Endangered Sumatran Tigers Are Being Revived | The Zoo | Pets & Vets

[Music] 70 acres of dublin's phoenix park nearly a million visitors a year [Music] 600 exotic animals 22 dedicated keepers welcome to the zoo coming up two of the zoo's newest arrivals are off to college a simple operation turns critical and what happened when the roses of truly met the lemurs of madagascar it's half seven in the morning and zoo staff are gearing up for another busy day all 22 keepers are assigned to one of three wildlife zones each one managed by a team leader here in the west section homes the elephants apes and big cats everyone answers to jerry creighton i've been a keeper here for 26 years and my father jerry senior was a keeper here for 51 years before me so i've been around the zoo since i was a very very small boy and i started working as a keeper in 1983. yes what we're going to do this morning we're going to weigh our uh so much on tiger clubs that were born last week it's a big day for them so we just see how to progress and how strong we're getting they're getting just important every every week you know to get a check of the weight make sure everything is good normal they always should be starting to open around this time too so it's magnificent it's a male and female i mean there's some matching tigers one of the rarest cats in the world so it's a usually significant birth and and use achievement yet again for the zoo it's pretty uh distinctive to show who's the boy at this stage this is the little lad here absolutely thriving you can see how warm and how snug it is in here and that's just to maintain a nice you know temperate body temperature of them so they they can progress and i can see their little teeth starting to cut the cubs are the direct result of an international animal breeding program with just 250 sumatran tigers left in the wild repopulation is something the zoo takes very seriously it was really interesting because the male that arrived he came from from chester zoo as on a part of a breeding program and normally it can take six to eight months to get them introduced to the female because you know they can be it's like personalities it can take a while to get them together he arrived in early february we put him together on on february the 13th february the 14th valentine's day they made it so it was love a first point and the results now was too highly um and critically endangered so much on tiger cubs okay now you sit up there for a second okay one one kilo 1.714 kilos okay 1.74 kilos so that's the female so that's a pretty impressive way for a little one isn't that huh okay there huh yeah give an error all ready this is a buster this fella cool 2.25 kilos so that's an incredible way for you know you just check for things like a nasal nasal discharge or metal everything is perfect bright oils you always look perfect for the feet all the nails everything is perfectly formed the umbilical cord is something that you always need to check onto that there's no infection or possible possible hernia and that all feels good so we have to be very happy in the zoo's east section keeper brendan walsh works with several dozen species including sea lions lizards and flamingos today he'll begin his rounds at the taper house come on gang let's go and first here is hillary she's 24 years old she's our female she's a great mother she's had 14 calves this is our most recent calf although she's pretty big at this stage just diego and then here is marmaduke hello buddy so these are brazilian tapers i mean they're as you can see they're amazing animals they're often classed as living dinosaurs and that's because they actually haven't changed much in 35 million years which for most animals is is quite amazing but tapers i mean to me their face is so prehistoric looking just per big nose big proboscis and a very good sense of smell um for sensing food and danger of the predators the jaguar um and also we're looking for other tapers around for for future and potential mates and things like that i've been working in the zoo since 1996 i started off in the restaurant and then i worked on the grounds for four years and then i worked with the animals but i am like i wanted to be zookeeper since i was completely because i remember i think two or three that's a nice bit of pee in my head there there's an example of it our male marmaduke there has just done his uh territorial urination over my face which is great 20 minutes into the day officially today and uh yeah you get urine on your face so that's kind of typical of the job it you do get obviously dirty very quickly you know for anyone that sometimes people see us doing the more glamorous aspects of the job feeding the animals and doing things like that and then you get peed on the face so it's uh some people wouldn't be too keen on that but you know it's one of the joys of the job a highlight of the african plains the six strong giraffe herd includes jenny a two-year-old female who's been the cause of some concern for keeper and team leader helen clark bennett last august we started reporting that you could see some abnormal growth on her hooves she was pregnant at the time and what the vets reckon um is that she developed laminitis we haven't seen it before in our giraffe here but it's something that's quite common um with say horses and ponies when they get the first flush of spring grass they get this severe inflammation in the foot and it causes major abnormal outgrowing very very quickly you can see the toes are completely misshapen it was unfortunate that we had to wait so long to get jenny's who sorted but to begin with she was heavily pregnant and then of course when the calf had been born we had to wait to the point where it was able to survive which we worked out in about four months we're not going to fix our feet in one day so the idea is get the worst of it started then in another month's time go again if at all possible you want it to be the least stressful thing ever for her you know because um the outcome has to be that she walks out the other side you know [Music] last week brendan got some exciting news in a few days time he'll be going where no zookeeper has ever gone before mick rang me up and said um there's a competition coming up on this saturday to to go for uh rosaceae and you know to be an escort and i thought sure why not you know i like to give anything a go and especially if involves any sort of fun it was tougher as i was going to be and i didn't even feel the interview went that well i thought now i haven't won that and there's about three or four column fire look-alike stairs that i thought if they're basing on looks they're going to fly away or you know but um no so it's tough and i wanted they announced up on stage and everything so i was very shocked so pool is filling up now we'll come back later on and i'll clean their bed for a moment it's time to feed and clean the red pandas we've got um two red pandas it's kind of like a almost like a mrs robinson affair the female is uh 11 years old and the youngster chota he's only one he's pretty young but so far it's paying off like the last male that lived live with bamboo or female didn't go too well he didn't like him too much but she seems to like him or toy boy but so far they're getting on greys on them so hopefully maybe six months to a year maybe a bit longer and never know my breed red pandas are omnivores but they're mostly uh a vast majority of bamboo in the wild with a bit of um fruit and veg and um but they also we say they're omnivores to eat both um animal matter and vegetable matter they're they are quite rare and the numbers in the world are coming down because i have that destruction and also because of old fashioned beliefs that um their tales are important for you know successful marriages and so that's what their forces are cut and their tales are cut off and so unfortunately cultures like that are okay they're they're nice for some people but unfortunately it's obviously been to the detriment of the red panda it's one of the one of the uh not it's not a strict criteria but one of the criteria of being an escort's preferable if you're if you're single so i am single at the moment and um yes you never know what might happen down in rosalie i don't know i can't imagine too likely but uh i know it would be a be nice to meet a nice last down there like a lot of jobs it's it's socially you can be it can be tough because you work every second weekend you work every bank holiday and your christmas easter eat all that sort of thing so it can be tough to um to to get some girls to understand that so it's like a lot of jobs you know it's tough going things like that but it's something i've only ever known so it doesn't bother me [Music] outside the giraffe house a team of 20 keepers and assistants is gearing up today jenny will be having the first of several procedures to repair her two deformed hooves sedating a fully grown giraffe nearly five meters tall and a ton in weight will be a first for both the zoo and the vet john bainbridge okay so what i'm going to do now is uh give the next dose of anesthetic so i have to mix that up and it's two drugs together so i'm going to mix them in the same syringe so it's easy for her and i'm using a quite a long needle you can see here because it has to go through very thick thick skin and then into the muscle and at the same time i'm going to mix up uh um and put into a syringe some antidote so if she gets into any trouble i can actually give her an antidote and allow her to come around very quickly she's gone sedated and she's been held up by straps under her tummy and she's holding her feet on the bars but in fact all her weight is on the belly straps she's actually straps you can see here uh under her tummy hold her up so at the moment there's an anesthesis up in the top here and she's trying to access the jugular vein putting a catheter in there though she won't completely lose consciousness jenny will remain calm and fully relaxed for the next hour so far so good for the first few critical weeks of their lives the zoo's newest and most precious arrivals have been under close observation by keeper jerry creighton and zoo director leo ustervegel okay so what's going to happen this morning basically you know we had the two sumatran tiger cubs a hugely significant bird but you know we monitored their development as they're going along and just last week i had a slight concern i just noticed that the female of the two cubs she's slightly smaller than me seems to be kind of hyperventilating a little bit more than the male now it's it she still looks very very well we called in one of the the cat experts from the vet college barbara when i asked to do a full medical and physical check of the cub there's a little bit of a different shape in the chest which is um you know it's not usually significant but it's something we want to investigate this is one of the this is a great thing about being a team leader you can always send someone in forced i mean so if they get it no big deal we're going to head over to the college this morning bring the two cubs so we can do a comparison with his heart rate and his chest development and all that and the female it's really just precautionary at this point you can see there there are an absolute bundle of health the size of his paws and their eyes everything is good about them they're magnificent and they're in great condition but uh it's just a little bit of a routine check that's all you know just to make sure oh wow wow it is a little bit of a concern i mean we were always concerned and you know i i couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong with she just seemed a little bit different in our behavior so we're just not going to take any chances and the beauty is now they're young enough that they can still be handled and held so it doesn't involve sedation or capture or restraint i've been pulling the net we get to the college to get the checkup and get them back to their mom and dad so fingers crossed everything will be okay okay mister it's the first one this is a simple little travel box that'll keep them confined and keep them close together which works out very well and uh the gp is quite warm these mornings are cheap as the air conditioning too smells you don't you want to worry about them overheating i'll give you a little bit absolutely yeah good stuff that's quite exciting all this you know it's like i said a little bit daunting but now it's no it's not enjoyable i'm enjoying it it's something different today we're doing um a press release there's going to be um hopefully a few journalists and have hopefully be a bit of exposure for the for the rose tree and for the zoo and two of the roses are coming in as well with the cavern rose and dublin rose so it's going to be great to have them along but not everyone thinks it's great we've been part of obviously press releases before but the topic has always been the uh the animal so it's pretty weird now to for me to be uh more of the subject you know it's a little bit a little bit daunting but um i don't know obviously it should be a bit of crack but last night i was a little bit anxious about it thinking you know um how's it going to go and that but it's not too hard to get it i'm gonna be about 20 minutes away before it happens and you know it's going to be something something pretty different you know but like i say bring it on hi susan hurtings good to see you here are things how are you how you doing hey tara it'll be mid-morning by the time brendan's photoshoot gets underway across town a special delivery has just arrived from the phoenix park all right guys well they traveled exceptionally well it was really really quiet all the way over so they obviously like a bit of simply red plain nice and mellow wakey wakey we've got the best people here in the world because one of the veterinary the veterinary team here in in uh ucd have been great assistance to us over the years with all our animals so it's very comforting to know that we have this kind of support in the zoo so it's a great partnership i mean the young vets here get to see some exotic animals like tigers and we got to make sure that he got the best care so it's a win-win situation hi barbara is it i'm just down at reception barbara thanks have you had it with the two too patient or well the one patient okay thanks a million see you there cheers have a quick yeah just don't touch gorgeous they're just almost four weeks old so you know they're doing great yeah the female is the patient or it's our brother that's just with her as a companion we haven't named her yet so you just put so much on there wherever you met the guys good to see you again two guys to do slept all the way over so no problems [Music] the team are now half an hour into jenny's operation at this point her hooves have been x-rayed and the job of grinding off excess tissue is underway despite the industrial hardware being used it's an extremely delicate job even if this initial operation is successful it'll only be the first of several treatments it's it's slow but it is you know it is progressing and they're finding these little areas of weakness or they're trying to actually get it absolutely flat so that whenever the animal stands there's no weight on any particular point and they've found an old abscess and they've got that cleaned out what i'll do is i'll hold i'll be holding his head so if you want to hold his uh his fire end you'd be grand and yeah he's you know he's a lovely animal like he he's out all the time this is monty introduce yourselves he's we estimate he's actually about nine years old he's saying he's a burmese python from india he's a big boy he's almost 11 foot long and they do actually they're they're they are potentially very dangerous animals and when we're handling we always make sure there's two people and they're from india southeast asia and then they're constricted snake they're not they're not venomous if they're venomous we certainly wouldn't be taking them out as relaxed as we are i used to walk in resection for about two and a half years we know each other really well but i know him anyway i don't know whether organizing me well i reckon he's over 20 kilos but again that weight is mostly muscle you know not like those where it's it's water and it's all different sorts i mean they're able to pull down big big strong animals you know when they get on the ground you go three and a half four times that size you know i mean his body be that with then you know so at the moment he's still junior you know okay now come on in paris talk you're doing ground promising you're running these are a group of 11 ringtail lemurs the ringtone lemurs are from the south coast of madagascar these are lemurs as the name suggests so which means they're actually not a monkey or an ape they're what's known as a prosimian which is a pre-monkey as a result they're not as necessarily as intelligent as monkeys right and they eat mostly fruit as they are here but they also eat um invertebrates we give them meal worms they love to be crickets and in the wild even in chameleons there's the small lizards so they're quite a very diet good on you nice big spoiled hair yeah there you go quite happily enjoys being a zookeeper so you got a bit of a scratch there i see oh yeah but that will hopefully yeah that will be gone pretty soon a little bit of a little bit of a fingernail along about there that'll go away hopefully in a few days we'll go a few days but if you're up on stage it'll be gone so that's that that's the the big part of it over here it was great for the bladers and back to back to reality now back to the normal roles of the day so i've got to finish the taper bed to finish off the red pandas as well i need to rake and sweep that up as well so yeah back back to realty it's a good day for so bring it on well the news hasn't been like totally great like you know what we've we've identified a hole in the heart of the baby so much from tiger it's very disappointing for us but it's the good news is that we found it and now we can put a plan of progress into place on how she's going to manage for the rest of her life and our main concern with the female cub is that her chest is quite flattened that it's actually putting some pressure on her lungs and on her heart that she also has some cardiac defects so she has a murmur that we can hear on the left side of her heart and she has two small holes in her heart and what we're hoping to do is because she's still growing there's still a lot of room for improvement we could maybe start doing physiotherapy so trying to get her up off her front legs and get her moving more so just when we see her walking you can see that she doesn't actually lift herself very well up of her body and while we may not be able to correct what's happened with her chest or why her vest is all flattened we certainly can do some things to help her to start using her front legs more so some of the ideas we'd have would be to do some very basic physiotherapy where we lift her up and we help her to walk initially herself and just repeating that exercise several times in the day and allowing her to maybe use her front legs and strengthen them certainly can help and once she starts to stand up on her own and get off her body you'll find that she doesn't have the same compressive effect and hopefully that will help to alter the shape of her chest she may never have a normal shaped chest and i think it's something that um assessing it will give us an idea how she's going to respond she's a wonderful little character so hopefully now she'll do okay at least we know now when we can we can work on it that's the beauty of it i think you're bored right i think we're time for ben get back into your bra and have a sleep tough morning i went in green and came out in blue all because of tiger poop huh yeah it was a you know a busy morning another eventful morning and the life of the zoo but you know it's worthwhile and these are the things that you need to check out gonna have a quick peek he's just been out getting there smoothly a little medical sexy little boy and a little girl what are you thinking there the open wheel was a little bit sad in the long term for the female because the whole idea of our program is to to breed animals and unfortunately she's lost that capabilities now by having the two little holes in her heart and her chest cavity really probably with the snow leopard it hasn't developed you know it's weird so you got it a minutes till you're done today hold it like that so i encourage you to walk upright but nevertheless you know she'll have a really good quality of life here in dublin zoo where we you know we'll get her swimming we get our exercise and she can represent their species i mean she can be here and be an ambassador for the species in the zoo and you know we can explain then to people how you manage sick animals in zoos or animals that have a defect i mean if this had happened many years ago the animal would have been simply put down probably you know what i mean but now because of modern medicine modern philosophy in a good way of managing the animals she'll have a long and happy future here in dublin too so it's a good morning's work all in all it's been an hour now since jenny was sedated and this first stage of her treatment is complete by now she should be back on her feet and reunited with her calf nima but there's a problem is she started no okay listen tim we're going to have to stop just give her the antecedent please [Music] so her breathing stopped there for a few minutes we were deciding whether to give her any more anaesthetic and at the moment we're not going to we're just going to watch her for a while [Music] next time on the zoo a race against time to revive jenny brendan walsh meets his rose and a ucd vet gets his first taste of gorilla dentistry

Channel: Pets & Vets

Views: 823

Rating: 4.7777777 out of 5

Keywords: Animals, Animal Documentary, documentaries, nature documentaries, nature documentary, The Zoo, the zoo season 1, sumatran tiger, sumatran tiger roar, red panda standing up, Red panda, Giraffe, Injured giraffe, tapir eating, Tapir zoo, lemur pet, lemur sounds, ring tailed lemur, Snake python, python, zoo animals, extinct animals, endangered species, endangered animals, tiger cubs

Id: 1KqAuElLNpU

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021