The Lion Dentist/The New Yorker
In contrast to another dentist....
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-lion-dentist
On a recent Thursday, in an operating theater at the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, Colorado, a mountain lion named Montana lay on his side, unconscious. Two veterinary dentists stood at his head, scraping infected pulp out of his four canine teeth, all of which needed root canals. Occasionally, one of the dentists raised an X-ray machine to the lion’s head to check his progress. While they worked, a veterinarian a few feet away removed Montana’s testicles, a bloody procedure. When she finished, she packed them up for transport to a lab, where she planned to use them to grow stem cells.
In the next room, a caged black leopard named Backara, his spots visible from up close, waited to undergo the same set of procedures. A technician put the hundred-and-forty-pound animal to sleep with an injection, then four people maneuvered him onto a cloth stretcher and carried him into the operating room. They set him down almost perpendicular to Montana, on a grate attached to a pulley system for large animals, before getting to work. (When the sanctuary’s grizzly bears, which can weigh more than fifteen hundred pounds, need work, they are anaesthetized in their habitat and brought to the operating room by forklift and truck.)
As the procedures went on, Peter Emily, a vigorous eighty-two-year-old who helped to pioneer the field of wild-animal dentistry, darted around the room in a surgical scrub shirt. Emily, who is semi-retired, consulted with the other dentists, inspected both of the anaesthetized animals’ mouths, and chatted with guests, speaking quickly, in a raspy voice. He soon took a more hands-on role with Backara, who had a molar that required extraction.
A Denver native, Emily graduated from human dental school at Creighton University, in Nebraska, after serving as an Air Force mechanic during the Korean War. He bred Doberman Pinschers for competition, and began X-raying puppies to determine if they had a tooth formation that would disqualify them from being shown. At the time, veterinary dentistry was largely restricted to cleaning teeth or removing them, but Emily began performing root canals on dogs and soon developed a reputation. In the nineteen-seventies, he said, the Denver Zoo contacted him to ask him to remove a hyena’s fractured tooth. Emily proposed instead to save it with a root canal. “There were no instruments, so I made my own,” he said. “I took orthodontic wire and twisted it and braided it in different diameters.”
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