Zookeepers perform mouth to snout resuscitation to save newborn tapir

Staff at Denver Zoo saved the life of a Malayan tapir calf when they took extraordinary efforts during a recent birth. Rinny, the zoo's female tapir, was having trouble while giving birth to a calf last month and a staffer freed the newborn from the mother's amniotic sac. After successfully helping to extract the calf, zoo members aided the newborn by performing "mouth to snout rescue breaths," the zoo has said.


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The staff helped the calf get liquid out of his lungs and breathe. "It's always a little scary when something like this happens, but thankfully we all have great resources and training," said Rebecca McCloskey, an assistant curator with the zoo. McCloskey, along with staff veterinarian Gwen Jankowski, took the life-saving measures during the difficult birth on Sept. 3.

Now the male tapir named Dumadi is doing fine, walking and swimming as he grows at the zoo. Rinny is also doing well after the birth, which the first tapir birth for at Denver Zoo. Adult Malayan tapirs have a distinctive colour pattern that resembles an Oreo cookie, with black front and back parts separated by a white or grey midsection, the release said. The colouring provides excellent camouflage that breaks up a tapir's outline in forest shadows.



Young tapirs have colour patterns that more resemble brown watermelons with spots and stripes, which help them blend into the dappled sunlight and leaf shadows of the forest, protecting them from predators. Malayan tapirs are the only tapir native to Asia. Once found throughout Southeast Asia, they now inhabit only the rainforests of the Indochinese peninsula and Sumatra. With a wild population of less than 2,000, they're classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.