Veterinary Workup: Bonobo 4146

Any bonobo or chimpanzee that was anesthetized for testing received a complete exam. Because the animals were housed at a human medical facility, I had access to physicians and quality laboratory diagnostics.

The paperwork above was for # 4146, an eight pound female bonobo that stayed at our clinic for three days. As noted, she was from Basunkusu, and had a small flat tail bud. She had a "cheeky" appearance with unusual fatty pads at the corners of the mouth.

Her temperature was subnormal, at 96.8, and she had swollen lymph glands below the throat, on the right side. She had no external parasites, the lungs sounded good and the heart rate was 100 beats per minute. As part of a simple test for long term malnutrition, I tugged on her hair to see if it came out too easily. Her hair was relatively hard to pull, but she did have puffiness under the eyes, indicating of lack of protein, as well as pale mucus membranes, a sign of anemia.

The erupted teeth were diagrammed. This showed that the bonobo was cutting her first lower molars, which meant that she was older than her weight would indicate. The bonobo had severe gingivitis, a common problem with malnourished baby apes, with exposed roots on three teeth on the upper right. This corresponded to the swollen lymph glands.

The owner brought the bonobo in an extremely small cage. He said that she had been losing weight, but had good stools. He said she coughed occasionally, and had no appetite, but drank water well. When she first arrived, she was very thirsty and drank a lot of liquids.

The bar code on the right side is the ten-digit number of the transponder that I implanted at the left shoulder, the same type of permanent identification that is used on cats and dogs. This was done to track the animals that entered the (illegal) pet trade; if they ever appeared outside the country and were scanned, their origin would be known.

Unfortunately, blood work was not done on 4146, but signs of parasites were found in the stool -- hookworms, roundworms, and whipworms. The animal was discharged with medications and advice.

One interesting comment is that reading back over these notes, I remembered that Zairians referred to animals as "it." In contrast, Americans often use "she" and "he," for known gender animals. For this post, I went back and changed the pronouns from "it" to the more personal "he" and "she."