A huge female Nile crocodile from a St. Augustine, Florida zoo had to undergo surgery to remove a visitor’s slipper from her stomach that fell into her cabin when the owner was going on a cable car.
Anuket, 10.5 feet (3.2 meters) long and 341 pounds (154 kilograms) in weight, is recovering from the intervention conducted at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine in the Alligator Farm Zoological Park of the first city founded by Europeans in what is now the United States.
If another shoe falls from the sky, it certainly won’t bring it to the jaws, as crocodiles are not the animals that stumble on the same stone twice.
The reptile was seen with the shoe in its mouth in December. He swallowed it and vomited it several times until it stuck in his stomach, according to a statement from the Veterinary School that saved his life.
At the zoo, they tried to get him to expel him naturally, but they couldn’t, so Anuket ended up in the Hospital of the Veterinary School.
Garrett Fraess, a resident of the veterinary hospital, tried to get the slipper out of his stomach through his esophagus by inserting an arm into his mouth, evident after Anuket was well sedated.
That didn’t work, because her arm wasn’t long enough for these types of animals, so she had to go to the operating theater.
There, the great vet Adam Biedrzycki tried to push the shoe through an incision in the esophagus and that didn’t help either.
Anuket eventually underwent gastric surgery in which they eventually took off his shoe, which, according to the photos, was unusable.
The female Nile crocodile spent the night at the Veterinary College and returned to St. Augustine the next day.