Of llamas and cattle (and sheep, and goats, and chickens, and dogs...)

I know, I know, it's been a few weeks since my last post.  But, midterms spread out over a two week period will do that.  So, here's what I've been up to since the last update:

Week 3 saw two more animal adventures: a trip to see some llamas and alpacas and one to see some beef cattle.  I have to say that, while llamas top out at about 400 lbs., and beef cattle can weigh over a thousand lbs., I find the llamas and aplacas much more intimidating.  They are very temperamental, and the alpacas especially are like high-strung, drama queen, junior high girls.  Catching them can be tricky, but luckily, once you get your arm around their neck, they just kind of submit.  My partner and I were lucky to catch a super calm llama our first try, and were able to listen to her heart and lungs, look at her gums, and pick up both her front and hind feet.  Llamas and alpacas have cool feet; they don't have hooves, and instead have pads kind of like dogs, with two little claws on the front.  After we finished with our llama, my partner and I decided to go for gold and try to catch what was described as the hardest, most dramatic alpaca.  Well, we caught her, but didn't really get to do anything with her before she threw herself to the ground and started hocking up a big wad to spit at us.  Even though she didn't actually spit, you could definitely smell it...camelid (alpacas and llamas) spit is probably one of the foulest smelling things I've ever smelled.  Once she started getting ready to spit, we decided to let her go.

Later that week, we headed to see some beef cattle.  On this trip, we had to learn how cut cattle from a small herd, drive them away from the herd, and hold them at the end of the aisle until we were ready to let them go.  Our instructor definitely got a kick out of challenging us and watching those of us without a lot of cattle experience flounder a little.  Then she showed us how to use a round chute system, and how to operate a squeeze chute.  Lastly, we learned about fistulated cows, and got to reach into the rumen of a fistulated steer, looking for a foreign object.  Here's a pic of me up past the elbow in the steer's rumen:

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The next week was small ruminant week in animal care.  On Tuesday, we worked on sheep.  We kind of just got thrown into things, but ended up learning how to trim hooves, draw blood from the jugular (fancy term: jugular venipuncture), spin a sheep on to its butt, and do breeding soundness exams on rams.  On Friday, we had sheep and goats, and we learned about the differences in their behavior, did physical exams on the goats, trimmed up all their hooves, and learned about the standard stuff you would bring with you on a visit to work on some sheep/goats.

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Last week, we went to the local humane society and learned about shelter medicine.  We learned about different restrain techniques to use on dogs and cats, and also about dog behavioral evaluations.

On Friday last week, we didn't work hands on with animals, but instead learned about food animal nutrition.  We focused mainly on dairy cattle nutrition, but talked about beef also.  We learned how to take a hay core sample, how to test silage/haylage pH, how to measure total dry matter, how to find particle size percents (to ensure the animals are getting enough long fiber and chewing enough), and how to distinguish different types of feed.

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This week, we only had animal care lab one day, and we worked on chickens.  We first learned about different types of pet parrots (we had a lecture on the poultry industry earlier in the week, so the vet in charge of the lab didn't lecture on poultry), and then went into the lab to do chicken exams.  We learned a standard exam format, and then were turned loose to do physicals.  My partner, A, and I were a little nervous, but we quickly got over that and did our exam.  We finished by drawing blood.  We tried first on the right jugular, but had some trouble.  Chicken vessels in the neck are very elastic because the neck stretches so much, so they roll a lot, which was our problem.  So, we moved to the basilic vein on the wing.  Unfortunately, this vein is very easy to get hematomas on, and chickens don't have a high blood volume, so if you get a hematoma, it's not great.  So, A took a try on the other wing and was finally able to get some blood.  Then, I took a try on the other jugular...normally the left jugular is smaller and hard to find, but our chicken had a great one.  Even though it tried to roll on me, I just went for it, and finally got some blood.  Then I used the blood to make a pretty good blood smear, so now I'll have one I can keep in my slide box to look at.

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We've been learning lots of other cool stuff too (today I dissected my lab cat's heart!), but this post is getting pretty long, so I'm going to end here.  I'll try to do better at posting more regularly, but we do have another round of midterms starting in a little over a week.  Ciao!