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  Earring Boy

  by Ned Gentz, DVM

  It 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.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ned Gentz received his doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Colorado State University in 1990 and completed an internship in zoo, wildlife, and exotic animal medicine at Kansas State University. Since 2000, he has been associate veterinarian and research coordinator at the Albuquerque Biological Park in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Previously he was director of veterinary services at the Wildlife Center of Virginia, where Animal Planet routinely filmed him at work for the television series Wildlife Emergency. He also served as a clinical instructor of zoo and wildlife medicine at Cornell University. Dr. Gentz is board certified by the American College of Zoological Medicine. In his current position, he volunteers his time as the consulting veterinarian for the Zuni tribe’s Eagle Rescue Program. He finds this work especially inspiring.

  Kachina’s Bones

  by Becky Yates, MS, DVM

  Martine called me late on a Friday afternoon from her vacation house in Arizona.

  “Becky, my dear, I need you to come right away. Something is wrong with little Kachina.”

  Honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was drive five hours from California to Arizona to see a bear cub. I clicked my cell phone off and asked myself for the hundredth time, “Why do I work for this place, and why is it always on a weekend?” Plus, we already had more than enough animals.

  Twenty years earlier, in 1976, Martine bought a piece of land north of Los Angeles, inside the boundaries of the Angeles National Forest, and established the Wildlife Waystation, a home for illegal or discarded pets. She took in leopards, jaguars, African lions, mountain lions, bobcats, bears, coyotes, llamas, deer, hawks—even tortoises. When a research facility closed down on the East Coast, she built caging for dozens of homeless chimps. She made room for a pride of ligers (lion-tiger crosses) someone had bred in Idaho. Every spring, our hospital ward filled up with baby opossums.

  The call about the bear cub frustrated me. The motto at the bottom of the Waystation entrance sign read “No Animal Turned Away.” That was an understatement. We needed more equipment and supplies for the clinic, to say nothing of more staff. I missed my weekends. A day off once in a while would also be cool.

  It wasn’t a wild cub, I learned, but a cub from the pet industry. Someone in Arizona was breeding black bears to sell as pets. I knew Martine well enough to know I had no choice but to go. She wasn’t asking me to make the trip; she was telling me. On paper, I was her licensed veterinarian, even though I’d started teaching part-time. We were trying to find someone who could take over the bulk of my clinical duties, especially these emergency calls.

  That Friday, still annoyed, I alerted Silvio, the other Waystation vet, and we grabbed our equipment and headed out across the desert toward Arizona. He drove as I searched for a radio station. I settled on country music, the only clear signal I could find. Silvio later told me this style of music was new to his ears; he’s called it “desert music” ever since.

  Why did I stay at the Waystation? I wondered again as we cruised along. Of course, the animals were the main reason. I knew them all, their names and their medical histories. I regularly walked the Waystation grounds just to visit my patients, old and new. The mostly Mexican staff was a good group. They could rise to almost any occasion. I’d also grown attached to the place itself: simple chain-link enclosures clustered on the floor of a beautiful canyon. Martine tells a great story about how she first heard of the property from a drunk in a bar and rode up the canyon on horseback to see it.

  Martine was another reason I’d stayed at the Waystation. Not only did she know her stuff, she could charm just about anyone into working his or her butt off for homeless animals. People who’d never imagined cleaning up after an animal found themselves mucking out cages, thanks to Martine. She’d never told me much about her background, only that her dad had been a diplomat and they’d traveled a lot to Africa when she was little. That must have been how she fell in love with the animal world.

  Late that evening, I stood looking at a tiny black bear cub in Martine’s backyard. The bear couldn’t walk. When Martine picked it up, it barely responded. We guessed it was two months old and about ten pounds. The cub’s stumpy little front legs were drawn in close to her chest and she whimpered whenever she moved. With each breath, her face wrinkled. She could barely keep her eyes open, and what I could see of them looked dull and listless.

  Martine sat down with the cub in her lap so I could examine it. Tough as she could be, she always softened when she had an animal in her arms. She cooed at the bear but it seemed to ignore her. She insisted it had been fine during the past week, ever since a local man, hearing that Martine ran a wildlife rehabilitation facility, had dropped it off at her house. She’d named the little female Kachina, after the Hopi Indian woodcarvings, and planned to bring her to LA when Kachina got a bit bigger.

  I asked Martine for Kachina’s history again. The cub had been cranky that morning, not drinking her milk, and then stopped putting any weight on her right front leg. That’s when Martine had called me. Now Kachina was unable to use her left front leg.

  At first, I suspected the cub had a fever. The problem could be a quick onset of some kind of bacterial or viral infection or an infectious disease affecting the joints or brain. But Kachina’s temperature was normal. Palpating her front legs, I could feel they were thick and swollen. We needed an X-ray, though at that hour I had no clue where to get one. Luckily, Martine knew everyone in town. Within an hour, Silvio, Kachina, and I were being escorted into the back room of a small animal vet clinic.

  The owner of the clinic seemed a bit alarmed—maybe he hadn’t heard me say over the phone that the patient was a bear cub. Soon we had an anesthetic mask over Kachina’s face, and after a few breaths, the isoflurane gas worked perfectly. This was the easy part. We snapped a few films and had our answer: both of the cub’s front legs—the bones above her elbows—were broken.

  My thoughts gelled quickly. A young animal, acutely non–weight bearing on the right and left front legs, with bilateral humeral fractures … I looked again at the radiographs. Not only were the bones fractured, they were abnormal. The outer walls give bones their strength; they should appear thick and robust on an X-ray. In Kachina’s X-rays, virtually every bone in her body appeared paper-thin. Her tiny skeleton didn’t have the strength to support her weight and had fractured under the stress. Why? There must be something missing from her diet, I thought. This bear must have been getting the wrong kind of food.

  I called Martine on her cell phone—she’d gone out somewhere. She was worried about Kachina but wasn’t the sort of per
son who stood around waiting for answers. Anyway, I had Silvio with me, and she knew I’d call her with a full report.

  “Martine, what kind of milk are you giving this bear?” I asked, trying not to sound accusatory. Baby carnivores require a specific type of milk. Martine knew this, of course, as she had raised dozens of young carnivores over the past several decades and was good at it.

  “The same formula that came with her. She’d been taking it very well until late yesterday, as I told you before. It’s in a plastic container back at the house. Why, what did you find?” The pitch of her voice rose a notch. She’d already become attached to this cub.

  “Both her front legs are broken, the bones above the elbow.” While I spoke to Martine, Silvio began gathering bandage material.

  “Well, that would explain why she’s cranky and doesn’t want to eat,” Martine answered calmly, her emotions back in check. “What do we do to fix this?”

  Her optimistic tone didn’t fit the situation—in my mind, anyway. It wasn’t as if we just needed to suture a wound closed. I answered quickly, “We’re going to have to put a cast on both legs, maybe even on her entire upper body. She’s still anesthetized. I have to go.”

  Silvio and I agreed that the only option for stabilizing the thin bones was a cast. It would have to be enormous in spite of the cub’s small size. After years in practice, this would be the first time we’d had to put a whole torso cast on any animal other than a lizard (but that’s another story). When we finished, Kachina looked pitiful. The entire upper half of her body was encased in white casting material, with her tiny furry rear end and legs sticking out the back and her head sticking out the top. We tried to put a slight bend in the cast so her front legs were not totally straight. Our biggest worry was whether she could breathe normally, since the cast undoubtedly put some pressure on her chest. We decided the best thing we could do for the cub was to keep her calm.