Tiger and Cheetah Root Canals - Cincinnati Zoo

So recently we had a veterinary dentist come out and help us with some dental procedures in some of our large cats. During our routine health exams we always do a thorough physical exam that includes a mouth exam and we look at all of our cat's teeth, give them prophylactic dental cleaning and if there are any major tooth problems we try to take care of them in the moment. But we noticed some changes to one of our cheetahs and one of our tigers at their routine exam that they had a small fracture at the tip of their tooth that had pulp exposure and in a human what you would do with this is what's called a root canal. You would try to remove some of that sensitive tissue and fill it in and make sure that it doesn't get a disease or an abscess and the other alternative would be to pull the tooth completely if we weren't able to save it. But what we wanted to do was try to provide these cats you know a long-lived life and one of the things that may help is keeping some of those teeth and we have the opportunity to have a veterinary dentist come in and perform that root canal so that we can save those teeth. So we contacted Dr. Jamie Burning who is a veterinary dentist in Columbus, Ohio and she was able to come out all the way down here to Cincinnati and do the root canals on both of these cats. We set it up for the same day so that we could kind of maximize her time. So we had these procedures back to back we were able to look at Brafu who is one of our male cheetahs from the Mass Farm. Dr. Burning took a look at his tooth and had noticed that that tooth had a little bit of debris in the center of the tooth canal. She was able to clean that out and perform a root canal. We actually removed two other teeth that were showing evidence of disease so that we could give him a nice healthy mouth and he did really well with the procedure. We were able to wake him up here he was nice and happy and then we transported him back to Mass Farm and the keepers are reporting that he's doing really well and not having any mouth problems. The other cat that we looked at is Zero. He's one of our Malayan Tigers. His routine exam we also found that he had a tooth fracture on one of these canines. He actually had a fracture on two different canines and when Dr. Burning came in she was able to determine that both of them were appropriate to perform root canals and so she was able to clean out the center of the teeth fill that with some resin that's going to allow it to prevent any other disease or infection and come in and be able to save the teeth so that he can keep his fairly pretty smile for for the rest of the days to come.