Your morning adorable: Baby giraffe gets great care at Tufts
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Fortunately for little Molly the baby giraffe, she seems to be on the road to recovery after a rocky start. When her mother failed to produce milk, the chief veterinarian at Southwick’s Zoo in Mendon, Mass., gave her cow’s colostrum (the form of milk produced for newborn mammals, also called ‘first milk’ or ‘immune milk’) instead. But even that didn’t seem to do the trick, as the Boston Globe explains:
But Molly’s appetite was weak and she was unable to stand. On Wednesday, worried about the giraffe’s deteriorating condition, the zoo rushed her to the hospital -- the one specially designed for large animals at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in nearby North Grafton. Immediately, a team of veterinarians and neonatal technicians swung into action, giving the 2-day-old giraffe a full physical examination –- assessing her heart rate, breathing, and blood -- before determining that she was dehydrated and suffering from a low white-blood-cell count. They pushed antibiotics through a catheter into her long neck and hand-fed her bottles of goat’s milk. Now, 24 hours later, Molly appears to be thriving, hospital staff said.
Molly is expected to stay at the hospital through the weekend so she can be monitored closely.
More photos after the jump. (And don’t fret: the bandage you see on Molly’s neck is only there to cover her catheter. She’s not injured!)
--Lindsay Barnett