Each team had specific duties while Ulie and I did the darting, drew blood and kept track of the level of anesthesia. Since we were using sernylan as our chief immobilizing agent we didn’t have to worry about animals coming up suddenly or being aggressive when they did. Nor did we have as much to worry as much about regurgitation and aspiration as we might have had with other anesthetic agents. We had asked that all the animals be held off food for a minimum of 24 to 48 hours to avoid such problems. As it turned out, our

As I said, never before or since have this many exotic animals been immobilized in such a short a period of time.

While immobilizing a female tigress and her four cubs, each of which weighed between 50 and 60 pounds, we witnessed another of nature’s countless phenomena. Our plan was to immobilize the mother and then net and hand grab the cubs. I put a dart in her, and she went down smoothly, but as she became ataxic amazingly all four cubs attacked her with a vengeance.

There were other surprises. We only lost one animal under anesthesia, a female hippo. We had asked that all animals be fasted for 24 hours and the hippos, elephants and large ruminants be starved out for 48 hours before they were scheduled to be immobilized. Unfortunately, some members of the hippo staff disagreed and just before we started had given them all they could eat. The grain immediately swelled up with water in their stomachs, and when we administered what should have been a light sedating dose of M99 and the female went down, her stomach and abdominal contents pushed up and compressed her lungs. Her respiration was severely compromised.

Additionally, this animal had more than five gallons of vile-smelling brown fluid in her uterus which later cultured out a cosmopolitan population of bacteria.

From that point on we asked very pointed questions of the keepers just before we immobilized each animal.