A two-year-old brown bear living in a UK wildlife park is to undergo pioneering brain surgery.
Boki, who lives at a nature reserve run by the Wildwood Trust, just outside the city of Canterbury, has recently been suffering from seizures and related health issues.
An MRI scan – revealed that the 115kg animal has hydrocephalus – fluid on the brain. Staff said that whilst his condition was initially being managed with medication, this is no longer having the same effect so their next option is to perform surgery to drain the fluid.
Specialist wildlife veterinary surgeon, Romain Pizzi, the first surgeon ever to perform a similar operation on a black bear in Asia, has agreed to operate on Boki in the coming weeks.
Bear Bypass
Wildwood’s director of zoo operation, Mark Habben, says while he is confident that surgery is Boki’s best chance to live a full life, it was not a decision made lightly by members of the Trust.

He said: ‘Boki’s welfare has always been at the forefront of every path we’ve chosen since he came to us two years ago. We’d hoped his condition could be managed through medication but it became evident that it was no longer giving the relief to the seizures that we had initially seen.
‘After consulting with medical experts and considering at length the ethics of this surgery, we believe who. And there’s no one better than Romain to perform this operation – an absolute leader in his field and one of the most innovative wildlife surgeons in the world.’
The operation will be performed using keyhole surgery, and Boki will be fitted with a stent which will drain the fluid from his brain into his abdomen, before he passes it.

Whilst Boki will gain weight following the operation, the team at Wildwood is confident that his overall body length and levels of fitness will not change significantly.
Wildwood adopted Boki from another wildlife park, nearby Port Lympne two years ago after he was rejected by their brown bear family.
He had been hand-reared by keepers there and has had to learn how to behave like a bear by interacting with a pair called Fluff and Scruff who have been at the Trust after being rescued from an abandoned breeding facility in Bulgaria 10 years ago.