Do you want to spend several minutes of your day gazing at photos of a turtle in a wheelchair? Well, do we have the story for you.
Meet Pedro, the handicapable turtle, a patient at Louisiana State University’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Baton Rouge.
Pedro was adopted missing one hind leg, and after a brief runaway adventure, he returned home having lost the other one. Despite his accident-prone nature, veterinarians at LSU determined that Pedro was otherwise healthy.
“There was nothing medically wrong with him,” Ginger Guttner, communications manager for LSU’s School of Veterinary Medicine, told CNN. “But of course he didn’t have any back legs, so our doctors quickly had to figure out what they were going to do.”
The solution came from a toy store. A zoological intern at the hospital picked up a Lego car kit. Using some syringe parts and animal-safe epoxy, the vets MacGyvered a little rig for Pedro’s hindquarters.
Pedro’s new wheelchair can even be snapped off the bottom of his shell for cleaning. He’s now zooming around faster than the average box turtle.
Guttner explains that such ingenuity is common in veterinary medicine. “Veterinary medicine often requires this MacGyver-like quality,” she says. “I would say the majority of special equipment we use has been fashioned or re-fashioned for a specific case.”
She recalls a team at LSU once building a little fountain to help keep a fish alive during an endoscopy. “Our patients can be two grams or 2,000 pounds, so we often have to look at things from a completely different perspective,” she says.
Now, Pedro’s story is a heartwarming testament to the creativity and dedication of veterinarians, providing another “You’ll never believe what I did at work today” story to share forever.
