8/3/2019 The ZOO Management Dilemma 122.1

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8/3/2019 The ZOO Management Dilemma 122.1

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When a captive animal is reported sick, the vet has to carry out a thorough check-up. This requires physical or chemical restraint; such restraint is inevitable as safety of the persons handling theanimal must be ensured. Restraint, whether physical (in a squeeze Cage) or chemical by employingdrugs, is mostly traumatic. In sick animals chemical immobilization is always risky. But the vet hasno choice if the animal is wild bred and doesnt follow command to get into squeeze cage it has to bedowned by using drugs in order to carry out health check-up. So, it is quite obvious that the job of azoo vet often makes him walk on a sagging rope his/her chances of success are always 50%. Incase of Van Vihar, likelihood of more deaths of captive felines in coming months is very high asseveral of them have already lived their natural lifespan. Such animals will die of old age. Death dueto senility should never be made a basis of setting up inquiry committees for fault finding and tomete out punishment as this would do more harm than good a team of demoralized and tormentedsoldiers never win a war.

When a disease is suspected its correct diagnosis and identification of the pathogen becomes criticalin determining the line of treatment. In wild animals making an accurate diagnosis is alwaysdifficult. For humans there are several diagnostic tools and equipment but for wild animals we donot have many. Van Vihar has recently acquired a portable x-ray machine and a blood auto analyzer;

it needs more equipment at least for sonography and endoscopy. If we need state of the art facilitywe need to have a fully fledged animal hospital fitted with an ICU and OT.

In December, 1996, the feline pan leucopaenia epidemic in Van Vihar and Madhav national Parkscaptive facility took toll of eight members of the cat family within a short span of 15 days. Thedisease was caused by a deadly virus - this outbreak emphasized the need to establish captive animalhealth care facilities in ex-situ conservation areas as well as continuous monitoring of wildlife healthin in-situ conservation areas. It took several days for the Veterinarians of Jabalpur VeterinaryCollege to diagnose the disease, and once the correct diagnosis was made the vets managed to curbthe epidemic with great difficulty. Had there been a Centre fully equipped to diagnose the disease,we would have been able to contain the disease swiftly and with minimum mortality.

Every death in the zoo should be a learning exercise for the vet, zoo manager and their superiors.Each case must be reviewed with a keen mind to find out the causes that might have led to mortality.In cases where negligence is palpable there is no reason why action should not be taken against thenegligent person but the reviewer of such cases must also see whether the act or omission wasdeliberate or an error of judgment and whether the person being blamed could be, beyond doubt, saidto have failed in this duties as was assigned to him.

Though death of animals whether captive of free ranging - especially those that belong to theendangered list- makes news headlines and worries all concerned, there has been little effort toaddress the real issues. The real issues are the need to create a cadre of wildlife vets with adequate

incentives and promotional avenues to attract the best talent, providing short-term specializedtraining to those vets who come from the mainstream veterinarians, equipping health labs at VanVihar with modern equipment, providing zoo doctors with qualified assistants, creating andequipping smaller labs in tiger reserves, setting up the long awaited state of the art Wildlife Healthand Forensic lab at Jabalpur. These issues are well known, yet our response to these issues has beenlukewarm and snail-paced.

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