Dentists Repair Elephant's Tusk

Devidasan is a working elephant in India, but his painful broken tusk put him at risk for infection, and it prevented him from being able to participate in festivals. His owner opted to have dentists in the area repair the tusk in the first operation of its kind.

Dentists used a special type of resin designed to fill cracks in teeth and hold them together. Of course, the elephant required quite a bit of resin—forty seven tubes to be exact. It took the dentists two and a half hours to repair the tusk, which required a lot of patience on the part of Devidasan, who was not put to sleep during the operation.

According to the reports, the elephant seemed a lot happier after the repair was complete.

[Illustrative image courtesy of Matthew L Stevens' Flickr stream.]