General zoo animals, avian, reptile, marine mammals, native wildlife. The Bronx Zoo and allied institutions have a large and extremely diverse collection of animals. The student’s experience will depend upon the cases attended to during the time of the externship, and procedures undertaken in that period. Nevertheless, animals representing every class are attended to on a daily basis. The student may be involved in as many as 10-15 cases on busy days. Case rounds are held daily for hospitalized cases and animals to be attended to that day. General pathology rounds are also included in these daily case rounds. In addition, morbidity and mortality rounds are held once weekly, and histopathology rounds are held on selected cases.
The Wildlife Health Center at the Wildlife Conservation Society's Bronx Zoo is a fully-functional medical facility and as such offers all of the equipment, personnel, and infrastructure necessary to triage, treat, hospitalize, and diagnose medical and surgical conditions that may arise in a large zoological collection. WHC staff include four full-time clinical veterianrians, two clinical residents, three full-time veterinary pathologists, one pathology resident, four full-time veterinay technicians, and a large support staff of caregivers and keepers and maintainers. A medial library is housed in the WHC as well as full computer and internet resources for scholarly activities.
The extern will assist the staff veterinarians directly with all facets of zoo animal practice, attend daily medical rounds, contribute to medical records using ZIMS, assist in anesthesia and anesthetic monitoring, assist in diagnostic imaging (radiology, ultrasonography, and endoscopy) and interpretation, directly assist in and/or observe surgeries (field and hospital), contribute to preventative medicine (vaccinations, medical treatments, visual and physical examination, etc.), and will be expected to perform literature searches/reviews as necessary to have an appropriate depth of knowledge and understanding of each animal or group of animals considered. Supervised hands-on experience may be limited depending upon extern knowledge and competency. The extern will ultimately have primary case responsibility for native wildlife cases that present to the Wildlife Health Center, including daily upkeep of medical records (using the SOAP convention), medical treatments, surgeries (if necessary), and other diagnostics. The extern will present these cases during rounds, and will be overseen by staff veterinarians who will provide recommendations and critical review. The hospital functions seven-day-a-week, but the extern is only required to be present Monday through Friday. On occasion, the extern may be requested to come in for procedures during the weekend. Work hours are generally 7:30 to 5:30, but may be longer in some cases.