Kinuk the polar bear had to go to the vet. It took ‘a very big team effort’ — and a forklift | 24CA News
Rolling round and mendacity lazily within the snow of his enclosure on the Quebec City Aquarium, four-year-old Kinuk appears to have recovered from his large journey to the vet in December.
He nonetheless reveals scars from the medical procedures — notably his shaved abdomen and patches on his paws and head the place his black pores and skin reveals.
Two weeks previous to that journey, employees had seen a change in Kinuk’s behaviour and some tremors.
“At the beginning we just tried do some blood sample at the aquarium and monitor his behaviour but we [didn’t] have all the answers we wanted,” mentioned Marie-Pierre Lessard, director of the conservation of the Quebec Aquarium.
Because the aquarium doesn’t have the tools to carry out quite a lot of assessments and deal with his bulk, they needed to hoist him right into a truck and head to the province’s solely college veterinary facility in Saint-Hyacinthe, some 200 kilometres away.
“The biggest challenge is the weight of Kinuk and the weight of the cage. Because Kinuk is 450 kilos and the cage is the same weight and we have to use a big forklift to move and we have to be really careful because we really don’t want to drop the cage and do some damage [or] hurt Kinuk.”
Limitations to treating ‘most harmful bears on earth’
Kinuk, who was born in captivity on the Saint-Félicien zoo, didn’t need to be drugged for the journey as a result of it was comparatively simple to persuade him to get into his crate.
But as soon as they arrived on the veterinary hospital, the group of vets went to work, mentioned Dr. Noémie Summa, zoological drugs specialist and medical teacher on the Université de Montréal facility.
They wanted sufficient time to do their assessments — with out him waking up and objecting.
“It’s a matter of giving him the [right] drugs for him to be able to sleep nicely and so that it’s safe for him, it’s safe for the teams,” mentioned Summa.
“It’s a very big team effort. So we had a lot of specialized people like anesthesia service, neurology, clinical pathology.”
She notes that Kinuk’s signs might have indicated a neurological situation or simply basic weak point — one thing that isn’t simple to evaluate when a big predator is awake.
“It’s hard because you cannot really touch them when they are awake.… He’s a very good bear, but there are limitations,” mentioned Summa.
“They are like the most dangerous bears on Earth,” she defined. “They look like a giant soft fur ball … [but] they are not soft at all.”
Treating Kinuk a ‘large accountability’
The group of vets shared behind-the-scene pictures of their work with Kinuk, and Quebecers lapped them up.
“It’s not very frequent to have to do this type of big procedure on them because of course we don’t want to do that very often,” mentioned Summa. “I had a picture of my hand next to his paw and you could fit ten of my hands on his paw.”
While they’re nonetheless ready on some testing outcomes she says Kinuk is doing higher along with his situation bettering and his thick coat is rising again.
“It’s a big responsibility to make sure everything goes well. So you are very focused on this, but there is always a little bit of time when you’re just like, ‘wow, this is incredible,'” mentioned Summa.
Summa says employees from the aquarium had finished “beautiful work” taking care of Kinuk.
Back at his enclosure, he appears to have moved on from his adventures and the individuals who take care of him are relieved he appears to have come by means of all of it unscathed.
“He took some days to come back to normal behaviour but it was necessary to make sure Kinuk was good,” mentioned Lessard.
