• Question: How do we measure how fast an animal's heart beats?

    Asked by libz to Donna, Jo, Mark, timcraggs on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Donna MacCallum

      Donna MacCallum answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      This usually requires an animal to be caught and it’s heartbeat measured like we measure human heart beats – of course, being caught will cause the animals stress, so the measurement is probably artificially high!

    • Photo: Joanna Buckley

      Joanna Buckley answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      Good question, Libz 🙂

      Most of the time, if it’s a domestic animal then you’d use a stethoscope, like the doctors use on us. I wouldn’t like to approach a lion or a tiger with a stethoscope though! They would probably eat me 🙁

      What you could do is dart the wild animal, so shoot it in the leg with something which would mean that it goes to sleep. Then when it’s sleeping, you could attach a wireless heart monitor to it and then give it some antidote so it wakes up and monitor it’s heart beat as it’s hunting and running about. To get the instrument back off the scary lion you’d have to do the same thing again but a trained keeper will know exactly how and where to shoot the animal. They have to do this if they notice they’ve developed an illness so they can treat them and not get eaten themselves 🙂

    • Photo: Tim Craggs

      Tim Craggs answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Hi Libz,

      I am not sure, maybe we can take their pulse, or perhaps we can measure the electrical pulses that cause the heart beat.

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