Apr

30

I Love Spring

Filed Under aggie stuff, cattle, horses, university farm | 1 Comment

Ahhh, spring. My favorite season.

Everything is so nice and new and green, and if you know me, you know how much I love the color green.

On top of that, there are all sorts of cute fuzzy baby animals around!



How could you not love spring?

Apr

29

Ferrets Are Weird

Filed Under ferrets | 1 Comment

How many posts entitled “Ferrets Are Weird” do I have? No matter how many times I say it, they just keep finding new ways to impress upon me the fact that yes, it’s true: Ferrets Are Weird.

Last night I was working on my computer when I heard the clinking of glasses in the kitchen. To normal people this probably means that their roommate or a loved one is getting something to drink, maybe washing the dishes or something nice like that. To me it means one thing: There is a ferret where there is not supposed to be a ferret.

I rushed into the kitchen and flipped on the light. I glanced around frantically but there was no ferret to be seen. It took me a full minute (and heavy reliance on skills I obtained while pouring over those “I Spy” books in grade school, looking desperately for the sailboat hidden amongst a large pile of random junk) before I noticed the little furry face staring at me from behind my flour jar. The offender was, of course, Huckleberry Finn aka He Who Can’t NOT Mess With Stuff.

This afternoon I heard a thunk come from my bedroom. I looked over to see that Huckleberry Finn had knocked down a large bottle of lotion and I didn’t think anything of it, though I made a mental note to pick it up next time I happened to get out of my chair. When that time came, there was no lotion to be seen. Huck apparently hadn’t innocently knocked the lotion down. He’d been on a hunting and gathering mission and had knocked it down so that he could stash it away behind the large exercise ball in the corner of the room.

Naturally, I had to mess with him.


I brought the lotion back out and Huck, irked, dragged it right back into the corner.


I got it again held onto the bottle while he tried, with all his might, to pry it from my grasp. I’m pretty sure he was cursing my opposable thumbs at this point.


Please note his little back paw braced in this picture. He is using every ounce of strength in his 2 foot long body to try to reclaim this bottle of lotion.

I know you see these pictures and you get kind of uncomfortable and you want to ask, “Is he … y’know … right … in the head?”

To which I say: Of course.

What makes you ask?

Apr

28

Kids These Days!

Filed Under fond memories, school | 1 Comment

1) There are new signs posted in every class detailing what your course of action should be if there’s an active shooter on campus.

Accompanying those are the awkwardly detailed discussions led by the professors which include information about which pocket their key ring is in and which of their keys to use to lock yourselves into a room should they be unable to do it themselves and which also include phrases like, “There’s no safe place in this room, but try to get as many people as you can into this corner.”

Another particularly uplifting portion of the poster warns us that we will have to deal with an ethical dilemma if, after locking and barricading ourselves into our classroom, someone should happen to be trapped in the hallway. We apparently need to be prepared to choose between helping them and keeping ourselves safe.

2) We got an email today confirming that a student on our campus has tuberculosis. Immediately upon reading this email, I was haunted by the memory of one of my friends giving me one of my favorite compliments I’ve ever received.

At a get-together, I wasn’t fond of some canoodling going on across the room on a couch because it was between a guy who was engaged and some random girl who was not his fiance. So, being a vigilante of sorts, I picked up a dart gun (wow, this post ties in together better than I’d originally thought) and shot one of the little suction cup darts right in between them, effectively preventing them from being lost in each others’ eyes any more. “Wow,” my friend exclaimed, “you went all Doc Holliday on that!”

And it was true. I had gone all Doc Holliday on that. But now I’m just hoping all comparisons to Doc Holliday center around my being a Great Bringer of Justice instead of a Great Dier of Consumption.

Apr

27

Guess Who, part 1

Filed Under aggie stuff, cattle, university farm | 2 Comments


Who is this noble bovine beast…


Getting so close in order to pose with such grace?

Why, it’s none other than…


32. AHH!

Apr

24

Spring Cleaning

Filed Under Uncategorized | 3 Comments

I’ve been working on cleaning my apartment.

I got a gentle nudge in this direction yesterday when my door was broken down and I was handcuffed and dragged out of my apartment. While being led towards a police squad car, a man with a jacket emblazoned with the letters “DEA” swaggered towards my door.

“How many kilos did we take off the streets today?” he asked smugly.

“It turns out it’s not a crack den,” exclaimed one of the officers, sounding very surprised. “It’s just a very messy apartment. We did find what appears to be a Boa Constrictor wearing a sweater, though. That might be animal cruelty.” Huckleberry Finn lounged in his arms.

I was released and the DEA man came over to apologize to me. “I’m sorry about this whole mix-up,” he said. “We should have known as soon as we came in and saw you had an iron in your living room. I mean really, what kind of crack head irons their clothes often enough to warrant that?” he chuckled at the thought.

“Oh, actually,” I started hesitantly, “that was out for a craft project.”

“Really?” he asked, trying to sound genuinely interested. “I’d like to see what you made.”

“Well, I would show you,” I said while shrugging helplessly. “But I gave it away as a Christmas present.”

Apr

23

You Thought it was Safe

Filed Under aggie stuff, cattle, school, university farm | 1 Comment

I bet you read my last post and noticed that I mentioned in passing the fact that my bovine repro class palpated cattle again. You probably breathed a sigh of relief, happy to see that I wouldn’t be going into detail like that one time.

No such luck! I was just saving up that post in order to present to you…
PALPATIONPALOOZA 2.0

It’s “2.0″ because it is a later version, complete with improvements, of the first one.

PART I: The Bulls
I want to mention, before I get into all this palpating talk, that the bulls don’t exactly get off scot-free. Sure, they’ve got a pretty good job. They’re fed well all throughout the year so that they can be in top condition in order to breed cows about 90 days out of the year. The rest of the time they spend hanging out, relaxing, eating. It sounds good, but there are downsides.

Earlier this month we took four of the young bulls to the vet to get a breeding soundness exam (BSE). This is accomplished through the use of an electro-ejaculator, which is pretty much summed up in this paragraph I found from here:

An electro-ejaculator probe is inserted into the rectum of a restrained bovine bull. Electrical current is passed from electrodes located on the probe primarily to the nerves controlling erection and ejaculation. As little as possible, current is passed to the nerves registering pain. Electrical stimulation of these nerves results in ejaculation. Voids or pockets in the probe receive any fecal matter which might otherwise insulate the electrodes from the intestine wall. The ejaculated semen is collected for analysis or artificial insemination.

This method isn’t usually used to collect bulls for breeding purposes. Since the bladder is right under the ampullary gland, you can get urine in your sample as a result of the electricity, which will obviously render it useless.

All of the bulls passed their BSE just fine, which means they’re ready to go to their new homes.

PART II: Preg Checking
Another day in class, we ran the fall calvers through the chute to see who was pregnant. This was basically revisiting Palpationpalooza 1.0. This is the group of cows that tend to have repro problems, so we had quite a few open cows in the mix.

Some people got fancy and, instead of just finding the cervix while palpating, started detecting the pregnancy and deciding if it was a late 1st trimester pregnancy (bull bred) or an early 2nd trimester pregnancy (AI). You see, after you AI your herd, you turn them out in the pasture with the clean-up bull. Any cows that didn’t get pregnant from the AI will come into heat in 28 days and be bred by the bull (that’s the plan, anyway). That way, they’re all pregnant and you’ll have a pretty uniform calf crop.

Some people were ever getting really fancy and deciding which side (horn of the uterus) the pregnancy was in. I was not nearly so fancy, instead relying on educated guesses when asked whether the cows I palpated were pregnant or open. I got them all right, by the way, but that was more luck than anything.

PART III: Synchronization
Heat detection is the number one reason AI isn’t utilized more. I should probably mention that by “heat” I mean “estrus” and that AI is Artificial Insemination and not Artificial Intelligence. Sometimes as an aggie you think things are common sense, and then your sister goes to your vet’s Christmas party with you and asks a nice old farmer who just said he had a herd of Angus cattle whether he has beef or dairy cows.

Anyhoo, heat detection is a problem. It takes time to go out and observe the cows and see if they’re displaying any signs of being in heat. And you really want everything to be uniform (calves born around the same time, a herd of cows that can be bred and turned out together instead of having to separate individuals, etc). It’s a pain and a waste of time to have 2 cows come into heat one day and AI them, 2 the next day, 3 the day after that, 1 after that and so on and so on until you get through your entire herd. It’d be a lot more convenient to just have them all come into heat at or around the same day.

And so exists synchronization. There are lots of different protocols from which different people choose, and I desperately/shoddily memorized them the morning of our last test, only to have forgotten them. Luckily, I’ve got a sheet that spell them all out.

We’re using the Select Synch + CIDR protocol, I think. I’m not completely sure, it that seems to be it. Today we ran the cows that we were going to AI through the chute. We put a CIDR, which is a piece of hard rubber that releases progesterone, in their cervix. We gave each one a shot of GnRH (Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone) and put a sticker on their butt (so that we can see if she’s standing to be mounted by other cows) and sent them on their merry way.

Next Wednesday we’ll take out the CIDR and give her a shot of Prostaglandin in the form of Lutalyse. For the next 6 days, we’ll watch and AI when she’s in heat.

In the case that we’re not using Select Synch + CIDR, we might be using CO-Synch + CIDR, which means we’d do the same thing except, instead of waiting for that 6 days, we’d AI within 54-66 hours and give her a shot of GnRH at the same time. Honestly, I was watching the calves in order to see 802, so I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.

Part IV: Practicing AI
In class, we’ve spent a couple days getting used to the AI procedure. This involves getting the semen straws out of the large metal tank in which they’re stored, which is tricky. Very tricky. It’s probably not even all that tricky, except that they’re stored with liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -294 degrees Fahrenheit, so as soon as they hit the air they start thawing and dying and wasting money and sabotaging your grade in the class. Also, the straws are stored on various little metal thingies (that’s the technical term), which you have to hold with our fingers while our fingers are going, “Ouch. Drop it. Ouch. COLD. Drop it. Ouuuuch!”

I would get into the various procedures we use for thawing, readying the gun, etc, but I’ve already written a novel.

Apr

21

Time to Invest in New Shoes

Filed Under aggie stuff, cattle, school, university farm | 1 Comment

There was an incident at the University Farm the other day. 32, one of the cows, attacked a couple of farm workers when they were out in the pasture. She’d just calved and the workers were out checking the calf when she butted one of them several feet through the air. Then she turned and got another worker down on the ground and worked him over for a while as the other people were trying to run through the mud to get to them.

It was decided instantly that 32 would be on the truck ASAP and her baby would be bottle fed. At a teaching institution, there’s just no sense in taking the risk by keeping animals that have attitudes like that.

Our Bovine Repro class was out at the farm preg checking the fall calvers the other day. One of my classmates and a pre-vet student, Hillary, was wearing gym shoes while most of the rest of us were clad in knee-high rubber boots.

“I’ve never seen a vet wearing shoes like that,” said another of my classmates suspiciously as Hillary stepped up to palpate a cow. This type of talk is common in our ag department since approximately 99% of our interactions with each other involve verbal harassment.

“Just wait,” said Doc. “They hear about cows like 32 and they’ll start showing up in track shoes.”

Next Page →