'A gorilla won't sit there and co-operate': Toronto Zoo staff call in human doctors for gorilla surgery

A surgical team from The Scarborough Hospital took a field trip to the Toronto Zoo Tuesday, but not to check out all the recent babies born at the facility. A surgeon and his team were called in to help remove a mass on an elderly gorilla's left leg that was affecting her mobility.

The surgery on 44-year-old Josephine a Western lowland gorilla was successful and she's now resting comfortably.

But the operation marks the latest collaboration between the zoo and physicians from local hospitals.

Zoo veterinarian Simon Hollamby said the zoo consults most often with outside veterinary specialists, including an opthalmologist, a dentist and a reproductive specialist.

"But definitely when we're dealing with procedures on great apes we will definitely get human professionals in because the similarities are marked," Hollamby told CBC News on Wednesday.

If he wanted to get an ultrasound of a gorilla's heart, for example, he would likely call in a human echocardiographer to conduct the test, he said.

"It's basically using the people who are most skilled in a certain area," Hollamby said.

Before Tuesday, the zoo had most recently worked with a team of human doctors in March of last year to perform orthopedic surgery on a male gorilla, one of Josephine's sons.

'A gorilla being a gorilla, it will not allow you to do an examination'

For Josephine's surgery, the human doctors performed the operation, he said. Dr. Saul Mandelbaum was called in because he's a hernia specialist, and vets at the zoo were concerned that a hernia was Josephine's underlying problem.

Instead, doctors discovered that the growth on Josephine's leg was a lipoma, a benign fatty tumour that is actually common in human adults between the ages of 40 and 60. It also turns out that Josephine has arthritis.

"Basically it got to the stage where it was affecting her walking," Hollamby said. "Normally [lipomas] don't affect people, they are benign, but if they are in a certain area that might be impinging on a muscle, they can cause mechanical damage to the area just by compression of various tissues."

The zoo team was unsure of the exact nature of Josephine's problem, Hollamby said, because "a gorilla being a gorilla, it will not allow you to do an examination of a hernia on the leg voluntarily when it's awake."

A human anesthesiologist was on hand to help, as well, but zoo staff took the lead on that part of the procedure because of their own expertise dealing with animals.

"A gorilla won't sit there and co-operate, while a human patient may be able to," Hollamby said.

Because life expectancy for a gorilla is between 35 and 40 years, Josephine at 44 is the equivalent to an 80- or 90-year-old human, he said. So while her surgery has gone well, zoo staff are monitoring her day-to-day.