Sheep Are Expendable

Our physiology labs are often about studying a system by looking at the effects of drugs or electrical stimulation (like nerves). Some of these labs are pretty cool, but it sounds like they used to be way cooler, and also more terrifying.

Maybe ten years ago, they would bring live sheep into the lab, and divide students up into pairs or groups. The students were given a lab guide, a sheep, an anaesthesia kit, and sent on their merry way to begin the lab. The amazing part is that this meant anaesthetising the sheep, doing surgery to find whatever was necessary, cannulating (sticking a tube into) whatever artery or vein they needed, and then doing the procedure. On a live sheep. These would have been students like me and my classmates. Right now, we have as much anaesthesia experience as you do.

The result of this was sheep dying during the lab due to some miscalculation, or worse, waking up and freaking out. The one group each year that could do it right thought it was great, but you can imagine how stressed out everyone else was. Picture yourself tentatively doing surgery on a sheep, pausing to try and decipher the next step in the lab book, and having your sheep suddenly wake up and start kicking around. It actually took the school a long time to figure out that this whole let's-give-everyone-a-sheep thing wasn't a good idea.

These days, if any lab involves a live animal, we just watch a video of some vet faculty doing it. The videos are pretty old, but I really don't mind not destroying some poor sheep of my own. Some of the labs even use computer simulations.

Not everything is computerised these days, though. Sometimes we get to work with live tissues, which usually come from a rabbit (and sometimes we get to use other vet students as the test subjects). One lab that was pretty cool was when the professor had a rabbit heart, hooked up to an apparatus to keep it alive and beating, and we watched how the beating changed in response to different drugs. It was right there, beating.