Rescuer's hope turns to heartbreak

Dane showed her feisty side at first. The caged 250-pound African lioness spread her jaw, displaying her lethal teeth. Unfazed, her caretakers rubbed her soft face and patted her back.

Dane then revealed her other side. She licked one of them, like a puppy, and let a veterinarian stick a needle into her left hind leg. Within minutes, Dane's eyes drooped. Her tongue stuck out, and her head slowly fell to the floor. She was under.

One of 11 lions at Big Cat Habitat and Gulf Coast Sanctuary in Sarasota County, an anesthetized Dane then underwent four hours of tests Tuesday to diagnose the cause of her paralyzed back legs.

She went down, as they say, about 10 days ago. She could not get up on her hind legs, and struggled on her front ones.

Ollo, another Big Cat lioness, went down last spring, but was back to her old self after going under the knife of Dr. Anne Chauvet at Veterinary Neuro Services LLC. Dane's five-person entourage, including the closest thing she ever had to a mother, Big Cat founder Kay Rosaire, figured Dane had the same condition as Ollo: a herniated disc.

Rosaire had the usual concerns of a loved one in a waiting room, but she was confident Dane would be back home that night, like Ollo was.

"It's like having your kid go into surgery," she said, pacing outside the small room in Chauvet's office where Dane lay on an X-ray table atop a pink quilt.

Rosaire took in Dane and her sister, Reba, nine years ago when they were cubs. Dane was just shy of her first birthday. Before coming to Rosaire, Dane was used to pose in photographs for tourists. Rosaire refused to say where.

"I can't divulge or I'll never get another cat," she said.

The worst of these big cat equivalents to puppy mills, Rosaire said, inbreed the lions and briefly use the cubs for calendar photographs or as tourist attractions. These cubs, like Dane, are prone to illness and can have genetic problems.

"She was so thin at one point when she was not well that she looked like a dog," Rosaire said. "So I named her Dane."

A former lion trainer and the eighth generation of a circus family, Rosaire spent hours hand-feeding Dane and her sister, Reba. The lionesses have since been inseparable, sharing a cage, eating together, playing together.

It was only the third time that Chauvet had worked on a lion. The surgery would have cost Rosaire $6,000, but Chauvet treats the nonprofit's exotic animals for free.

She climbed on Dane's back and stretched open her jaw to insert a tube. Her assistants shaved Dane's paws and prepped her with intravenous needles and more anesthesia. For four hours Chauvet took countless X-rays and injected fluid into Dane's spine to help with diagnosis.

They were right. Dane had a herniated disc.

But on the last X-ray Chauvet found something else. Bone cancer. It had eaten away at Dane's right shoulder. The lioness had compensated by leaning on her hind legs, which gave her the herniated disk.

With tears in her eyes, Rosaire agreed to do the unimaginable.

Chauvet's assistants removed the needles from Dane's legs and took her off the anesthesia. Chauvet injected 35 cubic centimeters of barbiturates into Dane's left paw. She got a stethoscope and checked Dane's heart.

"She's gone," she said.

Rosaire refused to watch. She sat, tissue in hand, on a sofa in the waiting room near the coffee pot and foam cups.

"Your heart just hurts," she said. "Now we've just got to worry about her sister. They're very close."