Stories From First Year: Aviary

This one didn't actually happen in first year, I think it was all the way after second year, but I didn't want to mess up my nice title series! Theoretically I could have done it in first year...

For my three weeks of "other" practical work, I picked birds! I worked at the aviary in the Esplanade that summer, which has dozens of species kept in all kinds of enclosures. Two of the enclosures house native New Zealand ducks that they're breeding as part of a conservation program. There's everything from the little songbirds and parrots, to pheasants and peacocks.

My favourite was a sulfur-crested cockatoo that suffered an old gunshot injury, so now climbs and walks around rather than flying. He knows how to speak and would say "hello" to me, and followed me around the enclosure by climbing along the walls. My least favourite was his neighbours, two more sulfur-crested cockatoos that got upset at my presence and liked to attack. More than once, I heard some flapping only to turn around and find a giant white bird hurtling towards my face.

The bird-keeper was a pleasant old fellow, but boy did he move slowly. He'd pause regularly to chat, whether it was out in the enclosures, or just hanging out at his computer as he showed me about a thousand photos from his trip to Africa. He usually took a full half hour at both morning and afternoon tea breaks, as well as a lengthy lunch. During that time I learned all the rules to darts and also drank more tea than I had in my entire life. Even if I didn't make myself tea, someone else usually brought me one. We spent so much time fluffing around to fill up the day, that one day when he was absent and I had to do all the enclosures myself, I got everything cleaned and fed by lunchtime. I scratched my head for a bit wondering how two people could take twice as long, then went home.

I was surprised by the birds' diets, having not had much experience. Making up their food is kind of fun, because they eat so much human food. Apart from their seeds (different combos for each enclosure), they also got fresh and frozen vegetables including corn, carrots, and peas. They got lettuce and silverbeet, apples, and some of them also got cheese, dried fruits, or honey water. To be honest, it sounded like a pretty delicious picnic some days.

At one point, we de-wormed all the budgies, which involved sticking tubes down their throats on two separate occasions--and there were 70 budgies. This was great handling experience, but I might mention that budgies bite hard.

My absolute favourite part was the Monster. I believe it was actually a Kea or some such bird, but I had to take bird-guy's word for it, because I never saw it. It had a huge enclosure with big bushes and a big house with concrete cylinders and other structures. I'd come in every day and drop off new lettuce, and find the previous day's three-quarters-eaten veggies strewn about. The apples would disappear. The water would decrease. But no bird. Ever. I decided it was actually a creature out of some horror movie, shrouded in mystery--the Kea thing is just a ruse.

Stories From First Year: Sheep and Beef

This one was in New Zealand, and again all I did was odds and sods. I put up some electric fences sometimes, but mostly I rode shotgun in the tractor, jumping out to open gates. Fortunately the old farmer I was with was very fun to talked to and loves making friends with international students (he introduced me to some other international students).

He also let me drive the tractor once. I am totally into that. I even parked it perfectly. Little me, up in this massive tractor, roaring down the farm track at like... 10kph. Well maybe it was faster than that. I don't remember. It was an automatic transmission so I didn't have to do much work at all, but it's something to cross off the bucket list.

The other thing I really liked was watching the farm dogs work, because they are so beautiful and well trained.

The most annoying day for me was sorting wool. Good god. It wasn't even shearing time, it was just crutching--taking the wool off around their bums so they don't get covered in poo--so it was way less wool than I would have had to face at shearing time. Still, that was one unpleasant day. From eight in the morning until I left at five in the evening, we were in the wool shed, with an endless stream of sheep, just me and the socially awkward shearer. I had a sort of stick thing that I used to sweep the wool off the platform, which sometimes involved sneaky maneuvers around his feet or behind him. Then, since it had just rained of course, I had to lay out anything super wet to dry, because apparently if you pile up wet wool it explodes. 

My skin is sensitive to wool, so by the end of the day, not only did I have a cramp from wielding my wool-stick, and not only were my hands covered in wool grease, they were also all red and itchy. It was also a bit of an adventure trying to get all the wool into the wool compressor thing. At first it went well, but around lunchtime the bin was pretty full, and there wasn't anywhere else for me to put the wool. So after that point I had to periodically climb up into the bin and jump up and down and stomp around on top of the wool until I made enough room to fit more in. Then of course when I did that, I got behind, because the shearer just kept on going, so the wool on the platform would amass and I'd have to frantically try to sort it out before it built up into some sort of wool ocean.

The worst part was that we didn't quite finish, and I had to come back and do more the next day. Ugh my hands were prickly needly greasy itchy sore globs of death.

Stories From First Year: Equine

A horse stables was the second of my practical experiences, and similarly involved a lot of new understanding about how horses are kept and what to do around them. It's pretty dull to talk about--I shoveled out stalls, fed the horses, groomed some horses, routine stuff like that. I did get a fair amount of responsibility with the horses, which was very lucky because apparently plenty of my classmates got stuck with some really boring equine time. Some places don't want you touching horses at all if you have no experience, so my friends got to do nothing but shovel stalls for three weeks straight.

One thing that amuses me is that horses require snow shoes so they don't skate around all over the ice, or get it packed up into their hooves. It was slightly terrifying to be leading this massive beast and have it slip on the ice and get a fright. I think I panicked more than the horses. They also got snow jackets, which I had to put on in the morning before they went out, then take off in the evening. The horses were surprisingly docile and pleasant to work with, which isn't my experience with horses in general.

I got to be mini-vet when one of the horses got kicked by another horse, and it became my duty to clean the wound and dress it every day.

The best part was all the other animals. In other stalls they had two ponies, two alpacas, a llama, and a donkey. Roaming free they had a goat, a tiny ugly pig, and a super fat sheep, and also a very handsome dog and a bazillion cats. And a domesticated raccoon that is the fattest raccoon I've ever seen.

The alpacas were skittish, but made adorable little mewling noises. The goat had some serious personality, and constantly sat on things that I needed and chewed on stuff and got into things. The ponies were fun to be around, but I'm not sure why. The llama was the best--I got to lead it out to pasture just like the horses, and it's just... llamas are really hilarious. They look funny and move funny and act funny. I think it got free at one point and the people who worked there had to go chase it back. The raccoon was cute, but had crazy sharp teeth and claws. It constantly chowed down on the cat food, which is how it got so fat, and it would come up and beg around people (which was not fun considering how sharp its claws are when it's grabbing at your leg or your sleeve).

Stories From First Year: Dairy

Ever since I started this blog, I've had "prac work" on my list of topics to write about. It would have been fun to see my original impressions of everything, but maybe the reason I never got around to it is that I couldn't think of any particularly exciting stories to tell. Now that I've finished all of them, I think I can cobble together an interesting assortment of notes from my experiences. We had to do 16 weeks on various farms during our breaks and summers, and I'll talk about them one at a time.

The first one I did was on a dairy farm in the states. As someone with no large animal experience, I didn't have a clue about working around cows or what a dairy farm was like at all. I remember being quite surprised at how all the cows had electronic collars, and the milking machine registered it and recorded their individual milk production and sent it to the computer, where you could look at it in charts and graphs. I also was impressed by the gigantic automatic pooper-scooper that moves slowly back and forth across the floor.

The most fun was on days when the vet came. I followed him around and talked to him heaps, and he let me help on a few surgeries. It was my first year out of vet school, so it was the first time I was ever treated as a vet student. I remember feeling excited but also super confused at all the vet-lingo he fired at me, as he explained the surgery. At this point I didn't even know cow anatomy, so my thoughts were along the lines of "I don't know what he's talking about but it sounds so professional and cool!"

The other distinct memory I have is following him while he was doing pregnancy scanning, and this one cow followed us the whole time. She kept rubbing up against me and pushing her head into me and sort of knocking me around. Cows are really cute!

Unfortunately, the farm I was on was well run and had everything covered. They didn't need a student to do anything, so apart from the odd job here and there, there really wasn't anything for me to do. The one time I tried to help out in the calf barn, I got myself completely soaked from trying to carry the big water buckets. Most of the work was done by a handful of Guatemalans. I ended up spending most of my time helping out with milking, and the Guatemalans flirted with me and tried to teach me Spanish.

As it turns out, that farm was a barn-based system, and in New Zealand it's largely pastoral farming, so when I got back to school I still was clueless about what we were learning. I spent the next two years trying to sort it all out in my head. Pasture-based farming is really different, but more fascinating I think.

Class-quake

Apparently there was an earthquake while we were in class. The bizarre thing is that I didn't feel it, though other people in the same classroom say they did. Maybe it was subtle because we were on the top floor.

We were just going along with lecture, when all of a sudden the projector image started wobbling a bit, and then went crazy. I was just sitting there, not feeling anything, while the projector image was bouncing all over the place. It was really bizarre!

What did you do today?

Standard warning: potentially unpleasant graphic concepts

Thursdays are lab days. Sometimes they're long, or a bit dull, or kind of cool. And then sometimes they're like today.

In the morning is the small animal lab, either medicine or surgery. Today we did dentistry. If you've ever had your pet get a dental from your vet, that's what we practised, and it's actually not very different from when you go to the dentist yourself. We use all the same tools, including the ultrasonic scaler which is the thing that makes the noise and uses the water spray while it scrapes against the teeth. So that was pretty neat, checking out all the teeth and cleaning off the tartar--the noise isn't quite so bad when you're on the other end of it.

The part about this lab that made it a rather unique experience is something you may have already thought of: what, exactly, were we practising on? Dogs. Dog heads, of course. Severed dog heads. We show up to lab and there is a huge pile of dog heads, and I go over and pick one out for me and my partner and carry it back to our table. So we just have this dog head (a pretty cute dog to be honest), that we are lifting up and rolling around as needed, prying open the jaws and cleaning its dead teeth. I have to say, that is a bit bizarre--cleaning a dead dog's teeth.

The other thing we did was practise extractions, which is a bit more of an ordeal than in people, because dog teeth have massive roots. It's more of a surgery, where you have to slice into the gums and make a flap, so you can get your tools way down to the end of the root. This involved some fun instruments like the drill (just like in people, if you've ever had a cavity done), and a lot of prying and leveraging to try and shove the tooth out. Like my human dentist once told me, it's not about strength, it's all about technique--you have to push in the right way, and the right direction. And it's actually pushing, not pulling.

That was in the morning. In the afternoon we have a large animal lab, either cows or sheep. Today it was sheep.

We've been learning about investigating ill-thrift in sheep, and there is a farm that is working with the university to investigate a problem in their flock. They have a whole bunch of very skinny sad looking ewes, and we the fourth years are going to be the ones helping to find out what's wrong.

Our labs are divided into half the class, so we have 50 people, and we were working in pairs. That means 25 sheep or so waiting for us in lab, and the first thing we did was the Great Sheep Massacre. We queued up, each pair with their sheep, and had a rather rapid-fire, bloody, sheep killing spree. We used captive bolts, which fires a bolt into their brain to destroy their pain perception and render them unconscious instantly, and then cut their throats to make certain they were dead (though theoretically the captive bolt kills them).

I partnered up with a very very quiet girl in my class. I did the captive bolt, which is a deceptively heavy item to wield. That involved putting the thing on the right spot on the sheep's head, then pressing the button. BANG, sheep collapses. My partner cut the throat, which involves twisting the sheep's neck around your boot and hacking through all the muscles and trachea until you get a massive fountain/lake of blood, and I have to say for such a quiet meek seeming girl, my partner had absolutely no trouble with this. Once the deed was done (which only took a few seconds), we quickly got out of the way and handed off the tools to the next group. We dragged off our sheep to an open spot in the floor, adding to the dozen bloody trails along the floor. I can't imagine what it must have looked like if some random person from the public had shown up. Dead sheep all across the floor, wide bloody trails behind them, a sea of blood at the centres of two ritualistic sheep-killing death spots, students queued up with sheep at each.

Once that was all over we proceeded to the post-mortems. As these are all very sickly, emaciated sheep, we went through our protocol of checking out each organ system in the hopes of finding a consistent culprit. Common boring ones include teeth and feet. I call these boring because you don't even have to open your dead sheep in order to get a diagnosis. Apart from those things, we had to check out liver, lungs, and intestines, looking for typical lesions of the diseases we've studied. The aim is that every pair writes up their final diagnosis on a board, and we'll get sent all the results. We'll analyse them, see if there's a common cause, and then write up a report about it.

Our particular sheep turned out to not be very exciting. I thought we had some lung lesions, but it turned out they weren't significant enough to call it pneumonia. We ended up not finding any lesions, which suggests either malnutrition, or maybe parasites. Which brings me to the next part.

We did something called a "worm count." When animals have parasites in their intestines, you can count the eggs released in their poop, but it's much more accurate to count the worms themselves. You take out parts of the intestinal tract, and then go through a fancy procedure to wash out all the contents into a bucket, dilute the worms, and put them onto a white tray to count them. It's winter here, and cold outside, and we had cold water, and I did not have a fun time. I spent forever running meters upon meters of intestine through my fingers in a bucket of cold water, to help get the worms off and into the water. By the end of the lab I could hardly feel my hands. I was trying to pick up microscopic worms and put them onto a slide, and my goodness my fingers could barely move. In the end, our sheep didn't have any parasites. After all that.

So our sheep ended up with a diagnosis of "unknown," and we attributed the emaciation to malnourishment just as the default. Once we get everybody's results, we'll see if any particular disease emerged as statistically significant. A few people did have some knobbly livers and diseased intestines, so it will be interesting to see the final results. I believe this is an actual investigation, and the professors are going to relay the information to the farmer, so it's pretty cool to be a part of that.

I Am Not Going To Be An Equine Vet

Today we had a short, easy practical exam on horses. 10 minutes on a written paper (label diagrams sort of thing) and 10 minutes with a horse and examiner.

It did not go well. I am so bad at horses that my person almost made me cry.

Considering everything about equine class screams "you don't want to be a horse vet!" I think it has been confirmed a hundred times over. From the pedantic need to know the difference between osteochondrosis of the fetlock and the tarsus and the femoropatellar and femorotibial joints (eg what is the prognosis of OCD of the distal intermediate trochlear ridge of the tibia versus anywhere else??) , to the fact that horses get sick and die if you sneeze at them and you have to be a crazy qualified specialist to be doing surgery on them, to the ever present danger of either the horse killing you, or the owner killing you, or maybe the horse killing the owner. Not a fan of the racing industry, either.

But I don't think I have to worry about these things, since it is apparently the limit of my skill to even get a halter on.