SAVAGE ZOO PATIENTS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5228, 18 January 1928, Page 4

SAVAGE ZOO PATIENTS.

SURGICAL OPERATIONS. INCIDENTS AT LONDON ZOO. The London Zoo authorities were recently obliged to remove pine-tenths •of. the tail of the; fossa, the giant civet cat from Madagascar. The fossa immediately retaliated by removing ten-tenths of the dressings from the stump of its tail.

“That is the usual trouble with Zoo patients,” says a writer in a London paper. There was the- ypun'g hyena who was getting bandy-legged through rickets. His forelegs were neatly strapped up with splints and adhesive bandages. The genera] impression, after the operation, was one of great smartness. You saw a doggy-looking creature in white spats. Shortly after, however, the hyena felt hungry, and devoured the whole contraption, splints and all.

“Animals seem to hate surgical doings. The. special steel and leiather boots made for the young African elephant, who also was going bandy, were too strong to be pulled off by the patient, but each morning he filled his trunk with milk and spirted the fluid into the boots. “Operations to-day are carr’ed out with the help of a sleeping gas. The animal is induced to enter a. special box with glass windows, and the gas is pumped inside, while the effects are watched by the surgeons. When thq patient is under, the work is done, with as much speed .as possible.

' “Memories of what happened in the case of the lynx keep the surgeons from loitering. The lynx had trouble with its skin, and some, embrocation had to be well rubbed in once a week. It was no good telling the lynx that this, treatment was all for the best. You could only argue with the beast with the help of chloroform.

“Well, at one treatment the lynx camq to. It was giving the surgeons some skin troubles of the'r own to worry about, when by sheer force of numbers she .was overwhelmed, smothered in towels, and cast back into her den.”