Virginia, our almost 15 year old American black bear, has some extensive arthritis and degenerative issues. We’ve been treating her for years with a variety of medicines and supplements. We’ve even added acupuncture and laser treatments. (Check out this blog post about treatment from almost 2-years ago). I watched yesterday as the team administered Virginia’s Laser Treatment (cold, or low-level, laser therapy is often recommended for pain management or inflammation reduction). The Animal Care team worked (and still works) toRead more
Posts filed in: Health/Vet
Flashback Friday: Yona’s surgery
I mentioned I try to take time on Fridays for some reflection time. My father had surgery last week. It got me thinking about other surgeries, which lead me to think about Yona. She’s our youngest black bear. She arrived at the Museum January 15, 2010, at just under one year old. We noticed pretty quickly she had a bit of a limp, and her right front leg had some atypical curvature. It didn’t impact what she could or couldn’tRead more
Pup Check Follow-up
More pictures from Monday’s red wolf pup check: Rocket, below, has been and continues to be our smallest wolf. He weighed in just over 13 Kg Monday. He is still smaller than his litter mates, but it is getting much harder to tell him apart. His behavior is fairly different however. Much quicker to come down to eat and he’ll sit in the side cage area and not run away immediately from his caretakers. Very, very calm, that is, untilRead more
A long time coming for this pup check
While temperatures are still high, the summer seems to have just flown by. This is the first Blog post in well over one month, and I have pictures to share of pups that are well over 30 pounds! We had our whole team plus an additional four staff helping us catch up our 20-week olds! It’s no simple task anymore getting our six “pups” caught. With 10 wolves in the yard there is a lot going on. Long story short,Read more
99 days old and doing well.
A successful red wolf pup check occurred earlier this week. Lots and lots of prep work and planning seemed to really pay off. If you recall, our last pup catch-up yielded only 5 of 6 pups caught up. This time, we brought in the entire Animal Care Team and four other staff who have worked with us on previous pup catches. Seems like 13 people and over 100 feet of tarps were the way to go. Three pups started theRead more
Teeth update
While meeting with Katy I noticed a picture on her computer. It was of red wolf M1803, Moose, from earlier in the month. It was a great close up of his face (thanks to Ranger Robert for getting the photo), with his jaw open and teeth in excellent view. It reminded me of the post from the end of May, in which we get a good close up of a video of one of our yearling wolf’s teeth. Teeth ofRead more