It’s bear drills for a brave dentist
IF toothache’s leaving us a little grizzly, we visit the dentist.
Unless you’re a 30-stone bear with a sore head, that is – and then the dentist comes to you... very carefully.
In this case the patient was General, a brown bear rescued from cruel and cramped captivity in Armenia. And the dental expert making space in his appointments diary was Paul Cassar, who is more used to treating families at his private practice in Chichester, in the south of England.
Mr Cassar flew to Yerevan in the former Soviet state to extract four of the animal’s teeth and deal with a painful abscess.
Most of the dentist’s daily appointments in his practice take around 25 minutes and a 2ml injection to numb their gums.
For General, something a little stronger was required and a cocktail of powerful tranquillisers and anaesthesia had to be administered for the four-hour procedure.
Just asking the patient to ‘open wide’ was out of the question, too. So General’s jaws were clamped open before the dental work began as he lay stretched out on a table at Yerevan Zoo.
Mr Cassar, assisting a team of vets from the charity International Animal Rescue, said: ‘It’s a bit different from my normal 9.30am appointment. ‘But there is no normal with exotic animals.
‘It was tough going but he has recovered well and is free from the excruciating pain he must have been suffering.’
General, 19, was rescued from a private zoo kept by a former Armenian army general and politician. Mr Cassar has treated more than 150 bears as part of the charity’s drive to save and then outlaw dancing bears in India.
His dental nurse Charlotte Callaway-Goldstone, who was among the team, said: ‘We used standard dental equipment with some extra veterinary kit but the team had to work hard to get the teeth free because bears have a much tougher bone structure. We gave him the same care we do for all patients.’
The charity is treating bears kept in captivity before releasing them in a reserve.