I’d imagined working with tigers and giraffes at the zoo, a lot of my work there was actually with primates. The first of these that I got to know were the colobus monkeys. With their lovely long black and white fur, these monkeys are distinctive. Like all monkeys they live together in groups and are very sociable. A bit too sociable, actually; the monkey population there was growing rapidly, so our job was to put contraceptive implants into some of the younger females. The idea was to cut human contraceptive implants in half and insert them into the primates. This was a fairly new idea and had only recently been tried, but it made sense, as their reproductive hormones work in the same way as humans’, and so far it seemed to have been a success.
In humans the implant is slipped underneath the skin on the underside of the arm. In the monkeys we were going to put them in at the backs of their necks, where they were less likely to remove them. To put in the implants we had to anaesthetise the monkeys as there was no way we could handle them, let alone slip in an implant, if they were conscious. Monkeys can bite pretty viciously.
We planned to implant six young females, and by the time we got there the keeper had already separated them from the rest, using a series of doors that led to different sections of the enclosure. The six monkeys were well and truly annoyed that they were now in the small indoor part of their enclosure, with no food, while their friends were still playing outside, and they were kicking up a terrific racket.
The monkey enclosure looked like a giant jungle gym, full of hanging tyres, ropes and branches. The indoor part of the enclosure was specially designed so that people could work with the animals if need be. There was a tunnel from the indoor enclosure through to the vet room where we were, and we were able to isolate each monkey in the tunnel and administer the anaesthetic via a syringe pole through a grating. Once each monkey was asleep, it was carefully lifted from the tunnel onto the table, where the procedure took less than a minute. A small patch of hair behind the neck was clipped, the skin cleaned and the contraceptive implanted through a very small hole made using the tip of a scalpel. The hole would then be closed with sterilised surgical glue and, once we had moved the monkey into the next-door section to recover, the anaesthetic reversal injection would be given. An hour later all the monkeys had been implanted and had woken up. They were all a bit groggy, so they would be kept indoors until they were alert enough to rejoin their friends.
Gemma hoped that it would be at least a year, maybe two, before they had to do the procedure again.
My biggest challenge of the week came when I was asked to do a post-mortem on a dhole that had just died. I’d only just found out that morning what a dhole was (it’s a kind of wild dog that looks like a cross between a wolf and a fox), so when Gemma said she was really busy and could I do the post-mortem while she did rounds I was a bit daunted. Would I know one end of a dhole from another?
Gemma laughed and said she was sure I’d be fine. She dropped me off at the shed where the dhole was, with a bag of instruments, and said she’d see me in an hour or two, when she would double-check my findings.
There was nothing for it but to get on with it. A post-mortem is not a question of simply cutting up the dead animal; it’s a methodical process, which complements a thorough history from the keeper when a vet is trying to establish the cause of death.
It had been a while since I had been trained to do a post-mortem at college, and my only experience since then had been the post-mortem on the alpaca with Niall. I certainly hadn’t come expecting to do one on my own. But I decided to imagine doing a post-mortem on a dog and as I made the first incision it all came flooding back to me.
I quite enjoy post-mortems. I don’t mean to sound gruesome, and of course I’m always sad that an animal has died, but I like the idea of solving a mystery. Remember that early passion for forensics? I’ve always loved piecing clues together.
In the end this post-mortem didn’t involve much of a mystery as I came to a conclusion pretty quickly; the dhole had had septicaemia, presumably from a large bite I found on its neck. Dholes are pack animals and the keeper’s report made clear that this one had been at the bottom of the pack. It had been picked on by the others, which was terribly sad. There had been a nasty fight about five days earlier, involving this dhole and the pack leader, which this one had clearly lost. The keeper hadn’t been aware that he’d been so seriously injured, and I didn’t blame him as the hair on dholes is so thick that it completely covered the injury. The previous day this dhole had been much quieter, hiding by himself, and sadly this morning the keeper had found him dead.
This sort of situation creates an ethical dilemma for zoos. In the wild, the animal at the bottom of the pack would have plenty of space to get away from the bullying animals higher up the pecking order, but in the enclosure there isn’t enough space to get away. And if the keeper was to remove the bullied dhole, the next in line would take its place at the bottom of the pack.
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