Archie the southern white rhino lies anesthetized during surgery to remove a tooth on Tuesday, May 21, 2024. | Curtis Dvorak
Published on May 22, 2024 at 3:07 pm
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The patient weighs about 2 tons, and his abscessed tooth — as big as a football — had to be removed.
But shortly after Tuesday’s extraction, Archie the southern white rhino shakily lumbered to his feet and was on the path to recovery at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens.
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At 54, Archie is the oldest male southern white rhino in human care, zoo officials said. That’s also older than most of his kind ever get. But when the decision was made to extract his tooth, experts had just over 2½ hours to get Archie down, pull the tooth and reawaken him, zoo spokesman Curtis Dvorak said.
With a wiggle and a nudge, the tooth came out and Archie soon awoke, initially “a little wobbly-legged.”
“He started taking some of his own breaths and that was a great sign — a really positive sign,” Dvorak said. “Then all of a sudden, he started taking bigger breaths, and they pulled the ventilator, and then a couple of little pushes here and there and kind of patting his back and tickling his ears, … and all of a sudden, he starts to move, starts to stand up.”
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Zoo veterinarians were joined by animal care experts from other parts of the state to handle what Dvorak called a “big, risky procedure” that not many zoos would take on. Three things had to be done correctly — get Archie down the right way so his legs are not pinned under him; get the tooth out quickly; and get him back on his feet.
This is the second large animal dental surgery performed at the Jacksonville Zoo this year.
In late March, a 34-year-old African elephant named Ali, once owned by musician Michael Jackson, had dental surgery to remove the last part of his right tusk. Almost 30 experts from around the world performed the 3½-hour surgery on Ali.
