A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford.
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“The follow-up question always seems to be: ‘You work with all the animals at the zoo? Even the . . . ?’ I always find it interesting what people jump to. ‘Even the elephants? Even the dolphins? Even the snakes?’
“There’s a zoo in Colombia that has an elephant, and they asked if there was anything we could do to help them with this elephant that had an infection in one of its tusks. He was confiscated from one of the drug cartels down there. Several of the cartels owned elephants. There was a lot of money floating around, and they could buy elephants, and they did. Anyway, there was no expertise in Colombia to safely immobilize and anesthetize an elephant. So Dr. Carlos Sanchez and I went down there and brought a veterinary dentist with us. You’re basically doing a root canal on a very large scale. The elephant’s doing great.
