Diary of a Vet Student

Hello.

Since my last Blog I've been to two vet balls at different vet schools. I think this is a great idea. Vet ball crawls. All vet balls are totally brilliant. Glasgow is awesome because they're such a warm and lovely bunch and they have a fantastic celidh. My feet were bleeding at the end of the night and my poor wee sister coulndnee string a sentence together. Oh yes that's how good it was. Bristol ball was last weekend and slighly marred by the fact that I decided to get so ratted tha my conversation was probably on the same level as one you'd have with a chimpanzee a brisol zoo. That said it was pretty good and if I hadn't been tha raed i would never have discovered jus how good i feels o ea cheese and marmalade sandwiches.

Anyway so balls are good. hee hee.

At the momen i'm half way through a pretty agonising fake behavioural consult. Two urine spraying cats. Actually i's very useful, bu lasting a little long and I'd like a cuppa.

We've just about finished our dse projects which involved writing a welfare assessment based on behaviour observations for animals at Bristol zoo. Planning a bi of an all nigher on ha. will hand i in tomorrow.

Ok bad to sraying. not me, the cats.

Just a quick one really as I have got to make a cake, straighten my hair and pack for a weekedn in Glasgow all within the next hour. eeek. Anyway. This week has been really great. Lots of interesting lectures at tjhe start of the week. On Tuesday we had agreat lecture on exotic welfare. Could only really cover the tip of the iceberg, but it's inspired me to arrange some exotics work experience. We've also been doing behavioural consultation scenarios and pretty soon we'll be assessed on them some that's useful.

I've almost finnished the first of my zoo welfare audit designs today. It's only 800 words,,but it's been quite difficult to squeeze my method, introduction and hypothesis into that word count.
Also trying to arrange my outreah project this week. This involves eductating a section of the public about a welfare issue. I'm going to try to target free range hen farmers and encourage them to promote more ranging in their flocks. Not sure how I'll do this. i could take them all out individually and wine and dine them, but that might be quite expensive so perhaps a large scale talk is more appropriate.

Anyway I'm off to bonny Glasgow this weekend with my even bonnier sister. it's the vet ball, which immense. Ah I love the vet ball. I think even if I hated cats and dogs I'd still become a vet for that one night.

ok so I've got 45 minutes. hmm ok.

Bye

Ooo. not good, I was going to start this blog by saying I'd been a bit of a lazy git last week, but have just read the start of my last blog ("This week i've been a bit slack"), so I think I'll take a different, more positive tact. In fact I was not really a lazy git last week. We lectures all day on Monday and went to the library at night to do some extra reading on stereotypies in horses. On tuesday we had an awesome trip to bristol zoo, where we began to plan our welfare audits. We've got to design a behavioural assessment for 2 species of either reptiles, invertebrates or fish and demonstrate how we can use the assessment to indicate welfare. So it was a really fun day, although plans for everyone to get their faces painted were dashed, because the kiddies fun tent was closed (at least that's what they told us).

So anyway we've all got to write two 800 word welfare protocols. I am going to base mine on iguanas and how you can use the way they chose to thermoregulate to indicate whether they're happy with their enclosures and then see if adding environmental enrichments to their enclosures changes their behaviours. I'd also like to do a project on snakes and see if putting them through an habituation programme reduces their stress levels when in captive displays. Exciting stuff. Will have to do a 3000 word report to follow it up though, which is less exciting.

My chickens were freezing on thursday and Friday (the ones I'm studying for my dissertaion) in fact it was minus five. I had to wear three pairs of trousers and dance on the spot partly to keep warm and partly to distract myself from the pain of being so tightly packed inside my boiler suit by all the extra clothes. Hopefully it'll be warmer next week.

Will write some more late as have a blog deficit to overcome this week.