Heart warming! Treatment to elephant suffering from Abscess in the foot

This is a wildlife conservation team comprising experienced wildlife officers and veterinarians, preparing themselves to tackle a wild elephant that is seen close to the village border for a few days, limping with difficulty. Since there seems to be no improvement in his condition, the villagers have informed these officers to come in for this animal’s help. Let’s see how the treatment is done.

The elephant doesn’t look like he is in any bad condition. He looks OK, minus this problem he has, that makes him limp. With their inspection from a distance, the veterinarians guess that something could have gotten stuck in this elephant’s foot, causing an injury. Anyway, since getting any closer to the animal while he is still standing on its feet could be dangerous, the officers decide to sedate him, by darting a tranquilizer drug from a distance.

The elephant gets a little nervous when he felt the sedative prick on him suddenly. So he moves into the forest, limping his way. In the meantime, the drug gets active and sedates the elephant within five to ten minutes, making him fall down in the forest. The vets hurry themselves to the sedated elephant and start examining him. The problem is identified. He has an abscess formed on his foot. There is no trace of anything that would have caused it but it could have happened when the elephant walked over a sharp-ended object like tree bark or so.

This place where the animal fell is a bit congested with all sorts of trees, which makes it difficult for the officers to do the treatment. So with the voluntary help of the villagers, the officers start clearing the area. In the meantime, the vets quickly check if the elephant’s trunk is in a safe position, otherwise, the elephant could have a difficulty in breathing, and make the situation more complicated and serious.

Elephants prefer to stay alone when they are no more in the comfort zone of moving tie-tie with the other elephants. That too would have been the reason for this elephant to come into the sight of humans.
Somehow or the other, it certainly is a wise decision of this intelligent creature to stay close to the village, in the vicinity of human beings, and not vanish into the forest with an injury of this nature. The observant and kind villagers looked after this wild elephant by giving it various things to eat until the officers arrived for help.

One part of the treatment is now coming to an end. An antiseptic spray is used on the injection site to prevent any formation of infection.

Moving on to the next part of the treatment, the vets start cleaning the horrendous abscess on the heel of the animal.

The vets start cleaning it, removing the hardened parts of the heal and the tiny particles of gravel, etc, that are stuck in the wounded area.

The vet who is cleaning the abscess can feel the wound cut into the flesh making a groove in the heel. He carefully yet thoroughly cleans the abscess using povidone-iodine, which is an antiseptic drug. This antiseptic will clean the abscess, and kill bacteria while oxidizing cell constituents and iodinating them, inactivating proteins.

In a forest like this, with very minimal facilities, one cannot perform a big operation on a wild elephant. Besides, this injury has not caused any kind of serious issues as of now. Therefore, this treatment should be adequate for the healing of this wound.

When the pus in the abscess is drained out and the other various particles stuck on the wound are removed, the pain and discomfort caused by the abscess decrease

The vets carefully syringe in more povidone-iodine, into the abscess. This will help the medicine get to everywhere in the wound and thereby bring in an improvement faster.
Now, the cleaning of the abscess is also over. What they would do next is, spray an antibiotic on the abscess to prevent further infection and thereby heal it faster.

The treatment is over and the revival drug is given in the ear vein of the elephant. An officer keeps flapping the ear throughout, to help the circulation of the drug quicken. This goes on for about 10 minutes. The elephant gradually starts to raise its trunk and move its legs. That is the signal that he will be revived at any moment.

The rescue team leaves the site immediately as it is otherwise likely to cause problems as this is an untamed wild elephant who is recovering from intense pain.

However, forest rangers have been instructed to monitor the progress of this elephant and report to the wildlife office until he gets cured, which is sure to happen.


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