animals safely under anesthesia.
You can see on the wall here there's a bunch of anesthetic tubes,
so as we saw with Sharni when she was anesthetised she had a little tube down into her windpipe,
but because our patients are so varied we have a large range of sizes, from quite small,
these are actually pediatric tubes so these are what go into children, these are kind of adult human size,
all the way up to these tubes which we might use in for instance our zebra. We also use bigger tubes in giraffe,
and then you need even bigger tubes if we're going to do a rhino intubation.
So this is our external quarantine building,
so in this building we have typically animals that are coming in and and leaving the zoo.
So we're going to go inside now and give Bella, who's a wild kākāpō who's here receiving treatment,
and help give her a tube feed and give her her medicine for the afternoon.
It's really important that we maintain high levels of hygiene and biosecurity for kākāpō.
They live in very special places way down in the south of New Zealand, and down there
there aren't all the same types of diseases that we have up here in Auckland. And so whilst they're here in hospital
we have separate shoes, we have separate overalls that we wear, and we have a separate building.
So kākāpō are a critically endangered native parrot species,
there's slightly more than 200 alive currently. So Bella has something called cloacitis,
so that means a lot of inflammation and scabs and infection around her bottom,
and today we're going to go and give her her medication and give her some food.
Okay
All these medicines together we know from previous experience makes cloacitis better,
we've got lots of research going on over the last 12 or 13 years because what we'd love to be able to do is prevent the disease.
So the medicines in the tube, we've got her food in the syringe ready to go, we've got a little bit of lubrication
on the outside of the tube, and this is her homemade gag by our lovely maintenance department.
Hello sweetie pie.
So it always looks a bit strange if you've not seen this done before. A little gag in her mouth,
a nice soft feeding tube and that goes all the way to the crop, which is kind of in this area.
It's as simple as that, and she'll give me the gag back probably, maybe? Thanks.
I'm just going to put some fresh food in for Bella. We're offering her a selection of vegetables,
but also seeds and nuts which she really likes so that will keep her happy.
And we've also got this fresh browse that we offer her.
So through the breeding season, and at certain other times, the kākāpō in the wild are given supplementary food,
and so the kākāpō in the wild know that if there's a green platform and there's a white tub,
that's their favorite pellets in there. These are designed to be heavy enough for a kākāpō to get their head in,
but little birds can't move it. So we continue that whilst they're in the hospital with us,
because for Bella this is reassuringly familiar and she knows what this is all about.
So the next job I've got to do is microchip some little green and golden bell frogs which are frogs about this size.
So we like to have each of our animals individually identifiable, and that's really important for ongoing care,
and things such as medical records, and to know who was sick last week, and who's on treatment.
Up until now we've not had a microchip small enough to go into these little frogs.
And so we just need to put the needle under the frog's skin,
press the plunger which slides the chip into place, and then we'll take the needle out.
A lot of people don't like being injected but it is all over and done with real quick
and the major part of this procedure actually is being able to hold a frog safely,
and that's why the experts are here to to do that. And so Nick's going to do do the frog wrangling for us.
And here's the microchip, an example of the one we're going to use on the frog. So it's this little tiny tiny silver dot
at the end of my pen there, and so these have been designed to insert into the tail of mice.
We're trying to find a repeatable location in the frogs.
So we're choosing to microchip the frogs on their feet,
that's because there's thin skin that'll allow the laser light through. There we go.
Frogs can change their appearance quite readily, they can change their colour especially with temperature,
so by microchipping it it'll have an ID number when we scan the microchip.
It's only been done in one species of aquatic frog in Europe,
so it's the first time being trialed in New Zealand but it's a really big step.
So thanks for looking behind the scenes and having a look at what we're doing today,
and we look forward to seeing you the next time you come and visit.
Just remember that every time you come and visit the zoo you're supporting all the really valuable work we do,
so thank you!