Recently, Werribee Open Range Zoo shared some adorable photos of a baby koala joey wearing a tiny arm cast. The photos quickly went viral and people couldn’t get enough of them.
The tiny koala joey was injured when she and her mother fell off a tree at the Victorian bluegum plantation. Sadly, the mother was severely injured by the fall, so veterinarians had to euthanize her. The poor baby lost her mother when she was just 150 days old and weighed just around 500 grams (~1lb).
“It was really touch and go when she was brought to us,” said Werribee Vet Nurse Jess Rice. “She was just at the stage where she would have been starting to poke her head out of mum’s pouch. Joeys that size don’t have a good survival rate in care.”
Although her mother passed away and chances of her survival seemed to be slim, the baby was set to have a more fortunate fate. She miraculously survived and continued fighting. An X-ray revealed that her arm was broken, so she was given an adorable mini cast to repair her broken arm.
She was later placed in the care of handlers at Werribee Open Range Zoo. But of course, she still missed her mum so much, so they gave her a temporary surrogate mum, a stuffed toy. Soon, she gained her strength, put on weight and was released to a specialist wildlife carer before being released into the wild.
“It will be more than a year before she’s old enough to be released into the wild, so she needs to be with a carer with the resources to take care of her for that long,” Ms. Rice said.
We love animals, so it’s so heartwarming to see poor animals being nursed back to health by caring humans!
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