A two-year-old Myanmar bear named Nyan Htoo had to have his tongue removed by veterinarians after it grew so big that it dragged on the floor.
A team of veterinarians traveled to a monastery about four hours outside Yangon earlier this month to perform emergency surgery to remove the nearly 7-pound tongue, which was prevented Nyan Htoo from closing his mouth.
“I’ve worked with bears for over 10 years and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Heather Bacon, a veterinarian from the University of Edinburgh who performed the surgery, told the Guardian. “It’s pretty astonishing.”
Nyan Htoo is an Asiatic black bear – commonly called a moon bear because of the crescent-shaped mark on its belly. He was rescued by monks from smugglers, who were trying to send him to China, where bear gall bladder bile is used in traditional medicine.
The monks noticed Nyan Htoo’s rapidly growing tongue and contacted a local vet who had studied in the UK, and this vet called in Bacon to perform the surgery.
The vets believe the tongue’s swelling could have been congenital or caused by the mosquito-borne parasitic infection elephantiasis, which is common in humans but has not previously been recorded in other animals.
The removal of the tongue was a last-ditch effort to salvage Nyan Htoo’s health and quality of life. Another group of vets visited the bear last year and attempted to remove some of the excess tissue from the tongue, but it continued growing afterward.
“We had a lot of discussion and debate because it’s a major surgery that you cannot undo, but we felt in terms of his quality of life it was the best way to give him as normal a life as possible,” Bacon said.
“Having to carry around 3 kilos of tongue is not normal, and that’s a lot of weight on his jaw and head. Also, since he was dragging it around on the floor, from a hygiene point of view it’s pretty unpleasant, and he couldn’t ever close his mouth. Now he should be able to close his mouth and manipulate food,” she said.
“It’s likely he’ll have a period of learning and adaptation because he’s obviously never experienced this before.”
