WEBVTT

NOTE recognizability 0.984

NOTE language en-us

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Chinook is a very smart polar bear, just like all polar bears are,

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and we've done a lot of training with her over the years, and it's

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certainly paying off currently, she is the only polar bear in the

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world ever that we can do regular ultrasounds on through training

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with her full cooperation. There's no anesthesia, no sedation. First,

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you have the keeper that she trusts the most, who is working with her

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talking. With her reinforcing her, asking her to roll over, you have

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another very trusted keeper at the other end, watching the behavior

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how her legs are positioned. If her leg starts to drop or picks up

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how relaxed she is. We then have two veterinarians involved in the

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process. One is operating the wand and moving it around the belly,

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and then we have another veterinarian that is watching the screen and

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helping to direct where the one needs to go. As you can imagine.

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Polar bears are very large animals, and Chinook weighs over 650

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pounds right now and we're basically looking for a fetus that is

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about the size of a peanut. Currently, we're only doing it once a

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week. That may change as we find different things, and we worked

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together talking together, putting her comfort level at the top

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priority, and we're very excited at how successful this has been.

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So what we realize is it's not just about pregnancy, it is about

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a great diagnostic tool that we can check our polar bears out

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without using anesthesia and the bonus will be is if we actually

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can document a fetus inside Chinook and see pregnancy, because

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currently the only way that you can tell if a polar bear is

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pregnant or not is when you see the codes and typically that's

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at birth. So we might just have an inside.