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?

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....

Keeping warm on a Scottish morning: The moment we've all been waiting for...

Having got over people thinking I'm going to be a zoo-keeper (must be if I studied zoology...), I now get 'Oh, you're going to be a vet? You'll be sticking your hand up cow's backsides then? Eww!'. Actually, yes I will and I did. Not as bad as it seems: suited and booted in boilersuit, wellies, full length waterproof outfit (very attractive) and extra-long glove, we are kindly introduced to the back end of an un-suspecting cow. All in all, a suprisingly... err.. pleasant experience, (apart from the obvious stench, flying faecal material and backward glances from the cow,) which allowed us to get a wee look/feel into what we will find in the back of a normal cow (pelvic boney structures, female reproductive organs (I found an ovary!) and possibly touching on intestines, that is to name a few). Quite challenging at first, but practice makes perfect. I'm happy with it, but I'm not sure about the cow.

Back to uni, down on the farm

Post-Christmas, and first day back we're in with the calves at Langhill farm. Having been assigned a calf between two, we proceeded to improve our handling and assessment of theses 3 week old cows. As it turned out, I got some extra experience as our wee cow had scour, looked quiet, and, on recording his birth and current weight, found he had infact lost weight. So, we injected him with a general antibiotic intra-muscularly in his rump. First injection into a cow. Very successful.