The Hippo with Toothache Read Online Free PDF Page B

offering my testimony, and when they cut the deal, I felt more than a little disappointed. The two women remained incredulous about the charges to the end.
    Earring Boy thrived. Early that fall, when he weighed about sixty pounds and had lost his baby spots, he was released in a remote wooded part of Augusta County not far from the West Virginia line, along with six other juvenile deer that we’d raised as a group. They bounded off into the piney woods together, white tails held high, a signal to each other but also a good-bye to us. The group would stay together for a while, to help each other watch for predators—and for women bearing earrings. But eventually, they would disperse and mature into adult deer.
    Watching the fawns disappear into the woods, I felt a mix of emotions. Veterinarians can’t help but become attached to the animals they work with, be they companion animals like cats and dogs or zoo animals like lions and tigers. But wildlife rehabilitation work is a special field. The goal of veterinarians who choose to work in this setting is to release their patients back into the wild, never to see them again. These patients rarely say thank you. More often than not, they prefer to strike out with tooth, hoof, and talon in an effort to escape—without a backward glance.
    Wildlife rehabilitation veterinarians don’t get many kisses from puppies. But that white tail held high, when a successfully rehabilitated deer bounds off into the woods on its way back to a life in the wild, is a pretty sweet reward in itself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Ned Gentz received his doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Colorado State University in 1990 and completed an internship in zoo, wildlife, and exotic animal medicine at Kansas State University. Since 2000, he has been associate veterinarian and research coordinator at the Albuquerque Biological Park in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Previously he was director of veterinary services at the Wildlife Center of Virginia, where Animal Planet routinely filmed him at work for the television series Wildlife Emergency . He also served as a clinical instructor of zoo andwildlife medicine at Cornell University. Dr. Gentz is board certified by the American College of Zoological Medicine. In his current position, he volunteers his time as the consulting veterinarian for the Zuni tribe’s Eagle Rescue Program. He finds this work especially inspiring.

Kachina’s Bones
by Becky Yates, MS, DVM
    MARTINE CALLED ME late on a Friday afternoon from her vacation house in Arizona.
    â€œBecky, my dear, I need you to come right away. Something is wrong with little Kachina.”
    Honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was drive five hours from California to Arizona to see a bear cub. I clicked my cell phone off and asked myself for the hundredth time, “Why do I work for this place, and why is it always on a weekend?” Plus, we already had more than enough animals.
    Twenty years earlier, in 1976, Martine bought a piece of land north of Los Angeles, inside the boundaries of the Angeles National Forest, and established the Wildlife Waystation, a home for illegal or discarded pets. She took in leopards, jaguars, African lions, mountain lions, bobcats, bears,coyotes, llamas, deer, hawks—even tortoises. When a research facility closed down on the East Coast, she built caging for dozens of homeless chimps. She made room for a pride of ligers (lion-tiger crosses) someone had bred in Idaho. Every spring, our hospital ward filled up with baby opossums.
    The call about the bear cub frustrated me. The motto at the bottom of the Waystation entrance sign read “No Animal Turned Away.” That was an understatement. We needed more equipment and supplies for the clinic, to say nothing of more staff. I missed my weekends. A day off once in a while would also be cool.
    It wasn’t a wild cub, I learned, but a cub from the pet industry. Someone in Arizona was breeding black bears