The first one I had was sheep. It was at least half an hour's walk away, but by extreme luck, I ran into a friend with a car when I went to the vet tower for directions. We show up, clamber into our overalls and boots, and march in.
A bunch of sheep had been lined up in narrow pens for us. After a brief lecture and demonstration, this is what we did:
- We learned to flip sheep over. You basically smoosh their heads sideways into their sides, then roll them over onto their back. Then you kind of heft them up so they're sitting on their butts like a person would. If this is the very first time you're handling a sheep, it's about as easy as it sounds. For some reason, though, sheep are completely docile once you've got them in that position, and will sit there stupidly as long as you care to support them with your legs.
- We learned to tie them up. While they're in the above position, you finagle a loop of string so it goes around their neck and hind legs. Sheep don't really like this. It's harder getting it off than getting it on.
- We learned some boring sheep stuff that doesn't make for a good story.
- We learned how to take blood from the jugular vein. By that I mean, we vaguely identified it, stuck it with a needle until we found blood, and collected it in a tube. Since they're sheep, the professor was all like, "Do it as many times as you need to get comfortable with it."
I know that's not very exciting, considering we're in vet school and all, but as I have limited experience with sheep I thought it was cool.
The second one I had was horses, and nothing particularly exciting happened. There were only two horses for the whole group so it took a long time, and the poor horse kept getting walked back and forth between two pens, and got various legs lifted up a gazillion times.
Then I had cattle. There were a bunch of teaching cows in cow holding devices that look vaguely like gymnastic bars with a guillotine at the end, and we paired off. These are teaching animals, so they are faced with flocks of vet students on a weekly basis, but a relatively chill cow is still not very impressed when you start having your way with it. This is what we did:
- We learned how to tie up the cows' heads. This involves pulling on the rope with all your might so you can get the cow to turn its head, which it really doesn't want to do, and then you tie it in place.
- We learned how to tie knots, only not really. The guy tied like five different knots for us, then told us to go practice them. Uh, ok.
- We learned how to use nose hook things to control the cow. This pissed our cow off.
- We learned how to stick a tube down their stomach to dislodge things that might be stuck along the way. This means sticking a wooden bar with a hole in the middle into their mouth, and shoving a long hose through the hole. Kind of like a magic trick, disappearing hose!
- We learned how to administer things orally (known as drenching), but the little devices were filled with molasses. Cows really like molasses. Our cow tried to eat our bottle.
- We learned how to brace their back teeth so they can't bite you. This one was quite an adventure, and took me like ten tries. First, you grab their giant, rough, muscular tongue, pull it out, and hold onto it with one hand. In your other hand you have a metal thing that's supposed to fit between their molars, so you have to put it in their mouth sideways, find their teeth, then set it up like a wall between top and bottom molars. For one thing, the cow made it very difficult to hold onto her tongue. She also was expert at getting the metal thing out before I had it properly in place (I kind of sucked at it, so it was easy for her). The end result was me completely covered in cow slobber.
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