An udder day in paradise

There are a few things in life I didn't expect to do, and that includes most of what happened in my cattle handling practical today. We walked out to the Veterinary Large Animal Teaching Unit (VLATU), which is a 20 minute walk from campus, in our brand new overalls and shiny gumboots. In my group of 12 we assembled near a row of cow crushes that contained - well - cows. These were tame cows that didn't really do much except occasionally get poked a prodded by vet and vet tech students once in a while, so they were pretty chilled! An awesome vet tech took us for the 3 hours, teaching us the basics of handling, restraining and controlling cows in a safe way.

A list of exciting cow activities that we got to do follows:
Grabbed her nose
Grabbed her tail and yanked it up (called a tail jack)
Put a halter on
Put a nose grip on
Grabbed mouth, tickled hard palate to cause a mouth opening reflex, grabbed tongue, shoved gag between teeth, put hand down throat.

So, yeah. The cows had fun. But they knew what was coming so they handled it pretty well. Afterwards they lead a big older jersey cow into an arena and demonstrated how to cast a cow. Essentially they tied her up (see below) and pulled on her from both ends, and she toppled over (slowly) onto her side. So cool! This is a quick video on what casting a cow actually looks like. The cow today wasn't in labour like this one but it's the same idea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWPn0QuJ1ok

So I really enjoyed that today. An awesome getting my hands dirty (cow shit, cow slobber, cow ruminate, cow snot, etc) and hands on with real animals instead of studying a textbook.

One awesome thing about the vet school is that they have lots of clubs and seminars that anyone can go along to every week. I went along to the radiology club this week and man it is interesting learning how to interpret x-rays. Of course I'll be using them in my career, but there really is something so fascinating about them. Every other week the 5th (final) year students get to present pictures of cases they've recently worked on, which will be so cool to hear about. They also have a wildlife club, and an emergency response club. The other thing they do is something called "grand rounds" where students give talks about cases. I went along to that today and I learnt so much! I'm really keen to go to another one called "post-mortem rounds" where essentially you get to hang out in the post-mortem room and people dissect animals out to show you diseases or just cool stuff in general. So, not for the squeamish but I seem to be pretty desensitised already!

We have the vet ball tomorrow, themed "Bollywood", which should be fun. Unfortunately Sam is in Dunedin so I can't take him! But I've made lots of cool friends already that I can hang out with. Yay for people!

So, a good day, a good week, thus I'll get a good sleep :)

p.s. watch this video if you haven't, it's simply hilarious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP4NMoJcFd4