Dentist visits jaguars at the zoo

Taking a child to a dentist can meet resistance and there is often kicking, screaming and biting. That task is certainly easier said than done. But what happens when the toothache is coming from a beast of the jungle. Which dentist is going to put his hand inside the mouth of a Jaguar? Well that is what we found out this morning when we met Dr. Ed Taylor, who explained how his team will take care of the toothache that is bothering a jaguar at the Belize Zoo.

Dr Ed Taylor, Veterinary Dentist
“Once we get the cat under anesthesia, then I’ll do the preliminary visual examination to get an idea of what we’re up against. I’ll take some dental x-rays to see what’s happening below the gum line and then we’ll develop a plan for each tooth. Typically, the jaguars have injured both sides of their mouth and being big cats, and the nature of what we’re doing, we cannot do the whole mouth at one time. It would take too long under anesthesia. So we do one side one day and then wait a few days and work on the other side the next day. So we’ll look at these cats and decide what’s the worst side and probably go for that side so that we take the worst toothaches away first. Sometimes it’s top side and we just work on the side that’s on the top. We’ll take x-rays, we’ll asses the damage, we’ll extract if we have to—like we did yesterday—we’ll try to salvage the tooth if we can by doing a root canal. But broken teeth have exposed nerves and the root canal system becomes infected and ultimately dies and then those become just a throbbing toothache that never goes away. So we wanna take care of that.”

A detailed storyline on the Jaguar’s visit with the dentist will be shown this coming Friday morning’s on Open Your Eyes.