Vet School 2.0: Stick Your Hand Up a Virtual Cow Butt

(the title is based on a Robin Williams Joke)

There’s nothing tidy about sticking your arm deep into a cow’s backside, getting up to your elbows in warm and gooey bovine innards.

But for new vet students, there’s no avoiding the procedure: To diagnose pregnancy or check for infection, you’ve got to reach into a cow’s rectum and feel for the uterus, ovaries and stomach. Unfortunately, proper palpation is a tough skill to teach, because once your arm is buried inside a cow butt, no one can see what you’re doing.

No one can see what you’re doing? Nothing like a little animal “husbandry” until they catch you at it.

(now I’m stealing from Tom Lehrer)

As long as I’m this low in the pasture, I’ll complete the trilogy. A few weeks ago, we were doing some mundane inventory-task, and one the guys said, “Hand me the scissors,” and was corrected by another of us — they were shears, not scissors. This prompted him to say, on the topic of shears, “I can tell you that the act of shearing takes all the romance out of sheep farming.”

Pause for effect.

I then said something like, “I’m not really sure I want to hear the details about the romance you found in sheep farming. That’s between you and the sheep.”