UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2003

Departments

Extended Family

Features

Experiencing Jeff Corwin

Drawing on the past

Clean-up at the old Davis Mine

Extended Family

Work on the wild side

Charles Creekmore ’95




	Dr. Janet Martin ’86: with a Saurus crane. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

IT READS LIKE A BAD joke: “How do you weigh an elephant?” The reply, given by anyone with a lick of sense, would be “Reluctantly.”

Weighing elephants and other wildlife is part and pachyderm of the daily routine carried out by Dr. Janet Martin ’86, director of the veterinary department at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence. Martin handles the health and wellbeing of some 900 zoo animals, doctoring everything from pronghorns to peacocks. And not one routine patient in the lot.

“All my cases are odd,” she says. “I never get the easy stuff. It’s the nature of the beast.”

Take the case of Tipsy the Tortoise Formerly Known as Number Two, who received a name change shortly after going lame with a hard-to-diagnose foreleg injury. Tipsy is a 22-year-old radiated tortoise, an endangered species native to Madagascar, who weighs about 6-1/2 pounds. After he began to hobble, various bone scans revealed no skeletal damage, indicating that Tipsy needed some physical therapy to get his foreleg working again. But how do you make a radiated tortoise do push-ups or deep-knee bends?

The answer, in this case, was concocting a skateboard-type apparatus for Tipsy to ride, allowing him to exercise the gimpy gam without putting weight on it. Eight months later, Tipsy was fit as a fiddle and had outlived his name.

Presumably, the tortoise and his skateboard were also ready for the X Games, if any hare could be found to race against him.

The emphasis at Roger Williams is much more on preventive medicine than the so-called “fire-engine” first aid needed for responding to emergencies such as tipsy tortoises. The zoo has an extensive preventive program that includes quarantining new animals before they enter the collection, careful monitoring by zookeepers, vaccinations, regular blood work, parasite testing, periodic dental work and annual physicals.

“Through this preventive program,” says Martin, “the zoo has experienced a significant drop in medical problems during the last 10 years, since I arrived.”

When asked if she receives danger pay for giving physicals to cheetahs, bears and rhinoceroses, Martin laughs and refers to her trusty dart gun, loaded with anesthetic, which she uses both sparingly and selectively to maintain her Peaceable Kingdom.

“Due to the safety issues of dealing with wild animals, we tend to expose ourselves to a lot less danger than a domestic-animal vet does,” she says. “I think I have more scars from cats and dogs than from wildlife.”

Martin’s original motivation for taking a walk on the wild side as a zoo vet had less to do with animal magnetism than with her conservation ideals. Zoos are currently the last bastions for many endangered species, such as the white-cheeked gibbons, parma wallabies and American burying beetles sheltered at the Roger Williams Park Zoo. The zoo takes part in the national Species Survival Plan, set up by the American Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which makes recommendations for the breeding, medical treatment, nutritional care and other maintenance of many endangered animals.

Martin notes that each group of animals has its own peculiar medical issues. For example, many prey animals refuse to show any kind of weakness – even limping on a broken leg – for fear that predators will pick them off. Likewise, when it comes to displaying medical symptoms, fish, birds and invertebrates are really tough to read.

“Often, you don’t know anything’s wrong,” says Martin, “till they go belly up.”

Hence, a vet has to know all the tricks of the trade; especially when she glances into her waiting room, and it’s a jungle out there.

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