Flipping Sheep!

Well it's been over a week since my last post? Sorry about that, just getting a little busy with school and whatnot! Well last thing you heard was that I had just come back from Glencoe, so much fun! All last week was pretty much filled with classes, now we are starting to learn a little more than just introductory stuff, more about sheep, cells, RNA, all that good stuff! Friday was lab practical day, which is always the best day! We came into lab to see a disemboweled dog trunk on each table, basically the 2 forelimbs with and the ribcage area that had been decapitated and, like i said, disemboweled for easily handling. We skinned the dog, we're getting really good at it! And the looked at all the muscles that cover the chest area and the forelimbs, and then remove both limbs for future use. Most teams just put their names on the arms, but we named our dog Neil Patrick Hairless, so we put that (because he has no hair now that he was skinned!) Also we weren't sure of the gender of the dog, but as its muscles were well defined and boxy we figured it was a male. We got lucky with our dog, some of the other groups had really furry and fat dogs, so they had a lot to get through to get the skin off. Friday night was the welcome back party at Walkabout, a bar near city center. It was really fun! They played great music, heard some Bewitched which was great, and everyones costumes were really great (it was under the sea themed). The rest of the weekend was fairly uneventful, just did some reading, it was rainy so I didn't really want to go anywhere, though I suppose I should get used to it because its not going to let up anytime soon! Mon was another loooooong day, 9-5 straight through and its all of our more dense subjects, so by the time we got to nutrition it was a little hard to pay attention, and we learned more about sheep! Today we learned about pig farming, very interesting and completely different from sheep farming, and from cow farming from what I know about it. Its very industrialized, and the class was taught by the dean! He seems like a really nice guy, and was very informative about pigs! After that I headed up to Cochno with my group to do some sheep flipping! (I know i called it sheep tipping, but my big vet says its sheep flipping, cow tipping). Its not as easy as it looks, some sheep are quite heavy, but I was able to flip a few sheep, and it was pretty fun! And we looked at their teeth so we could have an appreciation of the different stages of teeth growth as well as what sheep teeth look like that are missing or unhealthy. You use the teeth to age the sheep a lot of the time, so we were able to see how you can age the sheep based on how many adult/juvenile teeth they have, very interesting! After that I came home, ran some errands, skyped with Missy and Sue for a while, and now I'm off to study!