Another week another dissection

Well its back to Anatomy class practical where we had to dissect yet another cat.

Poor kitty was probably from the shelter and came to our labs as an extension of his life.

Photos later but our goal for today was to identify all the organs under the diaphragm and yes this means opening him up, pulling out each and every part (well not out out but shifting his organs around so we can see what is hiding behind).

More to this post later this week but honestly, no one tells you before going to vet school how stinky the animal cadavers can get!

Dissections, decisions

2nd year of vet school and there isn't as many posts because we are not going out to the farms so far.

Just to clarify, this is the 2nd year of my Bachelor of Veterinary BioScience and as part of the bridging programme, I will start the Doctorate of Vet Medicine next year hence some of the stuff that I do now tends to be more science based.

The nice thing about this year is that we do cover a quite a bit on anatomy and anatomy practicals mean having to
1) Dissect animals (so we would know what to expect within the animals in future).
2) Decide if this is really for us (it's not a joke, if you can't bear to dissect animals or you faint at the sight of blood, this is good time to transfer degrees)


We started off with a cat dissection practical which allows us to familiarise ourselves with the position of the various organs, the digestion tract, gastrointestinal tract, the position of the diaphragm, thoracic cavity etc.
(OK here is the part where I will post some pictures of animals all cut up, if you can't take this, maybe move on to the next blog?)

I think I did pretty well with the cat dissection practical - we cut up the cat pretty well and it wasn't too messy.

Another disclaimer (this post is just FULL of it!), all animals you see here were ethically sourced. They were not put down for our purposes, they would still be put down at the end of the day, we are just extending the usefulness of their life.

Our next Anatomy class was on muscular skeletal system.

This time around we were only dissecting chicken wings (seriously its the same ones you buy from the supermarket, we just had to dissect and look at the different muscles and tendon, not the most exciting).

The rest of the animals were shared stations which allowed 3 classes (we are talking 300 students or about there) to view these specimens and not waste them.

The demonstrators for this module are superb! They answer any of our questions, they help procure and prep the animals and so super nice and approachable.

Here we have the horse's leg cut in half to show us the joints

And the musem have very cool specimens that have been preserved for students like us

Honestly I'm having a blast in school so far, it has been fun (but very full on).

Til the next post.