The Memphis Zoo’s animal hospital recently received an $800,000 donation from Tommie Dunavant in honor of her husband, the late cotton entrepreneur Billy Dunavant.
“This is Billy’s gift. This is Billy’s request, and I am making it to that hospital,” she said.
“Billy made me the head of his foundation. He asked that I not give anything until the year after his death,” said Dunavant. “My Billy loved animals. The one thing that he always kept important was medical care for these animals.”
This donation was announced shortly after the Memphis Zoo announced a campaign to raise $1.5 million dollars for the zoo’s animal hospital.
The hospital was built in 1998, and according to the Memphis Zoo, the animal hospital “serves as a homebase for everything from check-ups and evaluations to major surgery.”
According to Matt Thompson, president and CEO of the Memphis Zoo, animals are at the forefront of what they do, however he said something that is not always at the forefront is “what happens with our animal health.” Thompson said this is the most important thing to them.
The Zoo said the animal hospital services more than 3,500 animals, encompassing 500 different species. As the number of animals began to increase, so did the needs of the hospital. According to the Zoo, some of the equipment that was used when the hospital first opened is still in use today.
“The customers, the patients here at the Memphis Zoo don’t have insurance, they don’t carry cash. We can’t always afford to upgrade things the way that we should,” said Thompson.
There are a number of major equipment needs of the hospital. At the top of the list is an OmniTom-Samsung 16-Slice Premium Small Animal CT Scanner that the zoo said costs $565,000. The Zoo also needs an LED lighting for their operating room, which comes in at $100,000. The hospital is also in need of facility upgrades that are totaled at $664,000, including a floor crane to lift large animals, and other pieces of equipment such as a veterinary dental X-ray system.
Felicia Knightly, senior veterinarian at the Zoo’s hospital, said that when they are conducting things such as scheduled wellness exams, they have an elective procedure schedule, and “they have to keep up with these kinds of things.” This also means that the Zoo needs consistent and reliable equipment.
“You have to maintain that conservation-minded wellness,” said Knightly. “When we bring an animal in here for a physical exam, I need to know that I have delivery of anesthesia.” Knightly said that the animals do not come on their own, and that they are not on a leash. Most of the time the animals are sedated, and Knightly said that she needs equipment that is “absolutely reliable.”
“Anesthesia is always a risk, but boy it’s a worse risk if you’ve got dated equipment, or equipment that isn’t up to snuff. For me, it’s just having things that aren’t dry-rotted, that haven’t been used for years and years and years. Some people say ‘just buy a new one,’ but we just can’t buy a new one. We’re a non-profit organization, and a lot of these things are quite expensive in the medical field.”