CONSIDERAÇÕES ANESTÉSICAS E CONTENÇÃO EM GRANDES FELINOS

Abstract

Anesthesia is a very important practice in Veterinary Medicine, it is used most of the time to provide analgesia and relaxation and has several purposes. Already in large wild cats, the focus is on restraint due to more aggressive behavior. These require additional care compared to domestic cats when it comes to their wild behavior. There are two types of containment, physical and chemical, which contribute to the safe maintenance of these animals and the technical team involved in this procedure. Physics basically consists of capturing and immobilizing the animal using equipment such as cages, nets, darts, among others. It has been replaced by chemistry, which implies the use of tranquilizing, hypnotic or anesthetic drugs and is faster and more efficient. Considerations should be made to choose the best form of containment between free-living or captive animals, as well as the route of drug administration, maintenance and procedure time. The procedures that require anesthesia most performed in these species are routine examinations, dental and orthopedic procedures, placement and reapplication of dressings and / or medications and capture of free-living animals. Due to less knowledge about wild cats, anesthetic complications occur more frequently compared to domestic cats. There are associations between drugs that reduce side effects and increase the safety of the procedure for the animal's health, as well as reversers. It is extremely important that the responsible veterinarian has the knowledge to develop a good anesthetic protocol. For the elaboration of the work, the species of big cats most found in the Brazilian territory were considered: Panthera leo (lion), Panthera onca (jaguar), Panthera tigris (tiger) and Puma concolor (puma).