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.