The new medical center set to open this week in Brookfield has pretty much what you would expect to find in a state-of-the-art, medium-size suburban hospital, plus a few unexpected things.
It has a high-tech surgery room; wide, quiet, softly lit hallways; humming, computerized laboratories; and a well-stocked pharmacy.
None of the spartan-like patient wards, however, has a bed, nor are any intended. The receiving room is thickly padded in case any incoming patient kicks up a fuss. The gurneys are constructed to hold patients weighing a ton or more. And the operating tables are configured so that all four legs of patients of varying lengths and widths can be comfortably strapped down at all times.
This is not just a hospital, of course, but Brookfield Zoo’s new, $4.5 million animal hospital.
The new head veterinarian at the zoo, Dr. Thomas Meehan, contends there is no medical facility anywhere where animals could get a higher level of care, including hospitals catering to humans.
But Brookfield zookeepers, Meehan said, are looking at the new hospital facility to do much more than give the best medical attention possible to the zoo’s 2,500 animals.
Scientists, he said, can use new medical equipment and techniques to generate physiological and behavioral knowledge about zoo animals. That data will help them understand why so many species are edging toward the brink of extinction and may help to pull them back to safety.
“We know so many of these animals in the zoo are disappearing in the wild, and we know that human impact on their wild habitats are the cause of those disappearances,” he said. “It’s the `why’ that we’re most interested in.”
Meehan, 41, came from Lincoln Park Zoo two weeks ago to take over Brookfield’s veterinary post, just in time to watch the finishing touches applied on the hospital’s construction. The new facility’s 21,000 square feet replaces the zoo’s old, 5,800-square-foot hospital built in 1952.
Much of the design work and planning for the new hospital was from Brookfield’s former chief veterinarian, Dr. Lyndsay Phillips, who recently left to become head of zoo veterinary training at the University of California at Davis.
The facility is laid out expressly to take care of zoo animals, which are much more difficult to treat than their domesticated cousins-pets and farm animals.
“The big difference between treating domestic animals and zoo animals is that you can walk right up and work on most pets and farm animals without them getting alarmed and struggling against you,” Meehan said.
On the other hand, zoo animals are wild, which means they usually struggle in fear when humans try to work on them medically. That means zoo animals usually have to be anesthetized.
Applying anesthesia on humans can be a risky business. It is much more so when you are the doctor to more than 400 species, from birds weighing mere ounces to elephants weighing tons. For many of those species, there still is no reliable baseline data on safe dosages of anesthetics.
The new hospital gives the zoo staff the ability to treat all of the animals on the premises.
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The biggest animals, elephants, rhinos, hippos and giraffes, are too big to be carted back and forth to the new hospital, so they’ll still be treated in special medical areas in their habitats.
But when the rest of the zoo animals need more than routine medical attention, they will use the hospital, staffed by three veterinarians, three medical technicians and three keepers.
Doorways and hallways are designed to be big enough to allow horse-size animals to be carted around. The X-ray machine in the radiology suite is powerful enough to penetrate the largest animals in the zoo and delicate enough to get an accurate internal picture of a hummingbird.
A quarantine ward is designed so that its air supply system is separate from the rest of the hospital. The ward will be used to assure that new animals coming to the zoo from other institutions or the wild are carrying no viruses or diseases that could harm other animals in the zoo. It will also be used to screen Brookfield’s own animals before sending them to other zoos or back to the wild for reintroduction.
The hospital lab is equipped with high-tech, computerized machines for analyzing body tissue, fluids and fecal matter from the animals. The machines are, in fact, identical to the ones used by the best-equipped human hospitals.
And, like those hospitals, the zoo hospital is equipped with a computerized recordkeeping system to track the medical history and a growing body of physiological information on animals. Brookfield and most zoos in the industrialized world now are linked by an international informational network that tracks the birth, life and death of all animals in their collections.
“This hospital gives us new ways to treat and study these animals,” Meehan said. “Now we have ways to keep track of anesthetic dosages, parasites, blood values according to sex and weight within each species so that we can develop a pattern of what’s normal.
“Like a research institution studying human physiology by watching the case histories of tens of thousands of individuals, we are beginning to be able to look at a lot of data collected over a long period of time on our animals.”
Meehan said by studying this rich new source of data, scientists will develop patterns of new information that will improve the health and lives of zoo animals. But, he said, it will also have direct and indirect benefits for animals in the wild and on wilderness habitats in which they live.
“We’re concerned about each animal’s interests in the zoo,” said Meehan, “but on a broader level, we’re even more interested in the environment from which the animal comes.
“In every case, what threatens endangered species is traced back to some sort of human activity. A zoo is a great place to educate the public about that, and in order to educate the public we have to make sure our animals are healthy and stay healthy.”
Ninty-five percent of all zoo animals now are captive bred. Zoos already are the last habitat of some endangered species and, in some cases, are breeding and reintroducing animals into the wilderness where wild populations have become extinct.
To that end, Meehan said, the study of zoo animals is giving scientists a foundation of knowledge of their wild counterparts, especially in terms of genetics and human contact. Human populations now so thoroughly saturate the world that there are few wide-open wilderness spaces left for wild animals to roam.
“Encroaching human populations may be threatening or actually causing entire species to disappear,” he said.
“Human contact might be altering wild animal behavior in ways so they can’t reproduce anymore, or it’s exposing them to new, deadly diseases, or it’s affecting their food sources.
“Those are sorts of things we can be looking at in a zoo situation. There is no comparison with what we know now about zoo animals to what we knew 20 or even 10 years ago. But with the sort of facilities we have now for gathering, storing and exchanging information, our knowledge is growing exponentially.”
Even his own field, zoo veterinary medicine, is rapidly changing, Meehan said, by the rapid growth of knowledge. Growing up in St. Louis, he said he decided as a teenager doing volunteer work at the zoo that he wanted to be a zoo vet.
When he started work in the 1970s, zoo vets were trained as generalists. Now they, like doctors treating humans, are developing specialties and subspecialties. Meehan himself is working with the University of Illinois to develop a program for training zoo pathologists.
“The lure that brought me here from Lincoln Park,” said Meehan, “is this new hospital. Our ability to do diagnostic tests and complete pathology tests are just tremendously improved with this facility. We are going to learn a lot here.”