Duchess the elephant weighs 4.4 tons, she only has one eye left (she lost the first to glaucoma) and the other one is riddled with cataracts. Lucky for Duchess she has a lot of nice people who care about her and want to help her and those people are giving her a cataract operation. It’s only the second elephant cataract surgery ever performed.
Now time for a joke — how many people does it take to give an elephant a cataract operation? Nine! One to hold the … no, actually, there’s no punchline here, it just takes nine people. And it also requires special tools, created just for the operation: a six-inch long speculum and a cataract removal machine with a needle three times as long as the one used when this operation is performed on a person (which takes place about 1.8 million times a year).
Duchess is recovering nicely in her home in Devon, England, where she is presumably getting dosed up with painkillers and having this happen:
