{"id":608507,"date":"2026-08-29T18:18:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T18:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/608507\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T18:18:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T18:18:21","slug":"experience-i-brought-a-bear-back-to-life-life-and-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/608507\/","title":{"rendered":"Experience: I brought a bear back to life | Life and style"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been a dentist for 40\u00a0years. I\u00a0spend most of my time treating patients at my surgery in Chichester, West Sussex. When I studied to become a\u00a0dentist in the 1980s, I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d be getting my hands anywhere near the teeth of any exotic animals.<\/p>\n

Twenty years later, in 2000, that changed. A patient of mine, Alan\u00a0Knight, the CEO of International Animal Rescue (IAR), showed me photographs of the inside of a bear\u2019s mouth. The bear was called Jojo and his teeth had been broken off by poachers. Some of the teeth were too rotten to be saved \u2013 if left untreated, Jojo would become more prone to infection and abscesses.<\/p>\n

Alan told me Jojo wasn\u2019t the only bear in need of dental care. Poachers would kill mother bears and grab their cubs. When the cubs got older, the poachers would break their teeth using a hammer to make them look more docile. I knew I had to help.<\/p>\n

That was how I ended up in India ready to perform dentistry on my first animal patient \u2013 a 14-year-old sloth bear named Anthony. He had a\u00a0massive benign tumour on his gum that was preventing him from eating. He was 180kg, which is especially big for an Indian sloth bear, and already anaesthetised when I first saw him.<\/p>\n

It was supposed to be a relatively straightforward operation \u2013 remove the tumour and any bad teeth. I\u00a0was working alongside a veterinary dentist, Lisa Milella. We\u2019d prepared for\u00a0over a year \u2013 I felt ready.<\/p>\n

I started by\u00a0removing the grapefruit-sized tumour from Anthony\u2019s gum, then the tooth that had been underneath the lump. More than three hours into surgery, I was feeling more at ease \u2013 perhaps treating a bear wouldn\u2019t be so\u00a0different from treating a human.<\/p>\n

double quotation markI\u2019ve operated on 200 bears, half a dozen tigers, a couple of lions, hyenas and gorillas Photograph: Julian Anderson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

I was about to take out some of Anthony\u2019s other broken teeth when his pulse rate plummeted. Within minutes, the local vets monitoring him could no longer detect a pulse. His breathing stopped and he was pronounced dead.<\/p>\n

The anaesthesia had killed him. In those days, the local anaesthetists only had experience injecting anaesthesia, and had used darts to put\u00a0Anthony to sleep. We did not know\u00a0how long it would last, so it had to keep being topped up. If an animal is unwell, administering too much anaesthetic can be lethal.<\/p>\n

The local vets walked out of the operating room, saying: \u201cYou\u2019ve killed\u00a0our bear.\u201d I couldn\u2019t process what had happened. I\u2019m a dentist \u2013 I\u00a0had never dealt with a patient dying mid-surgery before.<\/p>\n

Lisa brought me back to reality. She said: \u201cWe\u2019re going to get him back. Get the emergency drug box! Get the crash kit!\u201d<\/p>\n

I started performing CPR on Anthony. We gave him adrenaline, and I pounded his chest. It was an excruciatingly long three minutes before he was able to breathe by himself again. He was still under anaesthetic. We knew he was alive, but\u00a0not if he was well. We waited. When he woke up, I felt triumphant. He went on to live for another 10 years.<\/p>\n

Since then, I\u2019ve continued working with the IAR, performing dentistry on\u00a0200 bears, half a dozen tigers, a\u00a0couple of lions, a few hyenas, and a\u00a0handful of\u00a0gorillas and orangutans. I\u2019ve even been nicknamed \u201cBear Drills\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Operating on animals presents a\u00a0unique set of challenges. For one, their teeth are much larger than a human\u2019s \u2013 and with big teeth come\u00a0big tools. A file used for root\u2011canal treatments on people is\u00a0about a quarter of the size of those used on\u00a0tigers.<\/p>\n

Over the years, I\u2019ve seen all sorts \u2013 a 300kg tiger with multiple facial abscesses, a bear we fitted with a gold crown and nicknamed Bling Bear, and a lion having a ketamine-induced fit during an extraction. I very nearly had to do some crowns on beluga whales that were used for submarine warfare by the Soviet Union, but they escaped from their holding pen before I flew out.<\/p>\n

Anthony\u2019s resuscitation was a\u00a0memorable introduction to animal dentistry. I travel to IAR sanctuaries to treat rescued animals every year. It\u2019s more stressful than my day job, but it\u2019s\u00a0incredibly fulfilling. The local teams at every sanctuary monitor the animals after I leave, and always report positive changes in their behaviour. They have suffered so much, and I feel privileged to play a\u00a0part in bringing them relief.<\/p>\n

As told to Emmy Raynor<\/p>\n

Do you have an experience to share? Email experience@theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve been a dentist for 40\u00a0years. I\u00a0spend most of my time treating patients at my surgery in Chichester,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-608507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}