An English cat named Oscar can walk again after a surgery to give him bionic metal pegs, which show huge promise for human amputees.
Cats may have nine lives, but their limbs aren’t quite as disposable. Last October, when Oscar, a black cat from Jersey, England, was hit by a combine harvester, his two back feet were severed with no hope of reattachment.
But now, Oscar is on the cutting edge of technology for any species: he’s recently been given special prosthetic pegs that allow him to walk again.
The pegs are called intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthetics (Itaps), and were developed by a research team based at University College London. They are made of metal, and attach directly to Oscar’s bone. Normally, the body would reject the metal as a foreign substance, and the surgical site would get infected.
But in Oscar’s case, “we have managed to get the bone and skin to grow into the implant and we have developed an ‘exoprosthesis’ that allows this implant to work as a see-saw on the bottom of an animal’s limbs to give him effectively normal gait,” the veterinary surgeon who completed the surgery, Noel Fitzpatrick, told BBC News.
The Itaps technology is currently being tested on humans, and could provide far better prosthetic options for amputees in the future. And, as for Oscar, he started jumping for joy the moment he could stand on his own four legs again.