ELEPHANT VASECTOMIES

 Is it possible to reduce elephant overpopulation by snipping at a bull elephant’s reproductive equipment? Dr. Dean Hendrickson, a professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine at Colorado State University, has been part of a program in Africa to see if it would be.

Hendrickson, who spoke to Boulder Rotary Club recently about his work, is a veterinarian specializing in large animals such as horses, and, it seems, elephants.

African elephants need lots of room. They are large animals, and they are destructive to their environment – uprooting trees to nibble while eating 500 pounds of them a day, stripping bark from mature trees and generally tromping over the land. In earlier times they ranged widely, allowing for regrowth of trees and vegetation, but now increased numbers of people and other uses for the land are restricting the herds’ movement.

A result is serious overpopulation of elephant herds – too many elephants for the available food supply.

In each elephant herd there is one breeding bull who claims exclusive access to all the cows, keeping other bulls away.

The vets’ theory is that a vasectomy for the breeding bull could make conception impossible while maintaining the bull’s masculine vigor. Normal elephant interactions would continue, but no calves would result from them.

Problems the team faced included not just the size of their patients and the necessity of doing surgery in the bush, but also a lack of knowledge of details of the male elephant’s reproductive anatomy. They had to begin with a detailed autopsy on a bull, locating the testes within the abdominal cavity, up by the backbone, and the vas deferens, which in the operation would need to have a piece snipped out of it, enmeshed in fat and muscle.

Performing “minimally invasive” surgery was the method of choice. But the patient has skin an inch and a half thick, and inserted instruments must be one meter to four meters in length to reach the desired spot, so the incision must be several inches long.

A sedated bull elephant is suspended in a sling from a large crane, in standing posture. An incision is made along his back, the instruments are inserted, and the surgery is accomplished by remote control using a camera in one of the probes and a monitor for the surgeon.

Once the surgery is done, the incision is closed with lengths of #5 stainless steel wire, which eventually fall out. Ordinary sutures proved too fragile to hold up under the elephant’s activities.

The bull’s recovery is fast. Once the surgeons are done, he can be released. He stands, likely gives a loud honk and trots away into the bush. Only one case has seen complications result, although some operations were unsuccessful in permanently interrupting the vas.

After seven years of experience in this program it has clearly proved a success, Hendrickson said. Calves are being tracked by DNA markers and breeding has been reduced, resulting in reduced elephant populations.

And that’s no bull.

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