SEATTLE — As animal keeper Karen McRae does her daily rounds, the animals she tends to have learned to pick her out of a crowd.
“I think she sees me now,” McRae said. “Hi, Shila.”
Shila, the gray wolf, has been under her care since she was 6 years old – today, she’s 14. That’s why when Shila started losing her balance earlier this summer, her caretaker noticed.
“My heart just dropped when I saw that because I knew it was serious and we didn’t know what was wrong,” McRae said.
The Woodland Park Zoo's veterinary team, including Dr. Tim Storms, performed a complete medical examination and quickly identified the problem.
“Her heart was working well except for the fact that the rhythm was wrong – the heart was not beating like it should,” Storms said.
“My assertion was that this is a rare instance where we have a probably fatal condition that we can pretty easily fix if we are able to put that effort into it,” he continued.
For a human, the solution is often a pacemaker – a medical device that uses electric pulses to stimulate the heart muscle – a device that, as far as the zoo believes, has never been implanted in a wolf – that changed on June 12.
It took the surgery team just one hour to implant the small lifesaving device into the sick animal. The surgery was a success and after a short recovery, Shila is back and drawing a crowd.
“I’m so thrilled, it’s so great to see her walking around and walking like a normal wolf,” Storms continued.
Shila has now outlived her lifespan in the wild—she’s still standing as the literal lone wolf of her pack, even though her three littermates have since passed.
“Now that she has the pacemaker, she seems like five years younger – her activity level and her energy and her interest in things, it’s been very dramatic,” McRae said.
Shila is standing strong as a symbol of both science and nature.
Pacemaker proven successful in gray wolf at Woodland Park Zoo after groundbreaking surgery
“Now that she has the pacemaker, she seems like five years younger," a zoo staff member said.