Photos courtesy of the Tulsa Zoo
By Lauren Cavagnolo
Achimpanzee who suffered a stroke, a juvenile tiger who needed a root canal
and 60-year-old-plus flamingos are just a handful of the interesting encounters experienced by Kay Backues, DVM, lead veterinarian at the Tulsa Zoo.
Backues, who joined the Tulsa Zoo in 1998, is a board-certified diplomate in the American College of Zoological Medicine.
Most of her focus is on preventative care tailored to the health needs of the different animals housed at the zoo. Each type of animal has its own routine schedule for receiving a preventative exam, vaccines, getting their teeth cleaned or having an X-ray depending on their needs.
“Zoo medicine is probably the ultimate general practice: we see fish, we see birds, we see mammals, and then we see all sizes of mammals, fish, birds and reptiles,” Backues said.
Backues said one of the funniest things people often ask her is if she treats the snakes.
“Yes, we treat the snakes,” Backues said emphatically. “And then they usually say something about how they don’t like snakes, and I make the comment that they are just like everybody else out there trying to make a living; just leave them alone.”
Backues says being lead veterinarian at the zoo for the last 23 years is similar to being a small-town country doctor.
“You have a pool of patients, and if you are here long term, you have seen them be born, you have seen them have babies, and you’ve gotten to take care of them. And you have been here long enough to have some animals live out their entire lives with you as their caretaker or their medical care, so that’s always kind of neat,” she explained.
For example, all of the younger chimpanzees have been born since Backues joined the staff.
“I’ve been here, and I’ve seen them grow up. Now I’ll go by, and it’s just like a friend with their kid; you’re like, ‘I just can’t believe how big she is! She doesn’t look like a baby anymore!’” Backues said. “That’s kind of fun to watch them grow up, from a little tiny chimpanzee to cute little baby to full grown.”
Backues was reluctant to choose one animal as her favorite to work with, saying she likes them all for different reasons.
“Birds are amazingly tough animals, and they often don’t let you know that they’re ill until they are very ill so that can be a little frustrating, but I am amazed at how tough and resilient they are. A lot of people don’t give birds the benefit of the doubt for having personality, but they really do.
“The flamingos are actually quite endearing whereas the elephants, of course, are very
intelligent and (have) long-term memory, and they have a lot of personality and are quite stubborn because they are just as smart as their caretakers.”
Backues said that, often, zoo animals will reach an advanced age that would not be seen in the wild because of predators, habitat loss, poaching, preventable disease or injury.
“It’s amazing how long these animals live if they are well cared for in general,” Backues remarked. “We have flamingos here that we think are over 60 years old. We still have a couple of the original flamingos that came here in the 1960s. And people walk by, and you can’t tell. They don’t get wrinkles; they all look the same.”
While Backues said she tries to make sure 90% of her practice is preventative, unexpected situations occur, just as with any domestic pet you might have at home.
“There are things that always pop up—one of the children’s zoo goats is limping, that sort of thing,” Backues said. “We do things that suddenly crop up versus a routine schedule of preventative things, and it keeps us pretty busy.”
Just over a decade ago, two male lions were born at the zoo. As a juvenile, one of them broke the very tip of his fang and had to have a root canal in order to save the tooth from cracking, Backues recalled.
“We had a veterinary dental specialist come in and make a form of the base of the tooth and cut the tooth off and basically do a root canal,” she said. “And then to protect the base of the tooth, he put a metal cap on it just to protect it from shattering, and that was interesting.
“Forever, whenever you could see in his mouth, he had a silver cap, so we made lots of jokes about him having bling, having a grill,”
Backues chuckled.
Backues said there was another time many years ago when a chimpanzee had a classic stroke, just like a human might have.
“We had a physician/neurologist (for people) come out and just help us assess her across the bars through the mesh; obviously we don’t go in there with them, even though he really wanted to. We kept telling him even with her one good arm, she is still capable of really hurting you,” Backues said.
“It’s the exact same process, if you have a cerebral vascular stroke in a chimpanzee and a human; they have the exact same signs depending on the severity and where the stroke actually happens.”
The chimp lived for several more years and gained about 70% of her movement back after doing physical therapy.
“She had some residual loss of motion in her arm, but she went back into the troop and continued to be a contributing member,” Backues said. “It took a lot of time and effort by the chimpanzee keeper, the challenge of trying to get a chimpanzee to do physical therapy. … ‘Can you come up to the bar? Can you show me your shoulder?’ Our keepers did an amazing job of that, just to try to stimulate her to move those parts of her body.”
And as with any long-term caretaker of animals, Backues is sometimes faced with endof-life decisions for older, seriously injured or sick animals.
“When we have a serious case, we try to pull out all the stops. You don’t always win. The animals’ welfare is always kept forefront of the decisions we are going to make, and we have to make decisions that pet owners have to make, too,” Backues shared.
“When there is nothing else we can do, and the animal’s welfare is not going to improve and is not at a level that we feel is good, we have to humanely euthanize,” she said. “That can be really hard if it’s an animal that has been alive for 60 years or something like that because the staff are really attached to them, just as you are to your pets but in a different way; they are almost like coworkers.
“Life is life,” Backues said. “And we have the whole circle of life here at the zoo.”
