Binga, a muscle-bound silverback, was feeling down in the mouth so was taken to the dentist. It took six experts to keep the mighty ape safe during a tricky procedure to fix his toothache
Vets had a very unusual patient pop in for treatment on an agonising toothache – a giant 29-stone silverback gorilla. A zoo in South Africa asked for help when its prime breeding primate, Binga, stopped eating and was feeling sorry for himself.
An examination showed a painful ulcer full of poison on a molar in his lower jaw that needed treating. So the 23-year-old Western Lowland gorilla was darted with a tranquiliser and sent to the dentist.
To deal with such a mighty ape, a team of six experts had to be assembled to keep Binga safe and unconscious during the two-hour procedure. They even held his enormous hand until it was all over. Once the problem was fixed, the gorilla was back on his feet and knuckles and reunited with his family at the zoo.
Professor Katja Koeppel was part of the vet team. She said: “This gorilla is 185kg’s or pure muscle and it can go from knocked out to wide awake in seconds and you can do nothing to hold it on the table. That is why I have to make sure I get the anaesthetic exactly right as if Binga woke up there is little we could do which is why a gun team is on full stand-by.
“Taking a gorilla to the dentist is very different to a human. When I tranquilised Binga with a shot through the bars of his cage, he charged me at full pelt and stopped a few feet short and I was just praying those bars would hold!
“Then we got him to the operating theatre for the dentist.”
University of Pretoria vet Professor Gerhard Steenkamp assessed the heavyweight’s teeth and diagnosed a painful periodontal disease on a tooth gum that was poisonous. There was no option but to remove the rotten tooth, so Prof Steenkamp went to work with a pair of forceps and pulled the molar.
Prof Koeppel said afterwards that gorillas don’t display signs of distress in the wild as rivals see it as a weakness in a dominant male. It is only through regular health checks carried out at the zoos that such conditions can be discovered.
“Binga is now healthy and pain free and has been told to always floss and brush his teeth before bedtime when he goes back to his enclosure,” she joked.
Prof Koeppel has worked with over 400 big apes like gorillas, orang-utans and chimpanzees during her career and had a few wake up before – but not a gorilla, luckily. The zoo said it was grateful for the veterinary expertise.
The Western Lowland gorillas are the smallest of the species and although silverback Binga weighed in at 185kg’s the larger types can grow to an enormous 275kg. They may look fearsome but are shy and gentle unless threatened or cornered and will bare their fangs and let out wild roars.
They have no predators except man who is destroying their jungle habitats and have taken to poaching them for bush meat.
Gorillas are so close to humans they can suffer the same diseases and illnesses, and the deadly Ebola virus has swept through the great apes killing tens of thousands. They are listed as extremely endangered with about only 150,000 left in the 700,000 square km they inhabit in Central and West Africa like Rwanda and the Congo.
They feed on fruit, leaves, berries, tree bark, nuts, rodents and lizards but their numbers are very hard to count as they live in such remote jungle and swamp areas. They live in troops of five to 15 gorillas normally with one dominant male and the rest being females and off-spring with the silverback rarely caring for the young ones.
In 2019 Binga escaped from its enclosure when a keeper left the gate open sending hundreds of zoo visitors into a panic as it strolled over to the elephant house. He was quickly recaptured and led back to his enclosure without harming anyone.
In the wild gorillas can live to 30 or 40 but in captivity can live as long as 50. Binga was born in captivity during a breeding programme at Zurich Zoo in 2001 and was sent to South Africa in 2008.
