News and Stories

Many of you may be familiar with Kris the cheetah being a star in our Cat Ambassador Program. She is well known for her incredible running speeds and her relationship with her companion dog, Remus. Kris has always had such a fun, confident and tenacious personality and has captured the hearts of everyone since she was born in July 2019.

A week ago during her routine cheetah run in our encounter mid sprint Kris unexpectedly fell. It was shocking to all in attendance, her trainers included. The response was quick in keeping Kris calm and seeking medical treatment with our veterinarians. They did an on-site x-ray and found nothing broken in her spine and were able to quickly get her to MedVet to do an MRI. Once there, it was found that she had a partially ruptured intervertebral disc, and her spinal cord sustained some trauma. This caused her to lose mobility in her back legs in an instance during that run. The cause of this is unknown, but it was likely an accident that happened where her spine tweaked in just a way to cause the damage. This can happen in dogs, in breeds such as greyhounds, which makes sense because those are also very fast animals.

Kris’ spinal cord was still intact therefore surgery was not needed. Treatment was to keep her as calm as possible, and allow her to heal herself with medication necessary to keep her relaxed and out of pain. When we first brought her back to the zoo she did not have any movement of her back legs or tail for the first few days. Kris was a bit agitated, which is understandable; however, she was still willing to let her trainers come in and clean her and feed her. Over the past week we have seen some incredible improvement. We were not sure what her level of mobility would be after the injury, but every day there was a little bit more movement. At first we started to notice her flex her toes on her back right leg, then she was getting better use of keeping her feet underneath her and another day we noticed her start to twitch her tail. Within the past couple days she has been getting more use of her back legs and trying to take some steps! This is a remarkable improvement for such a short amount of time. To keep her comfortable during this “bed rest” time we have been sitting with her, playing her music and she has been watching a lot of movies. She really enjoyed watching Monsters Inc. yesterday.

We are taking things step by step, day by day and thrilled Kris has been getting better. It is likely we will start physical therapy at some point to help her with her mobility in hopes that she will be able to walk around steadily again.

While it does look like Kris’ running days may be behind her, we are just so happy that it looks like she will be able to walk again. Stay tuned for more updates in her recovery and thank you everyone for the well wishes for Kris and our team!