Any scientist who has spent time on the field has experienced mishaps, says Carrie Cizauskas. More by accident than design, this is something I seem to have become an expert in because I study the immune functions and infectious disease burdens of wild animals living in messy natural ecosystems.
To research the immunity of a wild zebra you need to collect blood samples, and to do that you’ve got to capture the animal first. And that’s harder than it sounds.
Catching a wild zebra involves loading up a pneumatic dart with opioids 10,000 times more potent than morphine. Indeed, just one drop of the anaesthetic will kill a person, so we always carry some antidote, just in case.
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Then you have to drive around looking for the ‘right’ zebra in a population of 15,000 in a park roughly one tenth the size of the UK.
You have to shoot the animal in the shoulder – never shoot a zebra in the rear, because they have such supple muscle there, a dart will irretrievably bury itself – and wait about five minutes for the animal to get groggy and fall over.
You then have to rush in to gather samples before reversing the anaesthesia.
All in all, this tends to be a tried-and-tested procedure that goes smoothly and yields excellent results. Except for when it doesn’t.
Every now and then, an animal possesses the ability to override the anaesthetic effects of the drugs and becomes more agitated than sedated. This can happen if the creature is stressed prior to capture (we do our best to keep the animal calm by approaching slowly).
Given the fact that Etosha National Park consists of plains and scrubby bushveld, it was very easy to track this plains zebra from a distance and we were, perhaps unreasonably, confident that she would soon tire herself out and take a nap in the open.
Being a special beast, however, the mare not only kept galloping for much longer than she should have, she made a beeline for the only tree within a 5km radius. Perhaps she thought she could hide under this one scrubby acacia, or maybe she thought it would afford her shade.
What occurred soon after was a meeting of zebra and tree, made all the more improbable by the fact that this solitary structure had a perfect branch crotch the height and width of a zebra’s neck. Of course, she got stuck in it.
It’s a little known fact that the safest and most effective way to manipulate a standing zebra is to grab it by the tail and pull. Well now you are aware. It’s also not widely noted that it takes two qualified vets plus a ranger to rescue a zebra from an acacia, while a third vet (me) takes a photograph.
Luckily, this story has a happy ending. The ungulate was finally pulled from the tree, sedated with an additional drug dose and samples were taken. After we gave her the antidote, she jumped up defiantly, trotted away back to her herd and resumed grazing as if it had never happened.
Carrie Cizauskas is a vet who studies disease ecology in wild animals with a focus on African species
Main image: a park ranger and two vets try to free a female zebra stuck in an acacia tree.
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