Zoos, Circuses, Safaris: A Gallery of Captivity

[Pckts]

When life is good, Tunya, a 435-pound lion at the San Francisco Zoo, has sex 20 times a day and gets treats like "blood popsicles" or dead rabbits.
When life is bad, he shakes and trembles. Technically speaking, Tunya is a wobbler -- he sometimes has trouble putting weight on his front legs, and endures pain that can last for days.
On Thursday, vets at the zoo sent Tunya to the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital at UC Davis. The diagnosis: a cervical vertebral abnormality. The conclusion: no easy fix. The next step: unclear, but possibly another commute on Interstate 80 for high-risk surgery that might or might not cure his ills.

Tunya's rare troubles began about a year and a half ago. Zoo officials have observed two more shaking episodes since then, the most recent three weeks ago.
Dr. Freeland Dunker, head vet at the zoo, concluded that the area between Tunya's sixth and seventh vertebrae was skewed, resulting in a pinched nerve, and that surgery was the answer.
And so, at 5 a.m., Tunya and six zoo employees left for UC Davis, a world mecca
medicine.
It was the first time the zoo had brought an animal to Davis for surgery, Dunker said -- though it was not the first lion for Davis. And it was Tunya's first excursion since April 1997, when he arrived from South Africa, with much fanfare, at the age of 3 months.

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