Here in the Great Land, we’re accustomed to dealing with bears. We are, after all, the only state in the Union that has three species of bears, those being the black, the brown/grizzly, and the polar. And we’re also well acquainted with those animals’ capabilities, including their bone-crunching jaws and railroad-spike teeth.
But those teeth, like any other mammal’s teeth, can go wrong. In Duluth, Minnesota’s Lake Superior Zoo, an Alaskan brown bear named Tundra had one of his choppers go bad, and now Tundra is the recipient of the world’s largest dental crown.
An Alaska brown bear at the Lake Superior Zoo in northeastern Minnesota has a gleaming new silver-colored canine tooth in a first-of-its-kind procedure for a bear.
The 800-pound (360-kilogram) Tundra was put under sedation Monday and fitted with a new crown — the largest dental crown ever created, according to the zoo.
“He’s got a little glint in his smile now,” zoo marketing manager Caroline Routley said Wednesday.
I was unable to confirm a rumor that Tundra was thinking of becoming an aspiring rapper, thus showing off his shiny chopper on stage. But musical career or not, Tundra’s new tooth set a record.
The hour-long procedure was done by Dr. Grace Brown, a board-certified veterinary dentist who helped perform a root canal on the same tooth two years ago. When Tundra reinjured the tooth, the decision was made to give him a new, stronger crown. The titanium alloy crown, made by Creature Crowns of Post Falls, Idaho, was created for Tundra from a wax caste of the tooth.
Brown plans to publish a paper on the procedure in the Journal of Veterinary Dentistry later this year.
The video of the procedure was tastefully done. Such procedures can be grizzly viewing to those unprepared for them. Fortunately, the people assisting Dr. Brown, I imagine, would happily paws to bear witness.
Zoo bears, of course, tend to lead easier lives than wild bears, resulting in them not having as much good, hard muscle as their wild counterparts; one might almost say they are gummy bears. A little bear conditioning may be in order.
But even bears who aren’t physically fit can suffer from bad teeth. Besides, poor dental hygiene can be em-bear-assing, leading to the animal having to wave off on such events as bearaoke and blue-bear-y pie eating contests.
See Also: Strange Kentucky Home Intruder Bear-ly Got Away With It
U of Florida Makes Earth-Shattering Discovery on What Causes Alligator Attacks
Now that we’ve gotten our bearings on this record-breaking tooth, it’s important to restate that these animals, in or out of zoos, aren’t big, friendly fluffballs. Coastal browns like Tundra can weigh over half a ton. They can run 35 miles an hour, they can rip the door off a 1-ton pickup, and bite through a moose’s femur. They are the very definition of an apex predator, and coastal browns like this are exceeded in size and danger levels only by their close cousins, the polar bear. They may be wary of humans, but they aren’t particularly afraid of anything or anyone. And, of course, they are magnificent.
We’re fur-tunate to have them around.
I’ll be here all week. Try the veal, and don’t forget to tip your server.
If you miss out on signing up for a RedState VIP membership, you’ll bearly bear-lieve how much you’ll wish you hadn’t pawsed to think about it first. Don’t wait until things are bruin over; join RedState VIP today and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
