A cat that had its back feet severed by a combine harvester has been given two prosthetic limbs in a pioneering operation by a UK vet.
The new feet are custom-made implants that “peg” the ankle to the foot. They are bioengineered to mimic the way deer antler bone grows through the skin.
This is Oscar. And he really is bionic!
Technically, they are intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthetics (Itaps,) which means they used naturally occurring processes to understand the engineering of replacing Oscar’s back feet. Noel Fitzpatrick, a veterinary surgeon based in Surrey, pioneered the process, and explains:
The real revolution with Oscar is [that] we have put a piece of metal and a flange into which skin grows into an extremely tight bone.
We have managed to get the bone and skin to grow into the implant and we have developed an ‘exoprosthesis’ that allows this implant to work as a see-saw on the bottom of an animal’s limbs to give him effectively normal gait.
Watch the video and see how Oscar wobbles for his first few steps. Then he’s off and, literally, running, even after months recovering from the original injury and waiting to heal from the surgery.
What were my thoughts on this event that made me, admittedly, teary-eyed?
Some jerk is going to complain. Sure enough, the story that goes into depth about how Oscar and his people got into this situation has, as the second comment, this:
While it is nice that an individual cat didn’t have to put down I would think it would be more animal friendly to adopt a cat from an animal shelter instead and then also donate the rest of the money which was not spend on a single cat for improvement to that animal shelter.
Perhaps “jerk” is a bit harsh, since this commenter at least wants to give this theoretical money to an animal shelter instead of starving children, as these kind of commenters are prone to suggest. However, I reserve the right to actually append “clueless” to whatever we might call this person, because this option certainly wouldn’t be animal friendly to Oscar, would it?
How would Clueless react to the suggestion that a child undergoing expensive treatment should be “put down” and the money saved goes to some orphanage? Where the people who just lost a child could find another one? I mean, isn’t that just a win-win?
People like Clueless don’t make suggestions like that, because they think of children as unique and irreplaceable. Which they are. But they think of cats as fungible; identical, interchangeable, mere moving ornaments. Which they are not.
I could tell Clueless that Oscar has performed a great boon to humanity; the surgeon is using this operation as the basis to move on to people from here, because humans who have lost their feet could reap the same benefits Oscar has.
That could possibly make an impact. Because Clueless obviously does not get that Oscar’s people wanted him back, with a good quality of life. That is why they agreed to let him live at the vet hospital for months; they were thinking about what was best for him, not what was best for them.
That’s what Clueless does not grasp.
That’s what makes it love.
Oscar’s accident wouldn’t have happened indoors. To keep our cat both safe and happy, see all my posts on cats and the great outdoors.
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There’s more ways to care for our cat with The Way of Cats than the article you are reading now. See all of my posts on CAT CARE.
The video made me emotional as well. I was so impressed by the attitude of the vet and his team. They all clearly love Oscar. And, yes, it is a lot of money to spend on one cat but nothing in comparison to what is spent on the evils of this world – weapons, drugs, etc; the insane luxuries with which the rich indulge themselves; or the bread and circuses of our media, celebrity and sports obsessed culture. All kindness to suffering creatures is a virtue and should be applauded as such. As the Jewish Talmud says, “He who saves one life, saves the world entire.”
why are her legs like that?