New cheetah doing well after surgery

Garbanzo, one of the three cheetah brothers recently relocated to the ABQ BioPark Zoo, came through mouth surgery to remove cancerous tissue last week just fine.

What’s not known is if all the cancer was removed. That prognosis still awaits the results from a pathologist who is examining excised tissue, said Carol Bradford, the senior veterinarian at the ABQ BioPark Zoo.

“We knew in receiving him that he had a sarcoma in his jaw involving gum and bone,” she said. Surgery was first done on Garbanzo at the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas, where he and his brothers, Pinto and Borracho, were born in May 2017.

“The margins were not clear, meaning there were cancer cells still left in his jaw, so we knew we had to do another surgery in hopes that all the cancer would be removed,” Bradford said.

The most recent Albuquerque procedure was performed by Peter Schwarz, a board-certified veterinary surgeon with the Veterinary Emergency Specialty Center of New Mexico.

The day after surgery, Garbanzo was back in his habitat area, eating, drinking, playing with his brothers and seeming none too worse from the previous day’s trauma, Bradford said.

“Cancer is not uncommon in older zoo animals,” she added, “though it’s a little bit surprising to find it in a 17-month-old cheetah.”