Duck with Disability Gets 3-D Printed Prosthetic Foot

Apparent victims of overbooking, 5-month-old Dudley the duck and his siblings were berthed in a cage at the K9-1-1 Animal and Rescue Shelter (Sicamous, BC, Canada) with some chickens. One of the chickens attacked the ducks and, in a fight that left his siblings dead, Dudley's leg was seriously injured and had to be amputated. Dudley was left with only a stump.

Brandon Schweitser, a relative of the shelter's owner, is also a jiu jitsu coach. One of his students, Terence Loring, was starting a 3-D design company called 3D Pillar Designs in the nearby town of Kamloops. Loring says, "My coach knew that my start-up company was going to specialize in 3-D printing so he asked me to try to build a leg for his little injured duck."

Loring took some measurements and, drawing on his background in biomedical engineering, designed a leg with a socket that would attach to the stump with a tube at the top. A hinged flipper at the bottom would give Dudley the ability to walk and paddle almost as well as a normal duck. He then sent the design to Proto3000, an Ontario-based company, who produced the limb using a 3D printer.

In the first experiment, Loring says, the joint broke when Dudley stood on it, sending him face-first into the ground. So he designed a second leg, this time an unhinged model made of softer plastic. When Dudley put it on, "the first thing he started doing was wagging his little butt, and literally, he just started walking. There was no delay for him."

The second leg is causing some sores at the bottom of Dudley's stump and he often snags his foot. But Loring is still working on the design: "This is going to be the most advanced duck leg out there."

Watch Canada's Global News video here. And Loring has posted a second video on his Web site, along with 3D STL and STP files of the prosthetic.

"I would absolutely love if other people could use this design to help out other wildlife in similar circumstances," he said. "I even put the challenge out there to design a better leg based on the original dimensions of the leg. It would be my dream to see this open-source platform take off where everyone is freely sharing their designs and ideas."