Having a ball!

Hogwarts School of Vetcraft and Dickery presented the Annual College Vet School Ball yesterday. After a grand champagne reception in Summerhall, we were escorted to The Corn Exchange in Edinburgh. The hall was decorated with a Harry Potter wizard theme. Everything from house coloured banners to Berttie Botts Every Flavour Beans on the tables. The Second years and graduate entrant students were sorted as Gryfinndors: Brave and honest folk that we are. After the initial shock of vet students in ball gowns and tucks instead of boiler suits and steel-toe caps, it was a great night. A good meal, good post-revision chat and wind-down, topped off with a wee bit of dancing (got to love a ceilidh)- what a magical night!

An iguana? With three legs? I didn't see that coming.

It doesn't really matter how much you prepare for a small animal practical exam, but having first had a nice little cute male, syrian hamster and assessed every possible husbandry aspect of hamsters that there ever was, you don't expect the examiner to look over a huge, solid, looming, kennel-like cage door and casually ask you to pick up a 3-legged iguana. (No, not the pictured one, although I think I should have asked for a snap-shot). Having never picked up such a beast before, I stared momentarily at it in all it's glory: at approximately 2 metres long, whip-like tail, powerful jaws, beady eyes and amputated leg. I walked into the enclosure, kneeled down, kicked over the water-bowl, and picked up the iguana. Perhaps not perfectly, but very correctly and successfully none the less. He still has all his remaining limbs intact and I had no injuries, except for a very wet leg. Think I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for the slightly more catchable tortoise next time.

Anybody thirsty? An Interesing Fact:

Day 1257 of revision (OK, perhaps slight exaggeration...) and the animal husbandry exams are looming. Four days of oral and practical handling exams, all accumulating in a written exam on Friday.

As I plough through lectures from the nutritional content of grass to how to tell boy chinchillas from girl chinchillas, I often come across an interesting fact or two. Today I learnt that a dairy cow can produce 40 litres of milk per DAY in her peak. That's a lot of milk! Even I, in my heightened state of revision tea-drinking, would have difficultly consuming enough to keep up with that output. Mmm... Tea....

Two Little Lambies (Or Red Stripe and The Gerbil)

Two weeks of lambing over, and although I think I might need a week to recover, I'm definitely sad to see it pass by, especially since I didn't even manage to sneak at least 1 pet-lamb in the boot of my car before I left (Don't think my Dad would have appreciated that...).

A prime suspect for lamb-napping would have been the lamb in the photo: Red Stripe (due to the spray mark on his back). His mother, Mrs Red Stripe (also pictured), had a prolapse and stopped producing milk, so Red stripe became a pet-lamb who was bottle fed every day whilst staying happily with his mother. After a few days, he was more like a puppy as he followed us around whenever we entered the pen and tried to suckle our waterproof trousers. Not much milk in those...

The second week was just as busy as the first, more and more lambs just kept coming. Including a lamb that was one of a triplet. It was very very tiny and had to be stomach tubed and put under the heat lamb straight away. The poor lamb could almost sit in the palm of your hand, had only 1 eye and had surprising resemblance of a gerbil. Henceforth, the lamb was affectionately named 'Gerbil'. After a day of feeding via a stomach tube, the Gerbil moved enthusiastically onto sucking a bottle and was improving rapidly. However, the lady visiting at the cottages next door soon became a fan and took the Gerbil to feed and care for. It turned out it is completely blind in the remaining eye too, but was apparently happily running up and down the hallway bumping into things. Now, the gerbil is going home with the lady to live the life of lamby luxury in the North of Scotland at a riding school. And so the Gerbil lived happily ever after. The End

A Brief Interlude

Not only did they have sheep on the farm, but also around 70 suckler beef cows, 2 bulls (meet Trigger on the left there) and lots of calves. So, there were 3 calves that needed de-horning and castrating. Scalpel in hand, I successfully removed the testicles of an unsuspecting bull-calf and removed the horns, using a wire, (and a lot of muscle,) of 2 calves. All great experience, and one of the highlights of my 2 weeks so far.

Mutton, I mean, lamb, dressed as lamb

One week of lambing over and I'm loving it! Although I've done a bit of lambing before (well, 4 years ago,) I am enjoying it even more this time. One of the farmers is a vet so it's all very hands on. So far I've lambed several ewes with lambs coming in all directions (head first, bum first, back first, two at a time,...) and given epidurals to ewes, carried out several intra-muscular injections and even my first intravenous injection. The ewe in question was looking very depressed and ill so she received multivitamin injections and antibiotics to perk her up. the next day, she was acting as if nothing had happened, so no need for a re-match in the IV department.

We're nearly at half way with the lambing, and most are lambing well. Ideally, each ewe would have 2 lambs. However, there are ewes that have either one single lamb or triplets. Therefore, if any lambs die we have to try and 'twin on' a second orphan or triplet lamb. To do this, the dead lamb must be skinned, and then the skin put on the new lamb. It sounds a bit gruesome and cruel at first thought, but this one of very few ways that a ewe will accept a lamb as her own, and the lamb being skinned is already dead. The lamb to the left is my first twinned-on lamb, and therefore marked as 'CAT'. the pair and mother are all doing well out in the field now.