Purdue's Veterinary Medicine treats wallaby's dislocated hip.

Using a device called a Tightrope™, a small animal surgery team at Purdue's College of Veterinary Medicine recently treated the dislocated hip of a female wallaby from Lafayette's Columbian Park Zoo. Wallabies are small or mid-sized marsupials, or pouched, mammals that belong to the kangaroo family and are found primarily in Australia and on nearby islands, according to National Geographic. They are usually smaller than kangaroos. Mark Rochat, clinical professor and chief of small animal surgery in the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences at the college, said the key to surgery on the wallaby was using the Tightrope™ to "create a new round ligament." "We basically treated it like a dog with a hip dislocation," Rochat said. "The hip is a ball-and-socket joint and the round ligament is one of the major anatomic structures that holds the ball in the socket. The Tightrope™ is incredibly strong and its job is to take the place of the torn round ligament and hold everything in place, until scar tissue can build up and other structures damaged by the dislocation can heal." There are some distinctions, of course, between a dog and a wallaby, Rochat said. "The anatomy of the wallaby hip is different from the dog, which makes sense given their very different way of locomotion," he said. "It was a very interesting surgery." "The wallaby seems to be doing fine, and radiographs made about a month after surgery showed the Tightrope™ in place and doing its job," Rochat said. Credit;.purdueexponent