Snow Leopard Cub Starts Physical Therapy to Help Her Learn to Walk

Snow

leopard

s are an important species to us here at the Bronx Zoo because they are endangered in the wild. Farmers often hunt them because they believe

snow

leopard

s are taking their animals as prey. If you were to go to Pakistan to see

snow

leopards in the wild. I'd be so lucky if you had any kind of view like this, we're so glad we hatched a snow leopard cup at the Bronx Zoo four weeks ago, come on, chubby, oh my gosh, you're too cute, okay, the guardians they are. notice that something is not quite right with this animal every time an animal is born we always do an examination, usually we can wait eight weeks, we will go a little earlier and see what we can discover currently, the snow leopard is not in the age at which we will get up and

walk

, but he should crawl, his back leg should be tucked under and he should crawl like this and instead what happened is these back legs are extended to the side and he crawls like this. get us anesthesia so we can start the x-rays, so start with your back, let's focus on the hips.

I'm going to try to hold them so that everything looks pretty good on the x-rays, we're not seeing. that there are problems with his joints it seems that the bones are growing correctly they are not curved they are not splintered I think it is a mechanical or congenital injury I think it is something that is happening as he develops it could be related to weight also it is not very clear why this may be happening in this puppy. One theory I have is that normally snow leopards have more than one cub at a time and in this case we only have one cub so she is getting all the milk she wants and is probably growing a little faster and a bit heavier, so it's getting harder for the cup to really put those legs under it and gain strength the way it needs to.

Is there any chance of this being resolved? Correct autocorrect, no. The question is if we could go there and do

physical

therapy

while she lives with a mom. It is important that the mother and the puppy remain united and we do not want to interfere with that bond because it affects the health of the puppy, but if we cannot correct her legs, she will never be able to

walk

. Over the past few days we have tried many different methods to try to get this cup to put its legs in the right place and today we have Dr.

Alvarez from the animal medical center who specializes in animal rehabilitation and can hopefully give us some advice about where to go next. Let's see how it works on the device you have now. Does he ever rise higher on his forelimbs? If we

help

her, if you

help

her, these are postural tests, just to see if they are aware of where her limbs are in space, normally what she should do, what she can do in the front, is jump, yeah, there she goes , that is normal. so I just want to try something if we support her. How much better could she roam?

It has much better function on the left side than the right. Okay, there you have it, so one potential thing we could come up with for her is a little harness almost like the puppet you made for that bird. So she has some sessions where we support her sternum. She is very heavy and I really think this is a big component of her condition, so let's try it. Look what you do without your humble ones, does this hurt you? No, it shouldn't hurt, it shouldn't hurt, right, not at all, based on what I'm seeing with the puppy today, it seems like it might be similar to the condition in dogs, which is Sooner's swimmer's syndrome, the Muscles that are weak are the adductors on the inside of their thigh, so they can't get those limbs under them, so walking feels more like swimming because their legs are extended to the sides.

Puppies or kittens born with swimmer syndrome are often larger than they should be, so they carry more weight on their bodies. Oh, you definitely feel bad. I think your sciatic nerve is fine. My forecast for the snow leopard. It's optimistic, I don't want to say that she will definitely recover, but in a period of about 30 to 40 days we should see significant improvement, what she needs more than anything is to get stronger, so if we can get her up and moving. I mean, you saw the difference when I supported her, I mean, she was actually able to mobilize a lot better and then if you can combine a little bit of your obstacles and maybe even that harness, this should be a pretty good

therapy

plan for her, it's It's really nice to know that the shacks are working from someone who has actually done it and really has that personal experience.

I was hoping she would say we would see improvements in a week or two, but 30 or 40 days is still not a lot of time. In general snow effort life last week, one of the things rehabilitation specialist Dr. Alvarez recommended for this snow leopard cub was a pair of harnesses, one to hold his front half and another to support your back half; There are some commercially available. Unfortunately none of the harnesses are snow leopard specific for exactly what we needed, hence the trip to the pet store yesterday and then being here on my weekend sewing snow leopard clothing.

One of the important features of this harness is that we have added laces so that we can stay upright so we don't have to go to the physiotherapist when we are done with the snow work effort. She moves very well on her front limbs. She is bright. She is strong and He's got a lot of energy we just have to Slow down a little bit, try to get those hind limbs underneath, we're going to try to get these side bands on, his legs still flap around when he walks so the idea is to try to tuck them in so they're more . in a normal position when she is actually walking with the harness and I don't have to keep pushing them with my hands I can't look at maybe a little support on the back as she grows and gets bigger this becomes a certain point at which she We are going to be less tolerant of what we are doing, the faster we put things in the right place, the better off we will be in the long run.