The world’s big cats are not easy patients, especially when trying to give them pain killers after a procedure. They will tear off transdermal patches; they are too powerful to restrain for easy—and safe—injections or pills; and when in pain they generally refuse food, making it impossible to hide the drugs in their dinner. Now, however, veterinarian researchers from Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo and the University of Tennessee believe they have found a solution: a surgically implanted, mini-pump that provides pain relief, and can be easily removed after the patient makes a full recovery.
“Osmotic pumps are a reliable, largely non-invasive means of providing pain relief to big cats such as leopards, tigers and other species after surgery,” said Dr. John Sykes of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Global Health Program and lead author on the paper published in the American Journal of Veterinary Research. “They can be placed within the cat at the end of an operation and then removed after a period of weeks with no other handling required.”
 The world’s rarest cat: the Critically-Endangered amur leopard. There are approximately 300 amur leopard in zoos (almost ten times more than in the wild) that may benefit from the new pump. Photo by Julie Larsen Maher. |
The osmotic pump provides a continuous supply of pain medication, allowing vets and zookeepers to forgo daily injections of drug darts for weeks after the operation. The dose of the drug is controlled by vets through the concentration of the drug inside the pump.
“It’s a win-win in that it reduces the effort by veterinarians to treat big cats while helping to reduce stress and thus speed healing in the cats themselves,” said Dr. William Karesh, Vice President and Director of WCS’s Global Health Program.
Osmotic pumps have already been used on other zoo denizens: WCS vets have used such pumps to give antibiotics to snakes at the Bronx Zoo.
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