Cincinnati Zoo Takes Proactive Health Measures to Protect Elephant Herd

So we have two young boys, young elephants who are at risk for a virus called EEHV or elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus. And this is a virus that really affects our younger elephants pretty heavily. It's been one of the leading causes of death in elephants in human care. And so we're really worried. We want to make sure that we give our boys kind of the best scenario moving forward and try to protect them from this virus as much as we can. So we had attended a conference that was specific to elephant health about this virus. And another facility had presented that they had done kind of a novel technique in which they had given a plasma transfusion to one of their elephants and see pretty promising results in terms of the antibody response. They did not have the antibodies present for one of the EEHV strains that we're worried about. And this transfusion gives them those antibodies. One of the things that we know about this virus is that if our elephants have a very low antibody titer to this virus, if they get the virus, they can become very, very sick. Once they have a full antibody response, they're pretty protected. So we wanted to try the same technique in which we give them a plasma transfusion from an elephant that already has antibodies to the virus and see if that can offer some protection to our young boys. In November of 2022, Sabu left Cincinnati Zoo, went to Columbus Zoo for a breeding loan. And the plan is that he'll be coming back here in the next few months. And he'll be coming into this new building with our new elephants. And these transfusions and other medical care is just really important when you start adding new elephants together. So since we were going to do a blood transfusion in our elephants, we had to make sure that they were compatible. So our plasma came from one of our older girls, Jotty. Plasma, you need a lot more. So we've been able to train our elephants to allow us to take blood from the inside of their back leg, which is a much bigger vessel. And they will come in again voluntarily through training. They'll stand and present one leg, allow us to take this bag of blood for the plasma. And the whole time they're just standing there eating. And it's always up to them whether they want to participate or not. Plasma is also a treatment during the actual illness. And so it may be that we call upon other zoos to give us plasma from their elephants. Now the challenge is we don't know who's compatible with our boys and who it's safe to get blood or plasma from. So there was a large grouping of institutions who have elephants who could be potential donors. And they all got together on the same day. And they collected blood from any of their eligible adults who might be giving us donations in the future. And they got blood from their elephants all on the same day and sent it to us. So that same day that we gave plasma to our boys, we also collected a blood sample from them. And we're able to cross match them against I think around 30 different elephants. So there are many, many institutions who are volunteering their potential time and help towards this effort. And then our technicians had a gargantuan effort of trying to cross match our two boys against nearly 30 elephants. We were able to find that we have a lot of different elephants around the nation that would be compatible with our boys. And this is great information to have because this means that if our boys were to get sick and we do have to call upon another institution to give us plasma or blood or some other product to help our boys, we already know who is the best match and we can ask them directly. It is something we can test for. We actually have trained all these elephants that we have to do a trunk wash, which is where we're able to put fluid into the end of their trunk. They lift their trunk up and then bring it back down and they blow the contents into a bag. We're able to send that away and kind of map with which of any of the strains of the EEHV they might have had exposure to. Now that we have all of this information, it's kind of a wait and see game. We've set our boys up for as much success as we can hope for as we're doing these new introductions with new elephants. The potential for this virus to move around is a little bit higher, but we know that they have a little bit of extra protection because of this transfusion and we have a lot more information because of this cross matching. So we have a lot more data so that we can be better prepared if they were to get sick to treat them as best we can. We don't know whether or not we're going to need to do another plasma transfusion kind of as a precautionary step, but certainly if they were to get sick we're right in the right place to be able to give them all the treatments that they need.