SAN ANTONIO – Mango the monkey has been suffering from a broken, infected tooth, just like humans sometimes get.
"People do it all the time (by) biting down on hard candy (such as) jaw breakers," Dr. Rob Coke, staff vet at the San Antonio Zoo, said.
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But fixing Mango's mouth isn't as simple as fixing a human's, due to his tiny stature.
"It's a 2-pound monkey, so we obviously had magnification loops as well as ... tiny instruments to go in there to try to repair that," Coke said.
Still, he said, the procedure is pretty straight-forward.
He drilled out the diseased bone, and filled the cone-shaped tunnel with a plastic-like material.
After an hour, Mango's tooth is still broken off, but Coke expects a perfect, speedy recovery.
The anesthesia used for the procedure left him groggy, but he went right back to the exhibit with the other eight squirrel monkeys, where zoo employees said Mango was likely to milk the root canal for all it was worth.
"He's going to be hanging out with all the moms like, 'Please take care of me,'" Anita Balan, mammal supervisor, at the zoo said.