Veterinary medicine is a difficult field at the best of times, considering that the majority (but not all) of their patients can’t talk. It becomes even more difficult when serious health issues require surgery, and the complications only compound when the animal that needs surgery is a southern white rhinoceros. 

Amara the southern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum simum) has lived at Knowsley Safari, UK since her birth in 2022. Keepers noticed that she was walking with a limp in her front right leg and sent her for medical investigations. While pain relief and rest didn’t seem to get to the bottom of things, equine surgeons used radiographs on Amara, discovering a unusual fracture in her ulna bone, part of her leg near the wrist joint. 

The team tried to research this type of injury, but no case studies existed. Instead the surgeons had to draw on their experiences of treating horses to come up with a plan of action for surgery on a rhino. In the end the operation took five hours and was performed as keyhole surgery. 

“Amara’s operation is unlike anything we’ve experienced previously. We knew we could position the camera inside her joint, but due to the unprecedented nature of the procedure, we didn’t know how much room we would have to operate, or how much of the affected area we would be able to see,” said Dr David Stack, Senior Lecturer in Equine Surgery at the University of Liverpool, in a post on the Knowsley Safari blog. 

After the operation Amara’s leg was put in a cast, much like a human limb, and she was kept with her mom Meru and monitored closely by the keepers. The keepers also injected her with platelet-rich plasma made from her blood, helping to aid the healing process.

Eventually, 27 weeks after the leg was known to be fractured, the cast was removed and Amara was allowed back out into her paddock to join the rest of the rhinos. In the wild, southern white rhinos have had something of an incredible conservation success story, while their cousins the northern white rhinos are on the very brink of extinction. 

“Treating Amara has been a truly ground-breaking veterinary journey incorporating many firsts which we will now document should another animal team encounter similar scenarios in the future, though we very much hope the notes are never needed,” concluded Dr Stack.