Less than two weeks into their new season, officials at Innisfail’s Discovery Wildlife Park are dealing with the loss of another star attraction.
Cleaver, the zoo’s 14-year-old Bactrian camel, passed away on Thursday evening, said Serena Bos, the park’s head zookeeper.
“It was quite sudden. It wasn’t something we were expecting,” a solemn Bos said Monday morning.
The zoo opened for its ninth season on April 30, still mourning the loss of its two female lions and a tiger late last year.
Bos said an autopsy showed Cleaver had an enlarged heart. Both sides of a camel’s heart are typically the same size, she said, and one side of Cleaver’s heart was discovered to be three times the size of the other.
“It is something he would have had his whole life,” she said. “That would have been a genetic issue – it would have been something he would have had his whole life, where his heart was naturally weak.”
Zoo officials recently became concerned when the normally “spry and bubbly “camel became lethargic. Blood tests showed Cleaver was suffering from low calcium levels, and he was being treated for that at the time of his death.
The autopsy also showed “stone-like” bodies in Cleaver’s liver. Bos said they are assuming it could be a build-up of calcium, but test results will not be available for another week.
“What actually caused him to pass away was definitely his heart,” she explained. “His heart was so bad that the vet was quite surprised that he was still operating and functioning at the condition he had been.”
Cleaver’s death has been especially hard on park co-owner Doug Bos, Serena said.
“All of us kind of have our special one, and that was his,” she said. “To be honest, he hasn’t left his office for three days.”
Unique in that he was broken to ride, Cleaver also had an exceptional personality, Bos explained, making his death incredibly difficult to accept. The park has had Cleaver since he was two-years-old.
“It’s probably one of the hardest ones to deal with,” she said, noting the deaths of the lions and tiger last winter were kind of expected given their advanced age. At 14, Cleaver was considered to be middle-aged for a camel.
“Everyone just kind of wants to pretend he’s still here.”
In addition to being one of the zoo’s most popular attractions, Cleaver had also appeared in the 2006 film “Deck the Halls” alongside Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick.
A memorial page has been set up on the zoo’s Facebook page.
For more on the zoo’s upcoming season, see page 5.
