Sarabi was euthanized today due to a very aggressive cancer

 

 

I was away and Jamie had to make that call.  I think it may have been the first time for her to have to do such a heart breaking thing.  I wrote the following the the volunteers after the blood work indicated it was cancer and we had to euthanize Sarabi.

 

You hear a lot of backyard breeders saying that they are breeding Barbary Lions to save them from extinction, but it isn’t true.  Many years ago, when the King of Morocco first came up with the idea of bringing the Barbary Lion (AKA Black Maned Lion or Asiatic Lion) back from the edge of extinction, he sent a group called Wildlink to the U.S. to look at 327 captive lions who were reported to have traits of the Barbary Lion.

 

Of the 327 likely candidates only three were considered pure enough representatives of the species to use for a captive breeding program.  There were two males chosen and Sarabi, our lioness was the only female selected.  She is a representative of 14 of the 17 Barbary traits, making her the closest living relative to the cat that is now extinct in the wild.  Before the program ever got off the ground the King fell sick and his family had no interest in saving the cats who once were used by the Romans for entertainment in the coliseum.

 

We don’t believe in breeding cats for lives in cages so we never bred Sarabi, but because she may someday be called upon for her genes, we did not spay her.  She would cycle in and out of heat and did so for many years.  This last time didn’t seem any different than before until she came out of heat and wasn’t hungry.

 

She was started on antibiotics but two days later was not improving.  After an emergency consultation with three vets it was decided that we would open her up to spay her and see if there was anything else going on, such as an impaction, that was causing her to act nauseous.  It was after dark before Dr. Stacie Wadsworth, DVM and Dr. Elizabeth Wynn, DVM could wrap up their day work to come to the sanctuary.  The wind had begun to howl.  The next morning we would discover that 14 people in central Florida  had been killed in the squalls and tornadoes that spun out of those raging winds.

 

Thanks to Dr. John & Sherrod West and Richard and Debbie Boensch we have a small cat hospital on site.  Since Sarabi was too big to transport into the clinics of either of our vets (394 lbs) we were fortunate to have our own safe place for surgery and recovery that had been built with huge doors that would allow the rolling transport to roll right inside.  Scott Lope and Cathy Mayeski saw to it that the hospital was fully stocked with all that we would need and made sure that everything was clean.  Jamie and Justin Boorstein rounded up flashlights, radios and emergency gear to make the big move from Sarabi’s half acre enclosure on the other side of the lake to the cat hospital.

 

I sat with Sarabi and tried to assess her condition.  She kept giving me the image of “poison” but insisted that she hadn’t eaten poison.  She acted like she just couldn’t get comfortable.  Sometimes she would dry heave, but only briefly, and then she would lay as close as she could get to me, with only the wall of her cage separating us.  She rolled her belly up to me as if to say that this was where the pain was, and I could feel the heat, but did not touch her for fear of inflicting more pain.  (Not to mention the fact that having my arm inside the fence would have been a really stupid thing to do.)

 

Scott did an expert job of anesthetizing and I was amazed at how well trained our staff has become in emergencies like this.  On radio command they all emerged from the darkness:  The transport truck backed up to her cage, the golf carts surrounded it, she was lifted onto a blanket and hoisted into the transport by half a dozen volunteers, while some held lights and others carried the drugs and tools.  In no time she was being brought into the bright lights of the cat ho