Breed control at the WSC

News, 07.03.2011, Zsófia Virányi

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Breed control at the WSC – many thanks to a great team of collaborating vets!

Many may wonder whether we are planning to ever breed our wolves and dogs at the Wolf Science Center. The answer to this question is “Yes and No”. At the Wolf Science Center each animal has a huge value since we invest a lot of time and devotion in the raising, training and experimental routine of each of them. If we let them breed every year we would probably loose older animals as the young ones are growing up, since the enclosures can host only a certain number of animals. For this reason we need birth control. Also for animals, different hormonal treatments are already available that can control their reproductivity. These hormonal treatments, however, strongly influence also the social behaviour of the animals (e.g. reducing testosterone level of the males will prevent them from breeding but will also decreases their aggression level and accordingly may push them down to the bottom of the hierarchy), which we want to avoid. In this way, vasectomy (closing the males’ vasa deferentia – the tubes leading the sperms out during ejaculation) is the only reliable solution. For long we had been discussing the opportunity of reversible vasectomy (closing the tubes temporarily in a way that we can re-open them again when we would like to breed a certain male) but this seems not to work very well even in humans where the methods are best developed. Further on, it is a serious restriction that it may easily happen that a brother and a sister take the dominant male and female positions in our packs (like the closely related Kaspar and Shima are leading the “black pack” right now). It is, however, not the best if littermates breed with each other. For these reasons we decided to sterilize all our males, after collecting semen from the male wolves we may want to breed in the future. The semen can be frozen and stored for many years, and artificial insemination can help us to genetically pair unrelated individuals. All this makes possible that our animals can follow their natural yearly rhythms and show natural social behaviours without the risk of producing offspring to whom we may not be able to provide the best possible living conditions.

These serious decisions were made based on advice from a great team of veterinarians, and were realized through their collaboration. Nanuk and Apache were operated on 5 January 2011. Both of them had an abdominal testicle that made laparoscopic operation necessary. On 22 February 2011 we collected semen from Aragorn, Cherokee and Geronimo. The equipment for the operations was provided by the Veterinarian University of Vienna, Dr. Buchmayer’s Praxis and by the Karl Storz Endoskop Austria GmbH. Many thanks to all who helped us with the different steps of this complicated procedure!

Electroejaculation:
Uni.-Prof. Dr.med.vet. Chris Walzer, Forschungsinstitut für Wildtierkunde und Ökologie
Dr. Robert Hermes, Forschungsgruppe Reproduktionsmanagement, Leibniz-Institut für Zoo- und Wildtierforschung, Berlin

Examining, collecting and storing semen:
A.Prof.Dr. Sabine Schäfer-Somi and colleagues, Sektion Besamung und Embryotransfer, Department für Kleintiere und Pferde, Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien
Dr. Cheryl Asa, Saint Louis Zoo

Laparoscopic vasectomy:
O.Univ.Prof. Dr. Gilles Dupré and colleagues, Kleintierchirurgie, Augen- und Zahnheilkunde, Department/Universitätsklinik für Kleintiere und Pferde, Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien
KARL STORZ Endoskop Austria GmbH

Vasectomy:
Dr.med.vet. Mathilde Buchmayer, Steinbach

Anesthesia:
Dr. med.vet. Christoph Peterbauer and colleagues, Anästhesiologie und perioperative Intensivmedizin, Department/Universitätsklinik für Kleintiere und Pferde, Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien