‘The Wizard of Paws’ makes prostheses for animals
WFor 17 years, Derrick Campana has been gifting the disabled with a new lease on life with braces, prostheses and engineered equipment. But Campana’s clients have four legs, not two. And he never planned it that way. Armed with a master’s degree in prosthetics and orthotics, Campana was perfectly happy serving his two-legged clientele. But one day, a veterinarian walked into his clinic with black lab named Charlie. Charlie suffered from a congenital deformity to his front leg.
“She said, ‘My dog needs a prosthesis.’ And I kind of looked at her weird because I never saw a dog with a prosthesis,” he says.
“I had never heard of animal prosthetics. And I fit that dog, and I got such joy and fulfillment out of it, I started a company right away. That was about 17 years ago, and I’ve helped almost 30,000 patients to this point regain their mobility,” he says.
Charlie may have started it, but Campana is nonpartisan in his ministrations. “One day I’ll have an eagle leg or an owl or an elephant leg on my desk and the next day it’s a couple of dogs and a goat and a llama or a deer,” he says.
His most challenging job was building a custom wheelchair for a tortoise. “That was really fun,” he chuckles. “And I’ve done talons for eagles, owl legs, a leg for a crane, an elephant leg. I’m making four elephant legs in Thailand this summer.”
Viewers can watch this modern-day Hippocrates and his unpredictable patients on the BYUtv series, “The Wizard of Paws,” which has two seasons available to watch online.
Campana travels the world fitting apparatuses for impaired animals. His company, Bionic Pets, manufactures a variety of mobility equipment.
“The majority of the cases I treat I never see,” he says. “So we send out these Fiberglas casting kits all over the world. A lot of times the animal owner or veterinarian makes a cast of the animal, and it’s the first time they’ve made a cast, and a lot of time we get not the best cast,” he smiles.
“And we have to take this mold and turn it into something that’s going to help the animal . ... Doing it by mail and helping animals in that way can be really, really difficult — that’s why there are so few of us who do that.”
Prostheses refers to limb replacements, he explains, while orthotics are braces. Campana often treks cross-country with
what he calls his “mobile limb lab.” “I go right to the family, right to the people. I cast it, build the device and fit the animal right there. That’s the way it should be. It’s a better way to do it.”
He was always artistic as a child. Campana says: “When I was a kid I was sculpting every day with plaster and things like that. I did go to medical school and learned a lot about human prostheses, but I was self-taught in how to do veterinary prostheses because there was no textbook showing how to do those things.”
Not exactly an art and not exactly a science, Campana says, “There’s a lot to it. You kind have to have the lefthand-right-brain kind of thing because it takes a specific skill set. But I love it. I’m left-handed so I think I have that kind of thing going on,” he laughs.
Many of his patients are dogs, and the most common problems with them, he says, are their ACLs and their knees. “These surgeries cost around 5 grand and what people don’t realize is that if you put a knee brace on a dog, after about six months a lot of times, the knee will heal, and you can avoid surgery all together. So we’re saving people thousands of dollars and helping their dog.”
The cost of braces runs around $700, says Campana. “And most of our prostheses are around $1,100 so it’s one of the misconceptions out there that these things are so expensive that you have to be rich to do this for your animal, when actually it’s quite the opposite. We’re saving thousands of dollars by avoiding surgery and helping the animal to have a longer and healthier life because we can extend their lives by a couple
years,” he says.
BYUtv discovered Campana when he appeared on the first episode of “Dodo Heroes,” which aired on Animal Planet and is streaming now on Discovery+. In that segment, he replaced all four legs on a dog named Chi-Chi. “Such a sad story,” he sighs, “she was the victim of the meat-trade industry in China. Luckily someone adopted her and brought her over here, and I got her all fixed up.”
Though it has been difficult for Campana and his company to survive the COVID onslaught, he says, “I’m living my dream now. I pinch myself every day doing this job — using my hands helping animals, helping animals and families get whole again. You can’t get much better than that.”