{"id":16716,"date":"2013-06-15T07:01:32","date_gmt":"2013-06-15T03:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/?p=16716"},"modified":"2013-06-15T07:01:32","modified_gmt":"2013-06-15T03:01:32","slug":"say-awwww-the-dentist-who-travels-around-the-world-to-fix-animals-teeth-from-deadly-hippos-to-an-adorable-little-hedgehog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/en\/?p=16716","title":{"rendered":"Say awwww! The dentist who travels around the world to fix ANIMALS’ teeth… from deadly hippos to an adorable little hedgehog"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Steenkamp<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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

‘I’ve operated on everything from a small bat right up to a six tonne elephant.<\/p>\n

‘There’s been plenty of carnivores too – lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs.<\/p>\n

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

‘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.’<\/p>\n

Dr Steenkamp, a trained dentist and maxillofacial surgeon, performs a host of procedures including root canals, extracting teeth and scaling and polishing teeth.<\/p>\n

The most common complaints from his animal patents are fractures of teeth, infections and abscesses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Being a dentist is not always an easy job. Performing painful surgery on grumpy patients…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":16706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,155,137],"tags":[1352],"class_list":["post-16716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-other-countries","category-world","tag-gerhard-steenkamp","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16716\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive2.ankakh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}