Hi, I'm Beth Stevens and we are here at Disney's Animal Kingdom right here at Conservation Station in the veterinary treatment room. And I've got Roy back. Welcome back, Roy.
Beth, it's always good to be here. This is my son Roy.
Hey Roy Pat, good to see you. Great to see you. And this is Dr. Mark Stetter and he is our veterinary services director. Hi there. Welcome. Thank you.
So, you know what the great thing about Disney's Animal Kingdom is that when our guests come here they ride great rides, fun rides, thrilling rides, see fabulous shows, they get to hug Disney characters, they get to see animals up close and personal. And really exciting is that not only do they see those out in the park, but they can come to Conservation Station and have a look backstage at how we take care of the animals. And Dr. Mark is head of all of the veterinarians here.
Thanks, Beth. Thanks for joining us. You know, one of the things that we really enjoy here is having our guests be involved with how well we take care of the animals. So, we take great pride in the fact that each animal receives excellent animal care, and we can share that with the guests. It's a beautiful way for us to be able to engage them and to get them excited about what we do here at Disney's Animal Kingdom to make sure that our animals stay healthy, to do all the right things from a research perspective and a conservation perspective so that we're helping wild animals all over the globe. And we have funding programs too that go out from here helping out research in the field.
The Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund is funding projects all over the world, about 450 projects so far. Many more to come. And so, between those projects and then the work that our veterinarians and our scientists and our animal keepers and everybody are involved in, we are helping animals all over the world.
Great, great program. We have many thousands of animals that live here. They can be centipedes and frogs and fish or elephants and silverback gorillas. So, the diversity and the number is really astounding. And it really is a great challenge for us, but a lot of fun at the same time to be able to share that diversity with our guests. But understanding exactly what make these endangered species and all animals, you know, tick from a health and a nutrition and a care perspective is what we're all about.
So, Roy, one of the really neat things about what we're doing today is that we actually have a cheetah that's here for a regular checkup. And as I mentioned before, all of our animals get a routine evaluation. A crocodile might get a checkup every 3 years, but cheetahs usually get a checkup every year to make sure that they're healthy in every kind of way. To bring that on, we actually have Dr. Greg Fleming. Dr. Greg? Hi. Nice to meet you, Greg Fleming.
I'm Roy Pat. Hi. Well, the cheetah's been sedated. So, how about we go and take a look at him?
I can't wait. All right. Excellent. Great.
Come on up. This is one of our cheetahs here. He's asleep here right now. So, he'll be asleep for about half an hour. And one of the really interesting things we do here at Disney's Animal Kingdom is behavioral conditioning. So, many of our cats like the cheetahs and the lions and the tigers will actually come up and take a hand injection so we don't have to dart them anymore. The best part about that is the animal really doesn't get stressed and it's much easier to do that than to try and dart them too because there's always some risk when you do that. Then once he comes asleep, we bring him up to the hospital here. And so, you can see he's intubated. We just have a tube going into his lungs and he's on isoflurane gas and he's sleeping right now. So, he's just breathing that. So, we have the fluids flowing in here and we have an IV line and just to do some supportive care.
Yeah, that's his heart. You can see his heart beating.
Exactly. And we're actually monitoring that. He's got a little clamp on his tongue and that's telling us how much oxygen's in his blood and it also is telling us his pulse. So, you can see his heart beating right there. Would you like to listen?
I'm going to try a different way of monitoring the heart rate now. And this is called Doppler. And the Doppler effect is, you know, when you're hearing a car go by and it goes wow. That's called the Doppler effect. And so, what this is, this is picking up sound and I'm going to put it on here. It's going to probably make a terrible noise for a second. And it actually picks up the blood rushing by in the blood vessel. I'm going to see if we can get it going here.
So, that's the actual heart, the sounds of the heart.
What's his normal heart rate?
Well, he's about what, 70 or 80 right now, Liz? He's 85 right now. So, that's right in the probably in the middle of his range.
How high does it get to when they really get going running?
They could probably get upwards of 200 probably. Or up close to that. But you know, middle to high hundreds. It's very easy in a big cheetah like this to actually listen, you know, with a stethoscope. But with a little tiny bird or something, sometimes the stethoscope's so big we can't hear very well. And we put that on their wing and you can hear their heart rate instantly.
Yeah. The other neat thing here you can see with their feet that are slightly different than other cats is you can see his nails. That looks like a dog foot. And cheetah's nails are permanently out like that because they need them to dig in when they're running. So, they're more like a dog like that. They're the only cat that their nails stays out the whole time.
Look like a dog's foot. Yeah. I noticed that the tail is very streamlined.
Yeah, the tail's very streamlined just like their whole body. And they use this as a rudder. So, when he's running really fast and if he makes a turn one way, he flips the tail the other way or vice versa to kind of balance him when he's running very quickly. And that's a real predominant thing. They use it to counterbalance him. So, it's a very important tool in a cheetah's life. And you can see his great back muscles here and that's because when they're running they flex and extend their whole back like that to get their back feet actually past their front feet.
Now, Greg, these guys are athletes. Do they ever suffer athletic injuries?
Yeah, sometimes they do. There's been a couple reports of a cheetah kind of blowing out his hip. But these guys really aren't in a huge area where they can get up to 70 miles an hour. So, we normally don't see too many problems with them in captivity as far as them injuring their knee or something like that.
And how do they get their exercise here?
