Horsing around in the borders

A welcome mid-week day off meant a day trip to Paxton near Berwick upon Tweed today with a visit to Aunty Diane and Uncle Bob's house.

That's Aunty Diane on the left her horse Jeffrey. Not much time for a ride, but a quick hello, a nice groom and some fussing left Jeff a handsome happy chappy.

There was also a surprise visit to Aunty Diane's friend down the road, where I was introduced to a slightly smaller variety. Meet Flora ('Miss Independence', born on July 4th). She was just two weeks old but bold as brass and gorgeous!

I had a great day off all in all: What with jam-making, horse/foal visiting, rabbit playing (featuring Benny the Bunny), cups of tea with the family and general horse play it was a very successful day off. Thanks Aunty Diane!

CSI vet!

The summer holidays are here and apart from working at Boots Opticians, I have found other exciting things to keep my active mind occupied (and from stopping it degenerating over the summer months).

So, I'm back at uni working in the pathology department on a short project. This included student input on some issues, scanning extremely old slides so they can be used on the computer, re-sizing lots of photos for online teaching, taking photographs at post mortems throughout the week and then creating case files for them and others so they can be used for teaching and online resources. Phew! It's been quite a varied, educational busy week but I've learnt quite a lot and have enjoyed it. Back to Boots next week!

Baby slimer

Well, I have a new arrival. My wee experiment of hatching Giant African Land Snails has in fact progressed. After a week and a half of spraying with water, I am now the proud owner of one very small pathetic looking 'giant' snail. Not being familiar with snail reproduction, I'm not really sure what it's supposed to look like or how they go about hatching. I though in fact it had rotted but once I dug it out, tempted it with a bit of savoy cabbage and now it's 3 days old.

A picture will follow shortly-watch this space (I can tell you're all on the edge of your seats...) but for now, here's what he could look like....

Third year here I come!

I passed all of my exams! Three modules: One pass and two credits. Woo Hoo!

Penguins on parade

The final week of work experience is finally over: That's 12 whole weeks of cats, dogs, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and last but not least, small mammals and exotics at Edinburgh Zoo.
Bella!

It was a bit bizarre at first-at 8am on the Monday morning I was wandering through the deserted zoo, past the polar bear and up next to the Bongos as the animals wander with only the sounds of other animals on a summer morning. I did eventually find the keepers and was assigned a funky uniform and large pair of boots and given the tour of the reptile departments and surrounding areas. unfortunately, the reptile house at Edinburgh zoo is no more as there is a huge new project in progress to build an enormous chimp-house, bird enclosure and primate research centre. All this is very good news, but also means that most of the exotics are 'off show' and are wasted being hidden away in dispersed buildings.

Still, I got to see a lot of different animals- from Bella the cockatoo to the rather scary yellow anaconda.

The highlight of my week, although not exactly a small mammal or reptile, was the department's duty on the penguin parade. For those of you not familiar with the brilliance of the penguin parade, at 2.15 every day of the year, the door of the penguin enclosure is opened to allow any keen penguins to come out for a short walk around the grassy section in front of the enclosure. My role in this was to stop the Gentoo penguins getting too fast, eating anything they shouldn't or letting people touch them. It was all very exciting, especially as one of the penguins decided the usual route was a bit boring and tried to take a bit of a short-cut onto the grass. Twice.

It was a great end to my 12 weeks and it was good to see behind the scenes at the zoo. I would definitely recommend a visit, especially to the penguins!

We're all off to sunny Wales! (Well it was sunny until Tuesday...)

With pigs over, it was time for a road trip to Wales and Beth's home town (Don't ask me what it was called-Welsh is tricky). The sun was shining and the cows were basking in the green fields. Then over the top of the hill appeared two vet students on a quad bike. We were to herd them all in and walk them down an exceedingly long track to the milking parlour. They weren't too keen to move much at first in the excessive June heat, but we were soon experts and had them all on the moo-ve.


We had a great time here too- the stockman were all friendly, and were all surprised at how 'normal' Beth looked! (she had a few mental hair styles in her younger days I believe...). We did lots of milking, herding, quad-biking (vrooooommm), feeding, watering, mucking out, training calves to drink milk from buckets (awww) and even did the milk recording one day. This involved taking a sample of milk from every single cow there and recording it's number on a sheet with the amount of milk each produced in the morning and afternoon, as well as the number on the sample bottle. It was a task and a half, and it took us a while to settle into it. Soon we had a good rhythm, and a few hours later we had the lot in the can. After that we had to sort them all into numerical order (thanks to Anne for the use of her giant table). I do have a picture of the lines of bottle somewhere. Quite satisfying when it was all done.


(Anyone noticed Beth's hair's flopped?!)

Apart from the cows I also learnt a bit of welsh. On the taps in Anne and Ray's house, the sink taps were marked poeth and oer (Hot and cold for you non-welsh folk). I think that was about the extent of my welsh-ness. Thanks to Anne and Ray for having me too, I had a great time. I'll try and work on the geordie accent for next time!

A joke from flash

There's two cows in a field. Which one's on holiday?

The one with the wee-calf. You get it?

Pigs, pigs, pigs (smell)

The exams are all over, 3 days off and I'm back on the farm. The pig farm. There was quite a crowd of us students. All four of us: Me, Beth, Cynthia and Bronwyn all appointed to follow 'Flash' the stockman for the week (That's Pongo the dog too):

There were lots and lots of pigs: big pigs, little pigs, tiny pigs and a few boy pigs. All smelling equally as sweet, we explored the realms of keeping pigs. All the sows were kept in a big pen with the male boars. Once they were nearly due to farrow, they were transferred to the farrowing sheds where they gave birth to lots of piglets (average about 10 or 11). Here they stayed until the piglets were weaned. The piglets then went on to be fattened and the sows back to the sheds for a wee rest and then are inseminated again.

We all had a great week and learnt quite a lot about everything from training a pig to feed from an automated system to Artificially inseminating a sow whilst sitting on its back. When a sow is on heat, it has a 'standing reflex'. In the presence of a male, if you press on its back it will stand rigid to theoretically allow the boar to mount. This also turns out to be a useful tool for a stockman to determine exactly if the sow is ready to be artificially inseminated. If so, then you can carry on and inseminate the sow with handy fresh sperm in a packet from AI company and take a nice warm seat on the back of a pig. (Not only very convenient but also makes AI easier as the sow stands better and imitates a boar too).

Another discovery from our week here was that pigs have piglets much easier and more simpler than sheep have lambs. They just get on with it! However, saying that, we did get a shot at delivering a few little pigs as there was a sow having trouble. It was very different to lambing too! The passage was much narrower and piglets are a lot more difficult to guide out when in a pickle. Even so, we all successfully got at least one piglet out into the world. Hoorah! There may be a video to follow when Beth returns to bonny Scotland with her camera.

All in all it was a really fun week and it helped with my lack of pig contact. The only downside? Trying to keep the pig smell in your coat on the way home on the bus. Sorry all the people on the number 7!