WASHINGTON — It’s one thing to give an amputee a prosthetic leg, but when the patient grows by thousands of pounds, adjustments are sometimes needed.
Mosha the elephant stepped on a land mine on the Thailand-Myanmar border 10 years ago, when she was seven months old. Her right front leg had to be amputated.
About two years later, she couldn’t walk correctly, and without a prosthetic leg. Surgeon Therdchai Jivacate told Reuters, “The way she walked was unbalanced and her spine was going to bend. She would have died.”
She got a prosthetic leg when she was 2 1/2 — she was the first elephant ever to get one. But when a patient grows from 1,300 pounds to more than 4,000, a baby leg won’t make the grade anymore. So Mosha has had a succession of new legs over the years; this latest one is her ninth.
Mosha lives at the Friends of the Asian Elephant Foundation hospital, where her leg was amputated — the first hospital in the world of its kind. In all, 17 elephants live there, including Motola, who also has a prosthetic leg.
