Virginia Zoo hosts ‘Teddy Bear Clinic’ for furry friends

NORFOLK — Teddy needed a checkup, so Elaina Varga took him to the zoo. Dr. Anna Lepore, an OBGYN at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, helped Teddy onto a scale and helped 7-year-old Elaina measure the toy bear’s length and weight.

Elaina is one of the many children who arrived at the Virginia Zoo on Saturday morning for the Teddy Bear Clinic, a series of check-up stations for stuffed animals. From height and weight to eyes and ears, health aspects for myriad fluffy animals were evaluated by real humans.

Doctors from the Naval hospital manned several stations for the stuffed animals: vitals; heart and lungs; eyes, ears and mouth; boo-boos and imaging; grooming; and medicine. At each table, children brought their stuffed animals for their yearly checkups, and were able to practice how visits to the physician work. Doctors showed each child how to use stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs and other medical tools.

“We’re doing this because we want children to be a little bit more comfortable when they go to the doctors,” said Nick Dzendzel, communications specialist for the zoo.

This is the second year of the Teddy Bear Clinic, Dzendzel said. He said last year, the clinic was smaller, but the staff expanded it for this year with help from Towne Bank. In addition to the clinic, guests watched Polly — a possum who lives at the zoo — receive a checkup from zoo staff, and the facility’s Animal Wellness Campus hosted chats about the health and nutrition for the zoo’s residents.

Even at the Teddy Bear Clinic, there was a waiting room. A fleet of strollers were parked outside, and patients and their child companions gathered at the zoo’s Event Pavilion. Staff signed them in with patient checklists before sending them to the clinic stations. Animals brought to the clinic were as diverse as the zoo’s residents: bears, bunnies, frogs and even a giraffe named Zebra waited their turn.

Elaina Varga, 7, measures her teddy bear during the Teddy Bear Clinic event at the Virginia Zoo in Norfolk on Saturday, Aug. 17, 2024. (Kendall Warner / The Virginian-Pilot)

“In the waiting room, we have our storybooks, and as they check in, they get a patient chart,” Dzendzel said. “As they’re waiting, they can build animal enrichment (chains of paper rings), so they’re actually building enrichment that we will use out there with our animals at some point. The more paper rings we have, the better, because almost every animal in the zoo can interact with them.”

As more children moved down the line, Emmy Barclift brought her pal — a brown and white dog named Cedric — to get his heart checked by Dr. Andrew Friski. After a few moments with the stethoscope, Cedric gets the go-ahead to move down the line.

Even if kids at the clinic forgot their animals at home, Virginia Zoo staff provided stuffed bears for those who wanted to participate.

“These are all the play items, and we wanted to make it as interactive as we could for the children,” Dzendzel said. “Even though our doctors are here facilitating stuffed animals, they’re talking about the human-care side of things and how this corresponds. The main idea is that doctors aren’t scary.”

Eliza Noe, eliza.noe@virginiamedia.com