Wildlife Vet Answers Wild Animal Questions From Twitter

I'm wildlife vet, Romain Pizzi.

Today I'll be answering your questions from Twitter.

This is Wildlife Support.

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Okay, a question from @OsmosisReads.

Do hippos eat people

or just chomp on them a bit?

Hippos are clearly vegetarians.

They only eat grass.

So they won't eat the person,

they would just mash them up,

which would still be fatal,

but at least they're not gonna poop you out the other end.

@megabyte_png asks,

How do vets diagnose animals?

Like they can't even talk.

How do you know?

But remember, even vets that work with domestic animals

like dogs and cats and horses,

they don't talk either,

but they do show symptoms.

Some of our wildlife patients are really tricky

'cause they hide their symptoms.

So if you're a deer, or a capybara,

or something that may be eaten by another species,

you will always mask your symptoms,

because otherwise, if you look ill,

a predator, whether it's a tiger,

a lion, or crocodile,

might single you out to catch you.

And that means as wildlife vets,

we have to be aware that if an animal

looks completely healthy,

it may still actually be injured.

And a good example are seals.

Seals might have a big fight,

and one seal might get a really bad crushing bite

from another seal.

But without punctures to the skin,

it's invisible to us.

So we can use a thermal camera,

and that will tell us that there's tissue damage,

or an infection, or an abscess forming,

and we can treat it quickly before it gets too bad.

Question from @eggsaladscreams,

Why do big cats have round pupils

but normal cats have slit pupils?

I think our solved why tigers are cuter than normal cats.

We know domestic cats have slit-like pupils,

whereas lions have a round pupil.

Now we don't really know why

there's this difference in cats.

There are several theories,

and one of them is that a slit pupil is much more effective

for nocturnal animals 'cause they can actually

filter out much more light.

So you will see seals, who are underwater,

will have a big pupil,

but in the daylight, can damage their retina,

will have a slit pupil,

and so will many nocturnal cats.

But then lions are also nocturnal,

so that doesn't answer everything entirely.

There are also theories about

different wavelengths of light being affected

by the different parts and the edges of the lens,

and that has an effect on how the pupil works.

So it's a good question,

'cause we don't entirely know the answer yet.

Question from @sex_uhPEEL,

I would not want to be the one

to put an oxygen mask on a tiger for tiger surgery.

#nothankyou.

I don't blame you,

neither would I.

Now believe it or not,

one of the first zoo or wildlife anesthetics

was actually a cheetah in London Zoo in 1850

that was anesthetized,

not even with a face mask,

but with a sponge with chloroform on a long stick.

So the animal had to be really sick

to allow people to pin it down with ropes and do that.

But we'd never do this to today on a tiger or a lion.

Instead, we would use something like a dart

to deliver the anesthetic drugs into the muscle.

Only when the animal is really fully asleep

would we either put a mask or tube down

to give them oxygen and anesthetic gases.

@blythereneay asks,

Does the placebo affect work on animals?

Now that's a really interesting one because we always think

that the placebo effect works on people

because they don't know they've been given a placebo.

But animals won't know that

there's even this possibility of effect.

However, often there's a person involved.

So whether the animal's in a zoo

or rescue center being treated,

the thing is the placebo effect may work with the person,

so that even if it isn't a drug that is working,

the person thinks the animal's getting better.

However, it gets more complicated

because there's an old study that was done in Russia

many years ago where they took dogs

and they gave them cyclophosphamide,

which is a chemotherapeutic drug

which crashes your white blood cells.

Now they gave this to the dogs

in a very specific tasting syrup,

and the white blood cells went down,

and then they stopped,

and a few months later they gave them the syrup

without this nasty drug in.

And interestingly enough,

the body reacted,

and dropped those white blood cells just the same

as if the drug had been in there.

So even though the animal wasn't aware

that this medication was having an effect on its body,

somehow the placebo effect had this

extreme effect in animals.

So it does show you the placebo effect

is much more complicated than we understand

and we still have a lot to learn about it,

particularly when it comes to animals.

Right, next question is from @noorie_31,

It just came to my mind

and it is confusing me up right now.

How do we know the gender of a snake

and how do we know if a snake is a male or a female?

We will use things called sexing probes

so we can hold a snake.

We actually insert these right next to a snakes bottom

and run them just along the side the vent.

Now female will only have a very superficial scent gland

but a male,

this will slip all the way down the hemipenes.

When we pull it out we can see,

if it's gone in quite a distance, it's a male.

That's how we sex snakes,

but we have to catch them first.

@macs_money asks

How many bones does a giraffe have in its neck?

Pfft, oh, who knows.

Well, we do know,

and giraffe have exactly the same number

of neck bones that we do.

They've just become very long.

So a giraffe's neck bones are about this long.

@alyss_uhhh asks,

Do vets give animals pregnancy tests?

Like how would you know an elephant is pregnant?

And this is an interesting question 'cause we need to tell

if an animal's pregnant in different ways

depending on how it's reproductive cycle works.

So orangutans and chimpanzees are really easy.

We can just use some urine that we've sacked

up off the ground on a human pregnancy test.

For an elephant, the hormones are very different.

Sometimes we need to collect feces

and it needs to go to a specialist lab

and that can take many days.

Some animals, like an elephant,

we can actually do an ultrasound

and actually put our arm up their bottom

and do the ultrasound from the inside

to be able to reach anywhere,

because their thick, corrugated skin will just not let us

get an ultrasound scan from the outside.

@LadyStarFire,

Ben, age eight, would like to know

how many teeth does a crocodile have?

I can't count them but there are many.

And the reason is that they will continue to shed

and erupt new teeth their whole life.

So they're not quite as extreme as a shark,

but it makes sense;

if you're a croc and you twist your prey

that you're gonna break

and lose teeth and you have to regrow them.

But they have a lot more teeth than we do.

@realjamescoffin asks,

What do big cats think of domestic cats?

I'm sad to say they won't see them

as some sort of relative of theirs

in any benevolent fashion.

They're just a big predator that will see a small predator

either as competition or as a potential meal.

So I think if a domestic cat got into a tiger enclosure,

it would be eaten really quickly.

@bal31w,

Do elephants from different parts of the world

speak different elephant languages?

The short answer is yes,

but it's more complex than you think.

Just like in people,

nonverbal communication is important in all animals,

including elephants.

And so that would be different

for the three different species of elephants.

So it's an African elephants,

forest elephants, and Asian elephants.

But what we also tend to forget is that

elephants also communicate through infrasound,

which is really low frequency sound,

and that carries over very long distances.

So elephants very far away

can actually hear that poaching is going on

in a different part of the country,

because the elephants in that part that are being poached

would let out these low frequency rumbles we can't hear,

but elephants close by can actually hear these sounds

through their feet as well.

So elephants almost have ears in their feet

that will pick up part of that.

So we don't understand enough to know exactly

what is different.

But watching elephants interact in places

like zoos from different parts of the world

do tell us that there are some differences

in how they communicate with each other.

@rigat0ni asks,

Why do giraffe have antenna?

Now I can understand why you would say this

'cause they have these two lumps

on top of their head that are covered in hair,

but they're actually horns,

and they use them, not so much to fight,

but from evolution, that was their purpose.

Giraffes now fight by banging their necks together.

And so because the horns don't clash,

evolution has seen fit to mainly cover them with fur.

@DefeatingLabels asks,

Why do I find a snake surgery so interesting?

So I guess you find snake surgery so interesting

because it's just such a different body shape.

They've got one long body cavity

with all the organs spaced out in it,

and they've got no limbs.

But probably even more interesting than the actual surgery

is how we safely get hold of some snakes,

and for that we often use a snake hook.

You may see this being used to either

scoop up a snake safely

and put it in a bag or a tube

so we can use anesthesia,

but sometimes we'll actually use this to pin a snake

down on a giving surface.

But there is a trick to this.

We actually are pinning the snake's head itself down

and never its neck,

because unlike us,

snakes actually have a really, really weak junction

between their neck and their skull.

They only have one little articulation there,

whereas us and most mammals have two.

So we have a much more sturdy connection

between our skull and our neck.

@greggory asks,

Do you know why they say an elephant never forgets?

Elephants obviously have a huge brain,

much bigger than ours.

Now, part of that is to control this unique appendage

they've got called a trunk.

But they do have phenomenal memories

and I've seen elephants that have come

and lived in a zoo,

and 40 years after they've come from Myanmar,

where they were used as a logging elephant,

someone has come up to them

and suddenly started to give them the old commands

in Burmese,

and the elephant takes a few seconds

and suddenly, it will know, I need to lift my foot.

40 years later,

they still remember everything that they learned

in a different country.

That shows you they really do have a good memory.

@mell0wbr1ckroad asks,

How quickly do big cats,

closest analog to dromaeosaurs,

kill people usually?

Now that's not a question that I'd really like to deal with,

but if you were to startle an animal,

had an animal escape like a tiger or lion,

the answer is very quickly.

These are top predators after all.

@DazzaOB asks,

How is the 2022 and we still cannot fix

the broken leg on a racing horse?

Now the tricky thing is it doesn't matter

how high tech we are whether it's people or animals,

we can't fix everything.

People can't live forever and neither can animals,

and not every injury is fixable.

But it is a particular problem for race horses,

and also for my patients like zebra,

because of how their legs are designed.

They're designed very long,

with all their leg muscles at the top of the leg.

So they have this long leg that's very efficient

for fast running.

But that does mean that

if the leg gets a break at the bottom,

it is basically just bone

with a little bit of skin covering it.

There isn't a very robust blood supply,

and a traumatic break over there with bone exposed

is almost impossible to get to heal

'cause there's no soft tissues to protect those bones.

@Ms_Acruz,

I get to participate in a surgery

on a lion this morning at Big Cat Rescue

and I'd like to know how to control myself right now?

It's all too easy to get tunnel vision

into how exciting it is and to forget to work safely.

I know this only too well because I once had a tiger

wake up on me during the operation,

and raised its head and had a look at what I was doing.

And that's a bit of a scary moment

that should never really happen in most cases.

@Kris_Hammes asks,

How did elephants trunks evolve?

The trick is to go and look at animals

that have something maybe slightly similar.

So if you look at a tapir,

you'll see a tapir has quite a long nose

that it can move and sniff,

and that's probably how elephants trunk started.

They're a portion of their front lip

and nose that has become elongated

over time because they could maybe sniff things out,

and then it became useful for holding things.

And over millions of years,

that portion of the front lip

and the nose has elongated into this amazing organ.

The trunk, with all its complex nerves

and muscles and everything in there.

Question from @avrilwp,

How would you anesthetize a giraffe?

Now the tricky part about the giraffe

is actually waking the giraffe up,

because the biggest risk is the giraffe,

with that very long sensitive neck and legs,

it has to fall down if you anesthetize it,

and then it has to get up without being unstable enough.

And if you wake up from anesthesia,

you're always little bit unsteady,

to not come crashing down again

and break your neck or your legs.

So, often when we move giraffes in the wild

in southern Africa,

we don't fully anesthetize them.

We will dart them,

give them their anesthetic drugs,

and just before they're woozy enough to fall over,

we will actually put ropes around their legs,

and then we will actually reverse

some of the anesthetic drugs.

And then they sort of partially wake up,

and we can walk them into a very long box on a trailer,

and we can move them to another national park

or do minor treatment.

So the trick is,

if we don't need to anesthetize a giraffe,

we don't.

@MNMJax asks,

Do big cats purr?

I bet it sounds like a Harley.

It can sound quite loud.

So if you sit next to a cheetah that's in a rescue center

and they purr,

it can be very loud, much louder than your cat,

but what's more interesting than purring

is actually roaring.

That is how it classify big cats versus other cats.

Some surprisingly large cats can't roar.

So things like cheetah are not classified as a big cat

because they purr and they can meow,

but they don't actually have the voice box to roar.

@Lord_Kristine asks,

Why do pigs have curly tails?

I'm presuming they mean domestic pigs,

because most of the wild pig species,

whether they're babirusa,

or warthogs, or collared peccary,

actually have normal tails that will cover their bottom.

And that's really important

because your bottom is a very sensitive part, to the body.

Flies could attack it or another animal could bite it,

so your tail is quite protective.

Now warthogs will raise their tail when they're running away

so they can follow each other

and you'll see a mom warthog doing that.

But domestic pigs' curly tail is something

that we've probably bred them for,

because a long tail,

when you keep farm animals quite close together

and they tend to have squabbles,

they end up biting each other's tails.

And with pigs what'll happen is

that infection will spread up the tails into their spine

and they'll end up paralyzed.

So over hundreds of years,

farmers have bred our domestic pigs to be really different

to wild animals.

And one of the thing is to have a small, curled up tail

that is out of the way from being bitten.

So it's not a natural thing,

it's something that we've selected animals ourselves

to have for our own purposes.

@dna_heligrace asks,

Do big cats like tigers and lion cough up hair balls?

Do they lick themselves clean the same way house cats do?

I'm just imagining a big ol' lion hunched over

hacking up the biggest hair ball I've ever seen.

Big cats definitely groom themselves

just the same as domestic cats.

Most of the time though,

they've got a big stomach

and a small amount of hair they're grooming after every time

they have a meal,

and that just disappears out in the poop

and it's only very rarely they bring up a hairball.

Thank you for watching,

and that's it from Wildlife Support.

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