Hong Kong : Special shoes to protect elephant feet

The GORE-TEX Hong Kong team came to the rescue of two of Singapore Zoo's Asian elephants in need of special footwear.

The intensive year-long effort by the zoo and W. L. Gore & Associates, creators of the legendary GORE-TEX fabric, recently culminated in the elephants being presented with comfortable yet protective footwear to help with their ongoing foot problems.

As the world's largest land animal, elephants naturally place an enormous amount of stress on their feet. Due to a bad stumble a number of years ago, Tun, the younger of the two elephants, has one front leg longer than the others.

As a result, she limps painfully and the extra pressure she places on the shorter front leg has created lesions on the sole of this foot. Meanwhile, 30-year-old Jamilah has lesions on the soles of both her front feet owing to her habit of swaying from side to side.

As Singapore Zoo veterinarian, Dr Sonja Luz explains, treatment has been difficult. "Try asking an elephant to take some weight off for a while," she jokes.

Dr Luz's team began thinking about ways to protect the elephant's bandages so that the lesions had time to heal. Tun's unbalanced walk also had to be addressed if she was to have a chance of full recovery.

"The best solution we could think of was some type of protective boot that was durable enough for elephant wear-and-tear and possibly also waterproof, it had to be made from a material that allowed the wound to breathe to prevent fungal infections. Most importantly, it would also provide comfort to the elephant."

"GORE-TEX fabric immediately came to mind," she says. In December 2006, Dr Luz contacted W. L. Gore & Associates in Hong Kong to seek expert advice on whether the breathable, waterproof technology of GORE-TEX footwear could possibly be adapted to footwear solutions for the elephants. The project immediately captured the hearts and minds of the product development team.

Source at Fibre2fashion.com