Brown bear in Kent to undergo pioneering brain surgery

A two-year-old brown bear is to undergo pioneering brain surgery, making him the first ever bear to undergo the procedure in the UK.

Transcript

00:00So my name's John, I'm head of bears for Wildwood Trust and I'll just give you a

00:04little bit of an update on Boccy and how he's doing. So we actually transported

00:08Boccy via van to Noel Fitzpatrick's centre and he underwent an MRI scan and

00:15the results from that came back that he actually is suffering from something

00:18called hydrocephalus which is a build-up of fluid on the brain.

00:23Unfortunately we're not entirely certain still what is the cause of that, we

00:28obviously will keep working to find out and we'll do our absolute best by him.

00:32But there is a surgery that Boccy can actually undergo so he can have a shunt

00:38put in that will lead from his brain down into his stomach and it will

00:42actually alleviate the fluid that's building up on his brain. This is a very

00:46very rare thing so this has only ever happened that we know of, it's only ever

00:50happened to one other bear in history. That bear was operated on successfully

00:56by a specialist, his name is Romain Pizzi, a specialist international zoo vet

01:02and he's volunteered to actually come to Wildwood and he's

01:07going to help us and he's going to perform that surgery on Boccy himself

01:10which is absolutely amazing. So I say you know it's only happened once in history

01:14and we've been unbelievably lucky to be able to get the vet who performed that

01:20operation before he's going to come here and do it again so that's just that's

01:24the best news, that's the best possible result we can get for Boccy.