NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — The Nashville Zoo loaded a 360-pound bear into the dentist Tuesday.
Pinocchio, who is an Andean bear, underwent a root canal. Originally from Ecuador, he was found abandoned as a cub and was considered unfit for release back into the wild. The International Union for Conservation of Nature considers Pinocchio’s species threatened, with an estimate of fewer than 20,000 bears left in the wild as of 2023.
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In 2017, Pinocchio arrived at the Salisbury Zoo in Maryland before coming to the Nashville Zoo in 2023. He spends most of his days eating grapes, drinking honey water and greeting his zookeepers. However on Tuesday, Pinocchio visited the dentist.
“We brought him in from another zoo to hopefully breed and have a great relationship with Luca — our female bear,” director of veterinary medicine at the Nashville Zoo, Heather Schwartz, said.
“The keepers were noticing just some change of behavior, that he was rolling food around in his mouth and just seeming like he would chew on one side of the mouth versus the other,” Schwartz said.
The 360-pound bear was sedated with anesthesia for several hours to undergo a root canal.
“It’s important because the pulp is live nerve tissue, so it is painful. The problem with dogs, cats, bears, zoo animals — they don’t let you know that it is painful,” veterinarian and certified dentist/oral surgeon, Keith Stein, said.
According to the vets, the procedure is much like a human’s dental experience.
“It’s a longer tooth than most,” Stein said. “The working length, or the length from our instruments to the end of the tooth to the socket, was 45 millimeters. For example, a cat would probably be 15 to 20.”
“The process is the same. The tooth is infected on the inside with the pulp,” Stein explained. “So we go in and remove the infected pulp, clean out the inside of the tooth, disinfect it, and then pack it with dental materials and put some restorations, like fillings.”
While working on Pinocchio, Stein also found two broken molars. He removed those and stitched him up. Pinocchio is on the road to recovery with a soft food diet for the next 10 to 14 days and has a check-up scheduled in four to six months.
