Death rolling Dino diagnosis!

Vet recheck for Dino! Dr. Kunshnir and Kim and Charles from @swamp_girl rescue rehab came out to examine and X-Ray Dino! We are so grateful for Kim bringing her portable X-Ray because we finally have a diagnosis! Unfortunately Dino is suffering from lead toxicity, and the X-Ray showed a lead fishing weight inside of him. This has likely been there for years, leaking out toxic metals inside of his body, making him extremely sick. This is also what Archer the alligator was suffering from. Dino’s lead levels AFTER dilution were 65, it should be zero. The machine won’t read higher than 65, so Kim is having it sent to a lab to get a more accurate reading. Kim covers 28 counties for reptile rehab, and she said that a majority of reptiles are testing for high lead toxicity! It’s in the soil, and the water, and animals are becoming infected through bioaccumulation. Since it’s not allowed by FWC to rehab sick or injured alligators, as far as we know we are the only ones who are actually running these diagnostics on the sick nuisance alligators that we get in! So we really don’t know how prevalant it is in alligators- but we plan on exploring this more. Where do we go from here? Our only option for Dino to try to save him is chelation therapy, which is expensive and very taxing on the animal. It draws the heavy metals and toxins into the bloodstream before they are filtered out during excretion, but usually the animal gets very sick before it gets better. It’s also very expensive, and Dino is so large he will need a lot of it. It’s also given 5 days in a row, and 4 days off and he will need multiple rounds, which means we will have to stress him out and pull him out every day to give meds. This will be a long, expensive road but we are determined to do everything we can to save him. As far as we know, this will be the first time doing chelation therapy on an alligator. We are hoping it’s successful and we can create a protocol for other alligators suffering from the same thing. Sometimes the medication can be difficult to source, so hopefully we can find some this week and start his treatment.


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