• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Safari Park Rhino Gets World-First Procedure To Mend Broken Leg

September 21, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Veterinary medicine is a difficult field at the best of times, considering that the majority (but not all) of their patients can’t talk. It becomes even more difficult when serious health issues require surgery, and the complications only compound when the animal that needs surgery is a southern white rhinoceros. 

Advertisement

Amara the southern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum simum) has lived at Knowsley Safari, UK since her birth in 2022. Keepers noticed that she was walking with a limp in her front right leg and sent her for medical investigations. While pain relief and rest didn’t seem to get to the bottom of things, equine surgeons used radiographs on Amara, discovering a unusual fracture in her ulna bone, part of her leg near the wrist joint. 

The team tried to research this type of injury, but no case studies existed. Instead the surgeons had to draw on their experiences of treating horses to come up with a plan of action for surgery on a rhino. In the end the operation took five hours and was performed as keyhole surgery. 



“Amara’s operation is unlike anything we’ve experienced previously. We knew we could position the camera inside her joint, but due to the unprecedented nature of the procedure, we didn’t know how much room we would have to operate, or how much of the affected area we would be able to see,” said Dr David Stack, Senior Lecturer in Equine Surgery at the University of Liverpool, in a post on the Knowsley Safari blog. 

After the operation Amara’s leg was put in a cast, much like a human limb, and she was kept with her mom Meru and monitored closely by the keepers. The keepers also injected her with platelet-rich plasma made from her blood, helping to aid the healing process.

Advertisement

Eventually, 27 weeks after the leg was known to be fractured, the cast was removed and Amara was allowed back out into her paddock to join the rest of the rhinos. In the wild, southern white rhinos have had something of an incredible conservation success story, while their cousins the northern white rhinos are on the very brink of extinction. 

“Treating Amara has been a truly ground-breaking veterinary journey incorporating many firsts which we will now document should another animal team encounter similar scenarios in the future, though we very much hope the notes are never needed,” concluded Dr Stack. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. FloBiz raises $31 million to scale its neobank for small businesses in India
  2. Rebuffed by Bolsonaro, Brazil medical institute to sell vaccines abroad
  3. How Much Does Google Know About You? A Short Video Shows All
  4. Incredibly Rare Pink Elephant Calf Seen Playing In South African National Park

Source Link: Safari Park Rhino Gets World-First Procedure To Mend Broken Leg

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • “Silent, Ongoing Genocide”: World’s 196 Uncontacted Tribes Are Facing Grave Threats To Their Survival
  • Golden Tigers Are Among The Rarest Big Cats In The World, But They Spell Bad News For Tigers
  • Rare 2-Million-Year-Old Infant Facial Fossils Expand What We Know About Prehistoric Human Children
  • First-Ever 3D Map Of Planet Outside Solar System Reveals Distant World’s Hot Spot And Cool Ring
  • From Chains To Forests: Working Elephants Set To Be Rehabilitated In The Wild Under New Project
  • Why Does Death Have Such A Distinctive Smell?
  • Blue Dogs Have Been Spotted In Chernobyl: What Is Going On?
  • Record-Breaking Gravitational Wave Detection Suggests These Black Holes Merged Before
  • Hurricane Melissa Is 2025’s Strongest Storm Yet, With Turbulence So Bad It Saw Off The Hurricane Hunters
  • Fancy Seeing Your Organs In 4D? Pretty Soon, You Might Be Able To
  • First Known Bats To Glow In The Dark In The US Discovered – But Scientists Aren’t Sure Why
  • “You Be Good. I Love You”: How Alex The Parrot Rewrote Our Understanding Of Animal Intelligence
  • What Would You Find If You Drill Down Deep Under Antarctica?
  • This Is The Safest Place To Sit In Your Car
  • Birds, Hats, And Boycotts: The Story Behind Why It’s A Crime To Collect Feathers
  • Ultra-High-Definition TV – Is It Really Worth It? New Study Figures Out If We Can Even See In UHD
  • Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Will Be At Its Closest To The Sun This Week
  • Human Movement Around Earth Over 40 Times Greater Than That Of All Wild Land Animals Combined
  • Rats Filmed Snatching Bats Out Of The Air Mid-Flight In First-Of-Its-Kind Footage
  • Incredible Planetary System Has Two Stars And Three Earth-Sized Planets
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version