Large Animal Block- A quick recap

So for January and February, I was in "Large Animal Block", which is designed to help the transition from all classroom work into clinics. Even though it's a little late, I thought I'd recap these courses here!

Courses that I took:
Large Animal Medicine
Large Animal Reproduction
Large Animal Pathology and Toxicology
Poultry Production
Dairy Nutrition

We’ll start with Medicine, since it takes up the most time! We’ve gotten lectures on everything ranging from cardiology to neonatology, and lectures on animals like camelids and swine. Our labs (2 hours every other week or so) have included Equine Dentistry (where we floated a horse’s teeth), Equine Cardiology (where we did echos as well as auscultation to diagnose horses with murmurs), Equine Physical Exam, Neurology (where we diagnosed a neurologic defect in a horse), Opthamology (where we looked at normal horse and goat eyes), Bovine procedures (including placing a orogastric tube, doing epidurals, and taking blood), and Swine labs. Every week we also work on written clinical cases, learning how to go from a problem list to a treatment plan.

Reproduction is our other big class. We only have a few lectures in this course, mostly centered on reproduction in certain species, but we have labs all day once a week. Labs are 3 hours each and include Bovine Palpation, Mare Palpation, Obstetrics, etc, etc. This class has been a ton of fun, and we spent a lot of time in the barns interacting with the teaching animals. Highlights included:
· Collecting semen from a variety of animals, including a pig (who has a ridiculously long, corkscrew shaped penis), a sheep, a dog, a bull, and a stallion
· Palpating (per rectum) mares and doing breeding soundness examinations on them. In addition to finding ovaries, we did uterine cultures, uterine biopsies, and vaginal speculum examinations.
· Learning how to perform fetotomies.
· Diagnosing pregnancy in sows (pigs) via ultrasound
· Rectally palpating lots and lots of cows!

Pathology has been another class with interesting laboratory sessions. The lectures have been a whirlwind of “everything that kills in two hours”. While some of the labs have just been small group lectures (not fair!), we also spent some time in the path room watching necropsies, observing abnormal specimens, and doing our own equine necropsies. Note: The Greek origin of autopsy is “to see oneself”. For animals, we often use the word necropsy or “to see the dead”. To imagine these labs, think of Dexter, and then multiply it by a lot! We also got a tour of the toxicology laboratory, which was impressive if only for the ridiculously expensive machinery in a pretty dingy lab space!

Poultry medicine was another class I’ve taken, which was also pretty fun. I promised Mom I would learn as much about chickens as I could while in clinics, so chicken class it was! This ended up being a really interesting class. Each week, we had a short lecture followed by necropsies of birds from local farms. We got our own dead chicken (or duck) each week, which sounds gruesome (and it is), but was also really interesting. We also did a field trip to a “local” poultry farm, which ended up being half a mile from my parent’s house. Imagine rows of birds going down a hallway as far as you can see, and you pretty much have it. It was impressive how clean and organized the facility was.

Finally, I took Dairy Nutrition. We didn’t get any field trips in this class, but we did have some computer sessions where we worked on developing rations. It wasn’t the most exciting class we had, but it was in the most comfortable classroom AND we had a K-cup machine right upstairs, so the coffee was much better than the stuff that came out of the vending machine in the normal classroom. We take what we can get…