See How a Dedicated Vet Helped This Sea Turtle Recover

Ver See How a Dedicated Vet Helped This Sea Turtle Recover - Wild Times at the San Diego Zoo en Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00So this turtle, we'll call her Lindsay, came to us from Galveston Bay. And she had washed in on the

00:21rocks near some fishing site. And when she came in, she was weak and depressed. She was covered

00:29with algae. She was already missing her eye and that looked like an old injury. It was

00:34not something that we even treated. It was, we cleaned it up and saw there was nothing

00:38more to do there. So once a month, we weigh and measure the turtle, monitor its skin condition,

00:44its shell. There are some diseases of turtles that show up with bumps and swellings. And

00:51so we want to make sure that the turtle's healthy. We also want to make sure that it's continuing

00:55to grow because if it's not growing, there may be a problem. And I'm kind of proud that

01:00today the turtle kind of graduated to a new scale and our old scale only goes up to five

01:05kilos and this time she hit, she hit over 7.3. So we're happy. Once they've recovered, we don't

01:12want to put them out in the cold ocean water. So we wait for the springtime when the ocean's

01:17warm and they can, they have a better chance of survival. I became a veterinarian because

01:22I love animals and I love to see animals in the wild. And I know that I feel a closer

01:27association with them the closer I am to the living animal. And when I have the opportunity

01:33to treat an animal from the wild and give it an opportunity to give it a second chance,

01:39it's like one of the greatest experiences of my life. There are some turtles that actually

01:44I get goosebumps now thinking about the release and the fact that I have had a chance to impact

01:50this animal's life and it could be out there for another hundred years.