Being a dentist is not always an easy job. Performing painful surgery on grumpy patients can test the patience – and nerves – of even the most experienced.

But when that patient is a six-tonne elephant needing root canal or a lion with toothache, it makes the task all the more trickier.

However, for Dr. Gerhard Steenkamp, it is all in a days work. The South African is one of the world’s top vet dentists, operating on some of the wilds most ferocious predators.

Dr Steenkamp’s work has seen him travel to China, Egypt, the UAE, and across Africa – performing around 500 surgeries a year.

The dentist, from Pretoria, said: ‘I’ve been really blessed in my career so far to work on a variety of animals.

‘I’ve operated on everything from a small bat right up to a six tonne elephant.

‘There’s been plenty of carnivores too – lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs.

‘The majority of the big animals like buffalo, hippo, rhino, elephants, they’re just so big and enormous it can be tricky.

‘Their size makes it difficult to work with them, you cannot just quickly move then around or turn them on their other side, it has to be meticulously planned beforehand.’

Dr Steenkamp, a trained dentist and maxillofacial surgeon, performs a host of procedures including root canals, extracting teeth and scaling and polishing teeth.

The most common complaints from his animal patents are fractures of teeth, infections and abscesses.