Trouble-Shooting Can Be a Chore With Some Exotic Pets
 Although Elmo wasn't in the mood for eating, he cooperatively gnawed on a plastic pipe while veterinarians searched for the cause of his malady. |
Elmo, a toothy, 3-foot-long American alligator, has lost his appetite.
Owner Jay Benson of Madison recently brought Elmo to the School of Veterinary Medicine’s Teaching Hospital after the normally hungry carnivore hadn’t eaten for several days. But unlike most veterinary offices, Elmo was seen by three different veterinarians who know their way around a reptile.
After getting Elmo to open wide by having him clasp on a piece of plastic pipe, they looked for signs of bad teeth or other discomfort in the mouth. Later, veterinarian James Morrisey felt a suspicious lump in Elmo’s abdomen that suggested a blockage.
Veterinarian Joanne Paul-Murphy began searching for clues. “Did it eat anything unusual?” she asked the owner. “Socks? A piece of leather? Anything furry it might have mistaken for a rodent?”
That afternoon, they hoped to solve the mystery by running an ultrasound on Elmo to identify the blockage. They will also run tests for signs of any bacteria that’s making the animal ill.
Through the visit, Elmo was surprisingly docile, staring intently ahead with diamond-shaped eyes.
It’s all in a day’s work for the school’s exotic-species faculty – but admittedly, the pet alligator is as exotic as it gets. “This is the first alligator I’ve treated outside of a zoo environment,” Paul-Murphy says. “But just about every week we see something I would call less-than-usual.”
They see a lot of boas, pythons, anacondas and green iguanas, she says. A “trendy” new pet they see is called a sugar glider, a furry-faced marsupial from Australia. A few years ago, hedgehogs were the hot trend.
The problem with very unusual pets, Paul-Murphy says, is that owners and veterinarians have limited knowledge about how to properly maintain them. Since research and experience is so limited, it’s hard to advise people on the proper food, care and living conditions the animals need. “About 80 percent of the problems we see are related to poor management,” she says.
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