The Lion Dentist

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  • Peter Emily, a pioneer in the field of wild-animal dentistry, has treated polar bears, Siegfried and Roy’s tigers, and a black-footed ferret whom he fitted with a gold tooth.
Peter Emily, a pioneer in the field of wild-animal dentistry, has treated polar bears, Siegfried and Roy’s tigers, and a black-footed ferret whom he fitted with a gold tooth.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ALEX HALPERIN
On a recent Thursday, in an operating theater at the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, Colorado, a mountain lion named Montana lay on his side, unconscious. Two veterinary dentists stood at his head, scraping infected pulp out of his four canine teeth, all of which needed root canals. Occasionally, one of the dentists raised an X-ray machine to the lion’s head to check his progress. While they worked, a veterinarian a few feet away removed Montana’s testicles, a bloody procedure. When she finished, she packed them up for transport to a lab, where she planned to use them to grow stem cells.
In the next room, a caged black leopard named Backara, his spots visible from up close, waited to undergo the same set of procedures. A technician put the hundred-and-forty-pound animal to sleep with an injection, then four people maneuvered him onto a cloth stretcher and carried him into the operating room. They set him down almost perpendicular to Montana, on a grate attached to a pulley system for large animals, before getting to work. (When the sanctuary’s grizzly bears, which can weigh more than fifteen hundred pounds, need work, they are anaesthetized in their habitat and brought to the operating room by forklift and truck.)
As the procedures went on, Peter Emily, a vigorous eighty-two-year-old who helped to pioneer the field of wild-animal dentistry, darted around the room in a surgical scrub shirt. Emily, who is semi-retired, consulted with the other dentists, inspected both of the anaesthetized animals’ mouths, and chatted with guests, speaking quickly, in a raspy voice. He soon took a more hands-on role with Backara, who had a molar that required extraction.
A Denver native, Emily graduated from human dental school at Creighton University, in Nebraska, after serving as an Air Force mechanic during the Korean War. He bred Doberman Pinschers for competition, and began X-raying puppies to determine if they had a tooth formation that would disqualify them from being shown. At the time, veterinary dentistry was largely restricted to cleaning teeth or removing them, but Emily began performing root canals on dogs and soon developed a reputation. In the nineteen-seventies, he said, the Denver Zoo contacted him to ask him to remove a hyena’s fractured tooth. Emily proposed instead to save it with a root canal. “There were no instruments, so I made my own,” he said. “I took orthodontic wire and twisted it and braided it in different diameters.”
Emily’s career since then could be fodder for a great children’s book. He has, as he put it, operated on “everything with a mouth”: polar bears, Siegfried and Roy’s tigers, kangaroos, a black-footed ferret whom he fitted with a gold tooth. He has also taught courses, written textbooks, and helped to develop a line of dog and cat toothbrushes. “His fingers and his brain work together in ways that those of us fortunate to have seen him in action on a tiger or a dog can only be in awe of,” Colin Harvey, the executive secretary of the American Veterinary Dental College, said.
Among Emily’s contributions as a surgeon is a method for straightening birds’ beaks. “Several years ago, we had a great horned owl that had a lower beak that was sitting like this,” he said, crossing his hands. “In order to straighten it, you had to realize, Where are the growth centers in the beak? Where can you apply force? You had to put some kind of a corrective lever arm on there, some kind of ligature.” Emily refers to the specialization as “orthobeakics.”
In 2005, he founded the Peter Emily International Veterinary Dental Foundation, a nonprofit that arranges missions for veterinarians and dentists to perform procedures on exotic animals in the U.S. and abroad. He runs the organization, with the help of one part-time employee, largely out of his home, an unpretentious ranch dwelling in Denver’s suburbs which is filled with sculptures and curios, many depicting animals, and some crafted by Emily himself, including a Japanese fisherman sculpted out of dental plaster. (His garage has been converted into a laboratory, with a dental chair that faces out at walls lined with animal skulls, among them an orca, a crocodile, and a wolf eel.)
The foundation’s missions include frequent visits to the sanctuary in nearby Keenesburg, which covers seven hundred and twenty acres and serves as a retirement community for exotic animals who have been abused or abandoned by their owners. In 2011, the sanctuary took in twenty-five African lions from Bolivia after the country banned the use of animals in circuses. (Animal-rights activists credit it as the first country to do so.) One of the males, Pancho, had suffered shattered molars, probably from being smashed in the face with a hard object; his upper-left canine had been driven into his head, causing a “communication” between his mouth and nose called an oronasal fistula. In June, the sanctuary expects to receive thirty-three more circus lions, from Colombia and Peru. Animal Defenders International, which is organizing the transfer, says that it will be the largest-ever operation of its kind. Emily said that he expects many of the animals to show similar signs of abuse.
According to the sanctuary, there are an estimated thirty thousand captive big carnivores living in the U.S. outside of the zoo system. Montana and Backara had been donated several months earlier, by a facility in Ohio. Big cats tend to gnaw on the bars of their cages, which can break their teeth. The owners who keep the animals as pets often try to mitigate the threat they pose by declawing them or damaging their teeth—procedures that cause great pain and can lead to further complications.
Montana, for his part, had also needed work on his paws, to repair a botched declawing. (A nail had continued to grow after the original procedure, puncturing his paw pads.) When that procedure was done, a crew carried him back to a cage and placed his head on a folded towel. When he woke up, he lay calmly on the cage floor, appearing rather dignified considering what he’d just endured. The team also worked on a serval named Diva, whose teeth had been filed down by a previous owner; she needed only three root canals, having already lost one of her canines.
For many practitioners, wild-animal dentistry is more of a hobby than a career. The missions sponsored by Emily’s foundation serve the dual purpose of treating the animals and training the next generation of carnivore oral surgeons. Several dozen dentists, who practice on pets, horses, and people in their working lives, have participated in foundation missions as teachers or students, volunteering their time and paying their own way. Harvey, of the American Veterinary Dental College, said that he hopes his group will create a way to recognize competence in exotic-animal dentistry. This could help to insure that there are alternatives to under-qualified human dentists, who sometimes harm animals when they’re brought in to perform procedures.
Emily recalled that, last year, Harvey had told him that he wanted the credential created in the next five years. “I said, ‘Why is that?’ He said, ‘We want to do that before you die, because we want to get all of that knowledge out of your head,” Emily said. While he liked the idea, he wondered whether five years would be enough. “I’ve been doing this for forty-something years,” he said. “How are you going to write down everything?”
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