At 16.5 years old, Kemala is considered a geriatric tiger, and being able to monitor her health becomes increasingly important as she ages. Even more important is doing so with minimal stress.
Many years ago, Kemala had participated in a voluntary blood collection. However, Kemala's relationship with Wildlife Health staff changed after an emergency medical intervention and she remained in the Wildlife Health Centre for a week undergoing daily tests. Although Kemala survived this brief health scare, her trust did not.
The Keeper team has worked with Kemala ever since then to regain her trust, and eventually, she trusted her Keepers during injection training, however, she would not participate at all if a Veterinarian or Veterinarian Technician were close by. In late 2023, Kemala would finally participate in training if a Vet Tech stood at the doorway to the Tiger House (and only if they did not speak or make eye contact). Unfortunately, a Veterinarian or Vet Tech would need to carry out the actual procedures, so more work had to be done.
The team started to use an area for these training sessions that Keepers did not often work with her in and changed the training sessions to always include a third person. This slightly helped, but the big breakthrough came when we realized that staff coming from the Wildlife Health Centre might smell different to Kemala.
One of the strongest animal odors of Indo-Malaya (and a favourite scent for the tigers) is that of the greater one-horned rhinos. The Keeper team finally had success when a Vet Tech wore coveralls that we kept in our rhino barn. With these rhino-scented coveralls, Kemala's training finally progressed and Hannah and the tiger team successfully collected blood from Kemala and injected her for her immobilization this fall -both voluntarily!
Since these procedures, Kemala has recovered extremely well and her trust appears to have remained intact. This was especially very important during crate training for Kemala’s move to the Amur tiger habitat while the new boardwalk is built.
Great job to the Indo-Malaya Keeper team and the Vet Techs for their support! And a special thanks to Vishnu and Kiran for being so smelly!