Great Horned Owl Has a Concerning Eye Injury | The Vet Life | Animal Planet

Today is very, very interesting and exciting. I have an owl patient here. Their primary veterinarian is away, so I'm going to try to help him out where I can. Hi. Hi, how y'all doing? I'm Dr. Blue. I'm Gwen Skye. I'm Maria. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you all. Yesterday at the wildlife park, one of our owls we noticed had an eye injury, and we saw that it was really bad, and so they were able to get us in here right away. I'm glad you guys caught me. We never want to take the risk of losing an eye. Let's go ahead and get the owl out to see what we got going here. Okay, we have our gloves. We brought you one just in case. Okay, all right. They have big talons, so we want to be prepared in case. So with owls, you definitely have to be cautious. These guys got sharp beaks, sharp talons. They can rip through flesh, so you got to be real careful with that. This is quite an exciting day for me. You know, I don't see owls that often at all, if ever. This greyhorn owl is really, really cool, but this eye looks pretty bad. I'm concerned with it. What is her name? Girl owl, very original. You see her big old feet? Mm-hmm. Those talons are the real deal. There we go. Oh, there we go. The female owl is really special. We're eventually working on having her be an ambassador animal, if you will, to be able to educate people on an animal that they wouldn't normally see. So my hope is that the owl's eye will be able to be fixed, and she'll be able to make a full recovery. Let me see if I can get a good glimpse of these eyes. Just kind of get in here. There we go. Ooh! All right, all right, all right. So if you look at the opening, the pupil, you see how it's very round here? Yes. On this one, it's abnormal in shape. I think that it could have been a foreign object actually poking to the eye. I have seen chickens and things like that collecting sticks and twigs for their nesting, bending down and actually something puncturing the eye. Okay. Okay, what I'd definitely like to do is go over everything in totality. You know, I have all my instruments in the back that we can look at the eye. So I think it'll be a hoot to kind of pick up and see what's going on here. Let's get back to the treatment area. Okay, sounds good. All right. All right, Carla, surgery went really good. Thank you for your help. All right, so right this way. We can come right in here. Dr. Ross, I got something coming in here. Man! Try to keep him calm if you could. Right, we have an owl? Yeah. We need to have this eye looked at. We'll help Dr. Blue out. Want me to put the E. coli on? Yeah, put the E. coli on and we'll be good. Want me to get a culture? Yeah, grab the smallest culture. Okay. Culturette. This will let us know if we're dealing with anything fungal. Okay. Just right around the ulcer and then the lid. I know it's tight, but we good. Let me get a little bit more. All right. So we got a sterile sample. I like to stain the eye. What I'm using here is just a fluorescein stain. Okay. Okay, and this actually picks up any type of abrasion that's on the eye. All right, we just want to do a drop right here. Okay. Don't you mind hitting that light for me. Okay. So you see that raised area? That shows the area of the ulcer and the abrasion. Okay. Okay, so we have a significant size there. Now here's the issue. You see how it's elevated or raised? That is my main concern right now. The actual iris, the colored part of the eye, is actually, it's so inflamed that it's actually attached to the clear part of the eye, the cornea, and we call that senechia. Senechia is one of those issues where you have attachment of the iris to either the front part of the chamber or the rear part of the chamber. The issue with it is you're throwing off the actual pupil's shape, which is causing a difference in its ability to dilate and constrict. It also interrupts the flow of fluid between the chambers, which can lead to glaucoma and ultimately blindness. What I think is important right now is we need to start the treatment. We're going to do anti-inflammatories for about two days. We want to reduce as much swelling as possible, and the idea is to have that iris to release from the cornea. Okay. Let's say everything goes well and it doesn't get bad. Is this eye going to go back clear? The eye should return back to normal. If we don't have any improvement, then I definitely want you to go see an ophthalmologist about this because she could lose the eye because of the trauma that has occurred. Even though Girl Isle is an animal that's in captivity, her eyes, like any animal's eyes, is very important. They use them to hunt, they use them as nighttime vision. For them to adjust to life without that, it's got to be traumatic. So hopefully we can fix the eye. I want to see her back in about two days. Of course, if things look worse tomorrow, tonight, then we need to get her in right away. But the important thing is going to be to watch it like a hawk. laughs Watch it like an owl. Whoa! laughs Looks like she's going to do some work for us over there. Hello, hello, how's it going? Hi. Dr. Ross. Joanna. And this is Hoppy? This is Hoppy. And I'm looking over the record and I see that Hoppy's here for a consult about his limb. Yes, sir. It does seem to cause him some pain. That's the reason I wanted you to look at him. I rescued Hoppy from the shelter. He was set to be euthanized. His leg was deformed like this. So we don't know a lot about him before that. He's a very sweet boy. While looking at Hoppy's limb, a list of differentials do come out to me. The first thing I think about is an angular limb deformity, and that's something that's congenital. Good boy. That's a good baby. Hold on, hold on. That limb, he could have been born with it. Another thing that comes to me is, are you familiar with rickets? I've heard about it. Rickets. Ricket is a disease that they get when they have a vitamin D deficiency. Okay. But most times we see injuries like this, it's trauma. Hit by a car, fell off the bed, broke the limb at a young age, and it starts to develop and heal abnormally if it didn't get the special attention that it needs. We're going to start off with doing some x-rays, but the x-rays will let us know in totality what's going on with that limb. Sadly, a lot of shelter dogs have been abandoned and abused, so my gut's telling me that trauma could be the reason why Hoppy's leg is the way it is. But we're going to look at these x-rays and figure out what's going on with Hoppy. You ready to come with me? Can I take you? Come on, bubba. I have to give Joanna a lot of credit. A lot of people would not rescue a disabled dog. Hopefully I can bring some comfort to the both of them with my findings. 1, 2, 3, roll. Just like that. Perfect. So if you could just hold Hoppy, I'm going to pull up these x-rays. This is the bad limb. Dr. Ross, what do you think it might be? Looks like it has a congenital defect. Born with it, this is what I'm worried about. We have a lot of osteoarthritis, a lot of bone fragments. That's not normal. That lets me know that the body's eating away at the bone. And unfortunately, there's no way to treat that. It has to be amputated. This limb definitely needs to come off. So looking at these limbs side by side, you can see the texture of this particular bone here is not as dense as this bone. It almost looks translucent, meaning that you can see through it. You have all these lesions on a bone that is making that bone very brittle. And it's going to just make it weak, weak, weak to the point where one day it could just... It could pop apart, basically. So it's just eating away at itself. Yes. Unfortunately, this is a degenerative disorder, so it worsens with time. If we don't take care of this, the bone could crumble and cause severe pain. Looking at these x-rays, I recommend going ahead and removing that limb. Okay. No owner wants to hear the news that their baby's going to have to lose a limb. But there's actually happy three-legged dogs. And I'm positive that Hoppy will be no exception. It's okay. Mama loves you. I know. I love you. You're going to be okay. Yeah? I know it's a hard pill to swallow. It's a very hard decision to remove his leg because I feel like this should have never happened to him. I just feel bad that he's 2 years old and he's got to lose his leg. You know, that he couldn't have had just a normal life and not have to go through anything. He has a long life ahead of him. The thing we don't want is for him to be uncomfortable for the next 3 to 8 years of his life. And that's not a decision that you have to make now. You can sleep on it, you can call me, and we can talk about it farther in depth. But I want you to be comfortable with making a decision. Well, I mean, I trust your opinion, you know, so I want to do what's best for him. You know, I want him to understand that I'm not doing this to hurt him, that I'm doing this because I love him. If I don't have his leg removed, he's going to have trouble in the future that's going to cause him to be more uncomfortable. So it's a decision that I feel like I have to make while he's young enough to be able to cope with having 3 legs. I love you. Hi, I'm Dr. Levine, how are you? I'm Tatum, how are you? Tatum, nice to meet you. And this is Shaman? Yes. All right. My name is Tatum, this is my mom, and this is my hedgehog, Shaman, and we're here for basically a thorough checkup. I've been told you're the hedgehog ambassador. Basically, yeah, that's what she calls me. I love hedgehogs, and she's really special because I've had her since she was a little tiny baby. She was 6 weeks old when I got her. And I love her, and she's like my best friend. So you're here to give Shaman a basic checkup? Yeah. She really needs her nails trimmed because her nails grow really, really fast. And she's got some fuzz that's kind of like... Yeah, I see that. Fleece blankets, like I've read everywhere, are the best blankets to get a hedgehog, and that's all fleece blanket fuzz that she has gathered on her quills. This girl's pretty impressive. Not very often I get a kid to come in and is so knowledgeable about their pet. She's obviously taking really good care of her. All right, well, let me go get her nails trimmed, and we'll get her quills all cleaned out. I'll be right back. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Come on, Shaman. Look what I got. It's your favorite. They just came in for just a general checkup. Hedgehogs are certainly not a common pet, especially for kids. Her nails are overgrown. We're gonna trim her nails up, and then she's got this fuzz that's getting collected in her quills. Proper care can be a little difficult. They need to be in a warm environment and can typically have a problem with obesity. So you have to be prepared to keep the room warm and have them on a strict diet. Oh, so I see the fuzz. Is this from the blanket? Yeah. Okay. Are you gonna use forceps? Mm-hmm. I think you need to stay out of the fleece blankets. Of all the major treatments and surgeries that I do, sometimes it's the little things like, you know, cleaning Shaman's quills that can be the most tedious jobs. But it's really good to, you know, get these quills cleaned out, because the more stuff that gets trapped in these quills, the more uncomfortable it can be for Shaman. Plus, it can just, you know, hide underlying issues on the skin. There we go. De-fuzzed. Hey, there. Aw. You're kind of cute. Alrighty. Yay! She did good. Oh, she looks so clean. Yeah, it took a little while to get all that. I was able to look in her mouth. Her teeth look good. She looks very healthy. She's not overweight. You're doing an excellent job taking care of her. I think you are the ambassador. Aw. I'm really happy with this treatment, because her nails look fabulous, and she has no more fuzz, and she's healthy. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Nice meeting you. Take care. Thank you. You, too.