Horse Handling and the Small Animal Clinic

Today was a fun day! I started the morning off by going to the school farm and playing with horses! More specifically, I learned how to approach and halter a horse in both a pen and a stall, and then how to pick up their hooves. It was a really good experience, considering I have only the tiniest amount of horse experience (if you count the day I shadowed an equine vet, the rounds I attended for a semester, and few times I rode a horse as a kid haha). School horses are probably the best horses out there. They know what you want from them even before you go to start it. They've done the drill a million times, and they get fed well afterwards so students are alright in their book. We also got to bathe one of the horses when we were finished. We managed to get ourselves pretty wet with the hose, good thing we had our coveralls on! The last thing we did before leaving was learn how to tie a horse up. Now we have something to use our ropes for! (remember at the beginning of the semester we got halters and a lead with our kits).

(Dr. Cate talking about technique)

The next thing I did today was volunteer for an afternoon shift at the Small Animal Clinic through our emergency and critical care club (SVECCS). 6th term students have all of the weekday evening/overnight shifts and the saturday evening/weekend shifts and SVECCS members sign up for Saturday morning/afternoon and Sunday morning, afternoon and overnight. The overnight shift is from 5p-12a in the hospital and then one student takes the on call phone home with them until the next morning (and responds to a call if one occurs).

I have signed up for a bunch of shifts on the weekends (particularly the Sunday night shift) to give me something fun to do and to help me apply what I'm learning in the classroom to the clinical aspect of veterinary medicine. It is much easier to sit with a live dog and go over anatomy than it is to stare at a picture! We had live dogs in the classroom last week and it was so much easier to remember structures after that.

The shift today wasn't too busy. I worked with two other 1st term students and a doctor. We had some down time which we spent reviewing notes and did the patient care as needed (but there wasn't much, mostly feeding and walking). It was fun and I got to spend a lot of time with a great dane! Very handsome dog! I am looking forward to working tomorrow too!