S.F. Zoo

Leopard gets new fangs

By Stephen Magagnini

Friendship was a snow leopard whose growl was worse that her bite – until yesterday, when she had her four fangs capped at the San Francisco Zoo infirmary.

During a 90-minute procedure, Friendship – one of a handful of snow leopards captured in the wild – was attended to by a medical team so extensive it could have been mistaken for a heart transplant operation.

Thirteen people – two dentists, two veterinarians, an anesthesiologist from Stanford, a dental technician and seven assistants – worked over the salt and pepper hued cat, as she lay motionless on the operating table.

"It’s a new frontier we’re doing something that’s never been done before," said Dr. Bob Turner, a Palo Alto dentist who had his hands in the snow leopard’s mouth.

Friendship, a political gift from Shanghai, San Francisco’s sister city, arrived in February with her fangs worn down to the nerve endings. Dr. Craig Machado, the zoo’s senior veterinarian, speculated that she had worn her incisor done to the nub trying to gnaw her way somewhere in the Himalayas.

The snow leopard an endangered species so named because it prowls throughout the Asian mountain ranges form Afghanistan to Tibet is an elusive, solitary creature that has been known to kill animals three times its size.

Machado said Friendship needed refurbished fangs so "she’ll be able to eat better, digest her food better and defend herself better. We plan to put her in with a male and breed her, and it’s quite a violent breeding sometimes."

Friendship is 9 years old, middle-aged by leopard standards.

Hardly anybody likes to go to the dentist, and Friendship was no exception. As soon as Machado approached her cage, she began snarling and spitting menacingly, and assumed the pounce position.

Machado safely outside the bars used a blowgun to implant a drug-laden dart in the plush fur around Friendship’s left flank.

Her bushy tail wilted like a week-old bouquet, and all she could manage was a low, sorrowful moan when Machado picked her up by the scruff of her neck and placed her on a stretcher.

The 72-pound cat was brought to the infirmary in a pickup truck then placed on an operating table.

After Dr. Freed Mihm of Stanford University administered the anesthesia, Friendship’s eyes glazed over and she looked helpless.

Turner installed four crown posts in what was left of Friendship’s fangs, then capped them with four porcelain-coated gold crowns custom-made by Jan Krieg, a Palo Alto dental technician who goes by the name "Dr. Technology."

Turner worked with a suction hose, a drill and an oversized set of dental tools made by Dr. Paul Brown, the dentist who did four hours’ worth of root canal work on Friendship’s four abscessed fangs last month.

After an errant piece of fang was filed down and X-rays were taken, Turner said the operation went "perfectly" and called Friendship "a tremendous patient."

Work like that done on a Friendship’s mouth could cost about $3000, but the two dentists donated their services to the zoo "for fun."

They had earlier operated on Jack, the zoo’s 16-yearold Bengal tiger, who also needed root canals and new crowns.

Friendship spent yesterday afternoon hungry and hung over, but today she’s expected to have no trouble digesting her daily meal: five pounds of horsemeat, bones and all.