| 1 | Mango has his spine repaired |
Mango was a blond-coloured Syrian brown bear living in the Ramat Gan Safari Park of Israel, who was 18 years old and had a decent chance of living another 15 yet. But one gloomy morning in 2014, zookeepers noticed that the once energetic Mango was no longer able to walk.
According to Dr Merav Shamir, it started with a paralysed right leg, before “it progressively deteriorated over the following 48 hours to become completely paralyzed on the hind limbs“. Without an emergency operation, Mango would probably lose the ability to walk forever, but luckily, this zoo was a specialist at animal healing. The previous year, they had healed a 14 year old Sumatran tiger’s ear infection using the powers of acupuncture alone.
It took 10 zookeepers wearing green outfits to lift Mango onto the operating table, where his head was laid gently on a trash bag wrapped in a pillow. An IV was placed through his snout, a blood pressure cuff was placed around his wrist, and all the fur was shaved on his back. He was diagnosed with a slipped disc between vertebrae 2 and 3, which was compressing his spine.
Mango’s spinal cord was exposed for 6 hours, and things were tense for a while, but after 10 long hours, the operation was officially a success. Dr Shamir was optimistic that Mango would make a full recovery over the coming weeks. She was particularly relieved given that the largest animal she had operated on previously was a lion, which weighed 220 pounds less than the 550 pound Mango.
| 2 | Knute has root canal surgery |
Knute was a friendly 8 year old grizzly bear living at the B.C. wildlife park in Kamloops, Canada. He was a particularly playful bear, but his one flaw was trying to eat absolutely everything and anything: “anything he can get his mouth around, he will put his mouth around“. As a result, he accidentally snapped one of his 9 centimetre long teeth.
The zookeepers knew that Knute was in pain because he was favouring one side of his mouth, and kept lifting his lip away from the infected tooth. The solution was a root canal procedure, and the zoo brought in two veterinarians from the University of Calgary, a dental specialist, and an animal specialist called Alfredo Romero who had never worked with a grizzly before and was simply curious.
The equipment for the operation was cobbled together from wherever the doctors could find it. The bear was positioned face down on a rock climbing crash mat borrowed from the local gym, while the table was on loan from the Royal Inland Hospital. The vet’s table looked like a fully fledged science lab, with colourful needles and syringes of all shapes and sizes. Then came the high-stakes operation itself. Black gunge was oozing out of Knut’s mouth from the infected pulp, but thanks to the power of general anaesthetic, Knut’s tooth was fixed. Soon enough, he was able to eat again – except maybe a doorhandle.
| 3 | Aurnia has dental surgery |
Not every brown bear operation goes well, and one with fatal consequences involved Aurnia the Eurasian brown bear back in October 2020. Aurnia was a former captive bear rescued from Lithuania. She’d spent 1 year in the Wild Ireland sanctuary in Ireland, a massive parkland where two other bears called Rionach and Donnacha roamed free, plus 4 wolves, a wild boar named Tory, and even a tribe of Barbary macaque primates on a separate island.
The thin and scraggly Aurnia was fully rehabilitated, except for one problem – her eroded teeth, caused by chewing on the iron bars of her former prison. Now, her two canine teeth were so red and swollen that infection seemed inevitable.
Aurnia was tranquilised by a group of doctors and laid down on the ground, while a specialist team fixed the offending incisors. All seemed well at first, but 45 minutes in, Aurnia suddenly stopped breathing. Killian McLaughlin and the other zookeepers delivered CPR, pushing on her chest, but it was no use. Aurnia the bear was gone, aged just 5. “We all loved her dearly,” said McLaughlin. The only consolation was that Aurnia had found happiness during the last year of her life – she was particularly fond of a pool at the front edge of the park.
| 4 | Fluff gets two teeth removed |
Luckily, this slightly sad story was redeemed by an October 2020 dental surgery which was completely successful. Fluff was a rescued bear who had been plucked out of a cruel Bulgarian breeding site back in November 2014. His destiny was to be hunted in the woods of eastern Europe by bored oligarchs, and he was bred in a stone concrete pit which was only metres away from his brother Scruff, yet with the view totally blocked.
Luckily, the brown bear duo were rescued by the Wildwood sanctuary of Kent in eastern England. Fluff weighed just half of a normal bear his age, and like most captive bears, he paced back and forth relentlessly. By October 2020, he was a happy, well-adjusted bear, living in a 1.5 acre woodland reserve, but his teeth were badly damaged by the legacy of his 15 year malnutrition in Bulgaria. The diagnosis was a root canal infection, and two infected back teeth which urgently needed to be removed.
The bear weighed 600 pounds, and could have reacted badly if spooked. Therefore, the zoo brought in Peter Kertesz, a world expert in animal density. The operation took a tense three hours, with Fluff placed under general anaesthetic in the park’s bear quarantine area. Finally, the operation was complete and all signs suggested that Fluff the bear was now free of toothache. A spokesman announced that “The 21-year-old Eurasian brown bear is recovering well“.
| 5 | Nameless Turkish bear gets rescued |
The large country of Turkey has approximately 5000 brown bears. Some are classified as Eurasian brown bears, while others belong to the Syrian brown bear subspecies, but in August 2020, at least one of them was stuck up a tree and in dire need of rescue. The small bear was found near the village of Akbucak in the northern Black Sea province of Rize. Its feet were ensnared in a hunk of steel, and it transpired that the bear had wandered into a poaching trap set for wild boar, before panicking and fleeing 20 metres up the tree. After being alerted by villagers, the rescuers tried in vain to tranquilise the bear, but the sky was turning dark, and hard rain was beginning to fall. They reluctantly gave up and returned the following Wednesday, firing 12 tranquiliser shots which finally subdued the bear.
The bear was lowered down with the most basic of lifts: a rope tied around its mid section, with a guy operating it with a pully system. The bear looked as floppy as a teddy bear as it descended, but it managed to reach the ground unharmed.
Then came the operation: the rescuers needed to cut the bear’s paws free from the trap, while preventing any wounds from getting deeper. They succeeded, and at long last, the bear was free. “We were cautious not to annoy it”, said Güçlü Uzunalioğlu of the Search And Rescue Association.
| 6 | Marley gets her leg fixed |
Marley had already escaped death by the skin of her teeth once before. She was found in a concrete pit in Georgia alongside 17 other bears, in a cruel attraction where people could walk past and throw them food. PETA rode to the rescue, in an effort co-funded by The Simpsons co-creator Sam Simons, but Marley was unable to walk. Her leg was broken, and so, Marley was whisked away to Colorado State University, and placed on a hospital bed just like any other patient, complete with blue gown.
Using the finest veterinary equipment, the first step was X-raying the 300 pound bear, checking the results with a computer, mouse and keyboard. Step two involved removing loose fragments of bone to prevent the infection from worsening. Because there was an open, festering wound, the doctors were in a race against time to get the bones to heal. Her paws were strapped to the operating table, her muzzle was tied shut, and she was placed under anaesthetic.
Students at the university were fascinated with Marley’s arrival. The previous few days had seen ferrets, rats and guinea pigs, and now, a 300 pound grizzly bear was trundling in. A police officer was positioned outside Marley’s operating theatre in case she escaped (because everyone knows that bears listen to policemen), and later, Marley was expected to make a full recovery. She was an unusual brown bear, a cross-breed of grizzly bear (ursus arctos horribilis) and Syrian brown bear (ursus arctos syriacus).
| 7 | Lucy gets an MRI scan |
It was a cold January morning in the Montana Grizzly Encounter reserve near Bozeman, and the zookeepers were growing concerned about Lucy. She was just three years old, yet over the last month, she had experienced two seizures. The friendly bear had become more aggressive, yet also more lethargic. So Lucy was shipped off to Washington State University and its state of the art veterinary equipment, where she was placed under general anaesthetic using a cone pumping gas into her nose, and had her head and neck placed in a white MRI scanner.
It took 10 concerned animal handlers to lift Lucy onto the table and perform the procedure. Thanks to high-tech magnetic resonance imaging, the doctors discovered multiple lesions in Lucy’s brain, along with excessive amounts of fluid. The cause was a mystery, but the doctors had multiple tricks up their sleeves.
Firstly, they gave Lucy antibiotics to wipe out any bacteria, and also deworming tablets, as parasites are well known to cause brain swelling in animals. Over the weekend, Lucy’s condition stabilised, and the day after she returned to Montana, Lucy felt well enough for a scoop of blueberry yogurt.
This wasn’t Lucy’s first brush with danger. When she was found in 2011, she was an orphaned bear wandering Alaska all alone, malnourished and edging along the brink of starvation. Sadly, Lucy died on January 23rd 2014, before the full MRI scan was made available.
| 8 | Victor has knee surgery |
In the heart of Oregon lies an animal sanctuary with the simple name of Wildlife Safari. It opened in 1972 as World Wildlife Safari, but was forced to drop the “World” from its name after the WWF claimed that it sounded too similar.
The park is a simple proposition: 600 acres, 600 animals, and 100 species. People can drive their cars through a wide central expanse like a savannah where the animals interact, and three of the main attractions are brown bears called Victor, Mak and Oso, who arrived in 2006. The three weigh around 700 pounds each, and are encouraged to hibernate every year from between November 13th and February, with comfortable bales of hay inside a dark shed spurring them on.
The bears live a good life, but one dark day in 2014, zookeepers noticed that 9 year old Victor was walking with a limp. X-ray imaging revealed a cruciated ligament, a similar injury to an ACL tear in humans. The zookeepers moved swiftly, recruiting an orthopaedic surgeon called Dr. Michael Van Anrooy to perform an emergency operation. The zoo said that if they hadn’t noticed the limp, Victor’s quality of life would have deteriorated rapidly.
Ultimately, the operation was a complete success, and Victor was walking again in no time. Since the surgery took place in October, the grand plan was for Victor to heal during hibernation.
| 9 | Comet gets a root canal |
It seems that fragile teeth are one of a bear’s biggest challenges in life, as Comet the English bear was another zoo-kept bear to have the operation back in 2015. He was a resident of Camperdown wildlife centre in Dundee, and when zookeepers noticed that he wasn’t chewing properly, closer inspection revealed an abscess and two canine teeth which urgently needed root canal surgery.
One of the hardest parts was getting Comet under anaesthetic. Not only did they fear for the bear, but the staff were worried about their own safety! They knocked the massive bear out, before placing him on a bespoke trolley and a lift that raised him to the necessary height for the surgery.
Dr Alastair Crozier took control, and although the operation took hours to complete, things went relatively smoothly. However, Dr Crozier also took the chance to insert a microchip into Comet’s shoulder, to monitor him for interactions with other male bears in the zoo. Microchipping wouldn’t normally be sufficient reason to knock a bear out cold – this was their only chance. The chip was the same type used in cats and dogs.
A spokesman for the Dundee zoo seized the advertising opportunity and said “it’s nice to have Comet’s teeth healthy and bright just in time for Love your Zoo week, which runs May 23-30“. Sadly, Comet died in 2016, but this was nothing to do with the operation: he was a wise and knowledgeable 30 years old.
| 10 | Suzie has a lifesaving procedure |
Marghazar zoo in Pakistan was a notorious house of horrors, the home of the “world’s loneliest elephant”, and also the prison of two sickly brown bears called Suzie and Bubloo. The first surgery was hardly a life-saving one: the pair had most of their teeth pulled out to prevent them from biting their brutish zookeepers (who could blame them?). They were kept in a small cage the size of a dining room, with the only consolation being that they had each other, and in mid-2020, Dr Amir Khalil was given the task by Four Paws International of rescuing these bears. He journeyed to Islamabad, and discovered Suzie and Baboo “suffering mentally and physically”, so badly that they were unable to hibernate naturally.
Most worryingly, Suzie had a horribly infected chest due to a recent operation to remove a tumour. Apparently, the amateurish surgeons had left the wound horribly exposed, without even thinking of disinfecting it. Dr Khalil whipped himself into action: he launched yet another operation on Suzie, this time to calm the deadly infection, which followed a more minor operation to remove an infected tooth (one of the few she had left).
One month later, Suzie was still suffering from kidney problems and looked horribly thin, but in December 2020, things finally started looking up. After brutal negotiations, the two were whisked over to the Al Ma’wa bear sanctuary in Jordan, a luscious place resembling the Sierra Nevada, where rescued bears are well cared for.
Unfortunately, Suzie’s cancer returned and she died in October 2021, but she had lived her last months in the sort of cozy habitat that all bears should. Bubloo lives and is in good health.
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