By Dr. Robert Kelly, D.M.D.
The Mountain Times
It was recently reported in People magazine that a 34-year-old male bull elephant at the Jacksonville Zoo in Florida recently had dental surgery. And this was not just any elephant, but Michael Jackson’s elephant, Ali, who once upon a time lived at his Neverland Ranch.
Ali was born in the wild and was donated by Michael Jackson to the zoo in 1997 when he became too big to handle at Neverland Ranch. He was actually in the news in 2018 when someone accidently left a gate open and he got out and started wandering around the courtyard of the zoo just outside his enclosure.
Ali originally broke off part of his left tusk about 15 to 20 years ago while playing. In the past few years his right tusk had gotten infected requiring 2 previous surgeries. Just recently they did surgery to remove the infected tusk because it was getting worse. It’s quite the undertaking to do surgery on an 11,000 pound patient! A 30-person team was needed for the surgery due to the complex animal anatomy, anesthesia challenges, and the large tusk size. On the veterinarian team were experts from across the U.S., South Africa, and India so people from all over the world flew in to help. The surgery took a little over three hours to perform and about six months to plan ahead of time.
Thankfully everything went as planned and Ali is doing well, albeit missing a tusk.