Larger animals, like an adult cow or a horse, might be out of luck though, says Fletcher, because it would be difficult for a person to generate enough force to compress the heart. ( Read about quirky squirrel behaviors, like stashing nuts.) CPR can work on any animal that’s shaped in a way that chest compressions can stimulate blood flow, and squirrels fit that bill. While he can't say whether the chest compressions actually saved these squirrels' lives, it’s certainly possible. WATCH: Squirrels balance caution and curiosity as they seek and cache their food. Of the two videos, Fletcher says Belsito's technique is preferable. Fletcher, associate professor of emergency and critical care at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine.įletcher, who teaches an online course at Cornell about pet CPR, says that for a deep and narrow chest like that of a squirrel (and many breeds of dogs and cats), it’s best to squeeze from the side rather than to apply pressure straight to the breastbone. "The challenge is that, unlike people who are all shaped kind of similarly, dogs and cats can have a lot of variability in the way their chests are shaped," says Daniel J. Whether the animal is a human, a dog, or a squirrel, the goal of CPR is to squeeze the heart long enough to get blood moving and keep oxygen flowing to the lungs. "Brought a squirrel back from the dead, what was your Wednesday like?" Belsito tweeted. ( Watch a dramatic elephant rescue in Zimbabwe.) Perhaps it’s no surprise that the freshman plans on majoring in biology, with a focus on wildlife conservation. When the animal perked up, she released it outside, where it ran up a tree. She then dried the animal and laid it on top of bags of warm water to raise its temperature. "It was just making these super slow twitches."īelsito cradled the animal in a towel and squeezed its chest for five to 10 minutes until it began to cough up water. "At that point it wasn't moving anymore," says Belsito. More than 2,000 miles away, a similar scene unfolded when Natalie Belsito, a student at Central Michigan University, resuscitated a gray squirrel fished out of a campus pond. After more than a minute of CPR, the animal begins to breathe again and scampers off. One video, shot by Emerson Salcedo D'Andrey in Colombia, shows an unidentified man compressing the chest of an Andean squirrel after it had apparently gotten zapped by a nearby powerline. Over the last two weeks, not one, but two videos have surfaced online of everyday people reviving rodents using CPR. How far would you go to save the life of a squirrel?
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