The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes (3 page)

The Eel and the Bartender

by Beth Chittick Nolan, DVM, MS

A
green moray eel was donated to the New England Aquarium by a bartender from a neighboring state. For years, the eel had lived in a tank next to the bar, but it had begun to outgrow its home.

In the wild, green morays are found in warm marine habitats such as rocky shorelines and coral reefs. They are solitary fish, spending most of the day hidden in crevices and emerging at night to hunt fish, shrimp, crabs, or cephalopods. From what I could gather, this eel was no shrinking violet. It had been a favorite among patrons, who would regularly check on it during their bar visits.

When the eel first arrived at the aquarium in the late 1990s, we set up a large holding tank along a back wall of the gallery. There it was quarantined from other fish in the collection until we were sure it was healthy and doing well in its new environment. Soon after its arrival, it settled in behind the rockwork of the tank, as eels often do.

For the first several days, the eel hid in its nook and refused food. This is not uncommon for some fish, especially after a move. The days lengthened to a week, and then to two weeks. The eel stayed hidden and would not emerge to eat.

It had come to us with very little history about its eating habits. The diet must have been fairly balanced, considering it had already grown to nearly three feet in length—or roughly half adult size. Maybe someone periodically tossed it a couple of chicken wings.

With aquatic animals, ensuring good housing, water quality, and nutrition is critical to keeping them healthy. Some robust eels can fast for many days, even for a couple of weeks after a major environmental change. With longer fasting periods, though, the eel's general health could become compromised.

The aquarists started trying all of the tricks of the trade to get this eel to eat. They enticed it with a variety of foods of different sizes, shapes, and flavors. They tried chopped capelin and herring, whole shrimp and pieces of squid, even live bait, but the eel showed no interest. The water quality was constantly monitored to ensure all parameters were within the preferred ranges for eels. The aquarists even tried covering the tank and dimming the lights to reduce stress to the eel and, some of them joked, “to simulate the eel's previous dark barlike ambience.” But all the efforts were to no avail. The moray refused to eat.

In the third week, the aquarists were growing more concerned and I got more involved. Could the eel's lack of appetite be related to a medical problem? We discussed diagnostic options, including blood work and parasite screening, as well as possible treatments such as tube feeding. We decided to examine the patient, which requires sedation in eels unless one is particularly proficient at holding on to a slippery, mucus-coated, snakelike animal with sharp teeth.

We netted the eel and transferred it to a covered bucket of tank water with dissolved anesthetic powder. An air stone bubbled in the water to keep it adequately oxygenated during the procedure. The first signs of sedation became evident as the eel's gilling rate slowed and it began to lie on its side. Within a few minutes, it was relaxed enough to be held safely out of the water without it struggling.

I thoroughly examined the moray, checking for any evidence of health problems. Its pale green skin was coated with a thin layer of mucus, which is as expected for these animals. I didn't see any fraying or irregularities in its long ribbonlike dorsal fin or tail. Its abdomen did not appear to be distended or otherwise abnormal. Its gills were a normal deep red and its mouth, with all of its teeth, looked fine. As with any routine fish workup, I collected a small sample of gill tissue and feces, as well as a scraping of skin mucus, to evaluate under the microscope for parasites, but saw none. I took a blood sample from its tail vein, but the results showed no abnormalities—no elevated white count or anything else that would suggest illness.

After collecting our diagnostic samples, we passed a small rubber tube through the eel's mouth into its stomach and injected some fish gruel. At least we could give it some nutrition that day. Then we placed it back in its tank, syringing salt water over its gills to reverse the sedation. Within a few minutes, it started to swim on its own. Before long, it settled right back into its hiding spot behind the rockwork.

As I sat there worrying about this eel, I found myself remembering the more mundane roles fish played in my childhood. My earliest experiences with fish were probably eating fish sticks, those processed finger-food wonders. During my elementary school days, fish were the small minnows my brother and I scampered through creeks to catch. When I was a bit older, fish were the three-inch sunnies we'd proudly display for the camera when fishing with Dad. Fish were the prey of gulls and gruff-looking old men casting off the jetties of Long Island Sound.

In fifth grade, I won Small Fry at the school fair, much to my delight and my mother's chagrin. Although I liked my pet goldfish, and would watch him in his small bowl, I was sad but not crushed when he met an untimely death (Mom deloused the house one afternoon and unfortunately deloused Small Fry as well). After all, it was “just a fish,” as someone had told me.

So I certainly had no childhood aspirations to become a fish doctor. During my fourth year in veterinary school, however, I got the opportunity to shadow the head vet at the New England Aquarium for a month. To my surprise, I was fascinated by the daily challenges and discoveries of aquatic animal medicine, a field that few veterinarians venture to tackle because it includes a great many species about which we know relatively little. From invertebrate animals like jellyfish and lobsters to vertebrates such as fish, sea turtles, and marine mammals, aquatic medicine covers a wide diversity of animals that receive minimal, if any, attention in the standard veterinary school curricula.

Just a couple years later, here I was, the intern veterinarian at the aquarium, now faced with an anorexic moray eel.

The question remained: Why was this animal refusing to eat? After three weeks, wasn't he hungry? We could support it nutritionally with tube feeding, but for how long? We were all stumped by the case.

Finally, one of the aquarists suggested that we contact the bartender who'd donated the eel. Maybe he would give us some ideas to stimulate this eel's appetite. Although less than optimistic about the outcome, we had few other alternatives and needed this poor eel to eat. We made the call.

After hearing the news and failing to come up with any immediate suggestions on how to better feed the eel, the bartender offered to pay it a visit. I happened to be in the gallery by the eel tank when a large, broad-shouldered man entered one morning. The bartender approached the tank somewhat apprehensively, a furrowed brow shadowing his features. He quietly stood in front of the tank—and waited.

At the bottom edge of the rockwork, in the far corner of the tank, a small head appeared. It hesitated, surveying its surroundings, and then slowly, ever so slowly, pulled its lean body from its lair. It cautiously moved directly in front of the man. The eel paused. Its round lidless eyes focused intently on the man's face. Then, to my amazement, the eel began to undulate its body back and forth in a smooth, calm rhythm, maintaining eye contact with the man the entire time. The man's worried look softened as the corners of his mouth lifted. Here was his old friend again.

I don't remember the words of endearment the man said that day. I remember that the man hand-fed the eel a piece of fish or shrimp, and that the eel did not refuse food from that day forward. But most of all, I remember the look of pure adoration on the man's face as this eel emerged from its hiding place for him, and only him.

I have experienced the strength and love of the human-animal bond many times since then over the years. In practice, I have witnessed many clients with close bonds to their pets, large and small, furred and feathered. But despite all my veterinary training, my growing fascination with sea creatures, and my own personal experience, I had never truly considered the potential for such a close connection between man and fish until that eel and bartender taught me otherwise. Their bond was even more elemental than the eel's hunger for food.

Earring Boy

by Ned Gentz, DVM

I
t was summer 1997, a hot, humid July day in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The van with the out-of-state license plates in the parking lot of a grocery store in Harrisonburg had its windows rolled up tight. Two concerned good Samaritans, studying the van, saw someone or something moving inside—a child, perhaps, or a pet. They called the police. When the van's owners emerged from the grocery store, they were surprised to find their car staked out by two of Harrisonburg's finest. Then it was the officers' turn to be surprised as the two women, a mother and daughter, unlocked and opened the van: inside was a young male white-tailed deer fawn. The policemen summoned a state game warden and began gathering information.

The younger of the two women told the police she'd been driving her mother from North Carolina to Virginia for a visit to her home in Harrisonburg five days earlier when they came upon the spotted fawn. It was lying in the grass alongside the road near Roanoke, Virginia. The fawn's mother had been struck and killed by a car, she said. Not knowing what else to do, she added, they'd picked up the little Bambi, put him in the back of their van, and kept driving. They'd kept the animal with them ever since.

When the police checked the back of the van, they found the spotted fawn panting heavily from the heat. It was wearing a disposable diaper because it had developed scours (diarrhea) from the cow's milk the women had given him. Even more bizarrely, the bright sunshine streaming in through the van's open door glittered as it struck the little fawn's ears. The police stared at the animal in disbelief. Each ear was pierced with a cross-shaped rhinestone earring.

The game warden arrived and announced that he was confiscating the fawn, to the histrionic objections of the two women. He placed a call to the Wildlife Center of Virginia (WCV) in Waynesboro, where I was the head veterinarian. The WCV is a wildlife hospital and wildlife education center that routinely cares for several thousand sick, injured, and orphaned wild animals each year. Of course, we told the game warden, we'd be glad to check out the fawn and make sure it was okay.

When the fawn arrived, I performed a physical examination. My trusty hospital manager and head veterinary technician, Sarah Snead, restrained and calmed the nervous youngster. He weighed just thirteen pounds, and we guessed him to be only a few weeks old. There was no way we could release this baby into the wild. I'd have to hold the fawn in our facility for several months until he was old enough to fend for himself.

The fawn was dehydrated from the combination of heat and diarrhea. He also had an elevated temperature from being confined in the hot van. I removed the earrings from the fawn's ears. Both ears were infected: the skin around the holes was red and inflamed.

I treated the fawn's dehydration with subcutaneous fluids, injected under the skin in several places across his back. The animal would gradually absorb the liquid. Once it was gone, we'd repeat the treatment several times. Then I started the fawn on antibiotic therapy—injections of penicillin—for the ear infections. I also treated these with a topical antibiotic.

Next we had to deal with the scours and the presumptive tummyache that went along with them. Since fawn season had recently begun in western Virginia, we'd already received an initial supply of goat's milk in preparation for the orphaned white-tailed deer fawns we knew would be coming our way.

From prior experience, we knew that either fresh goat's milk or powdered lamb-milk replacer worked best for raising orphan deer fawns; cow's milk is not so good. The trick is not to overload the digestive system too fast, especially in a dehydrated animal. The fawn's first bottle would be 25 percent goat's milk and 75 percent water, the second one 50-50, and the third 75 percent goat's milk and 25 percent water. That way, we'd allow the animal's intestinal tract time to adjust before starting on pure goat's milk. Our new fawn was hungry and took to the bottle readily. The holes in his ears healed in about two weeks, and I discontinued the antibiotics.

The WCV routinely receives twenty to thirty white-tailed deer fawns every year. Some of these fawns are legitimately orphaned, found standing next to their dead mothers alongside a roadway after a fatal encounter with a car that couldn't stop in time. But many “orphaned” fawns aren't orphaned at all. Mother deer don't spend all day with their babies. On the contrary, they allow the fawns to nurse only a few times a day. Most of the time, deer moms are out shopping for groceries (as it were) while they leave their babies hidden in a nest of tall grass somewhere. A fawn has the instinct to lie very still, not moving until it hears its mother coming back for it.

Unfortunately, most people who happen upon such a fawn in a field or woods think the baby has been abandoned. It's all too easy for them to pick up the animal and carry it away, thinking they are doing the right thing for the fawn. But taking a perfectly healthy animal out of the wild is obviously not in its best interest.

Whenever a new orphan arrived, I'd quiz its would-be rescuers, trying to ascertain whether they'd actually seen a dead mom. If not, I'd encourage them to put the fawn back where they found it.

Some people worry that “the scent of man” carried by such a fawn will deter the mother from taking her baby back. But this is rarely the case. Of course, a replaced baby does need to be monitored to make sure its mother returns to care for it. Most of the time, putting these babies back where they came from works. Was our new fawn with the rhinestone earrings a true orphan or not? From the vague story told by his female captors, I feared we'd never know for sure.

Happily, he already had a companion. We'd recently received our first orphan deer fawn of the year—good timing for Earring Boy, as my wildlife rehabilitation staff had taken to calling him. We didn't routinely give names to the wild animals in our care at the WCV. We wanted to stress that these animals were not pets, that our goal was to make them better and then return them to the wild. More important, deer fawns are best raised in groups and with minimal contact with people, so that they retain their wild instincts. Nevertheless the name stuck.

When the game wardens called to check on Earring Boy, I told them he was doing fine. Good, they replied, because we need you to keep him there until the court date. They were charging the women in the van with illegal possession of wildlife: you can't go driving around with a live deer in the back of your car. Because of the earrings, the women would also be charged with cruelty to a wild animal. I would have to go to court as a potential witness when the case was heard before the judge.

In an odd sort of way, I looked forward to the court date. It wasn't just that I didn't think Earring Boy was a true orphan. I believed it was important to address the all-too-common problem of people taking wild animals out of the wild. Without seeking expert advice, people will often keep a wild animal for a few days, thinking it will make a good pet, until it becomes too much trouble. By that point, it's dehydrated or ill or injured. Then they simply dump it somewhere, often to die. If the animal is lucky, it ends up at a wildlife center like ours. Even so, they need to know when to intervene and when to leave nature alone. I wanted to make sure the judge hearing the case was aware of these points.

When the day came, I made certain to arrive at the court-house on time. The testimony proved quite entertaining. “I thought it would be pretty,” the woman explained to the court, referring to the earrings. “You can get a little kid's ears pierced. What's the difference between a person's ears and a baby deer's?” When a reporter from the James Madison University student newspaper took a picture of one of the defendants, she responded with an obscene gesture—a photo the newspaper was only too happy to publish on its front page.

Ultimately, the cruelty charge was dropped when the women agreed to the illegal-possession-of-wildlife charge. They were fined the exact amount of money I calculated it cost us to house and treat Earring Boy until his release, which was then paid to the WCV in reimbursement. I'd been looking forward to offering my testimony, and when they cut the deal, I felt more than a little disappointed. The two women remained incredulous about the charges to the end.

Earring Boy thrived. Early that fall, when he weighed about sixty pounds and had lost his baby spots, he was released in a remote wooded part of Augusta County not far from the West Virginia line, along with six other juvenile deer that we'd raised as a group. They bounded off into the piney woods together, white tails held high, a signal to each other but also a good-bye to us. The group would stay together for a while, to help each other watch for predators—and for women bearing earrings. But eventually, they would disperse and mature into adult deer.

Watching the fawns disappear into the woods, I felt a mix of emotions. Veterinarians can't help but become attached to the animals they work with, be they companion animals like cats and dogs or zoo animals like lions and tigers. But wildlife rehabilitation work is a special field. The goal of veterinarians who choose to work in this setting is to release their patients back into the wild, never to see them again. These patients rarely say thank you. More often than not, they prefer to strike out with tooth, hoof, and talon in an effort to escape—without a backward glance.

Wildlife rehabilitation veterinarians don't get many kisses from puppies. But that white tail held high, when a successfully rehabilitated deer bounds off into the woods on its way back to a life in the wild, is a pretty sweet reward in itself.