Diary of A Second-Year Vet Student: Lambing Season

I don't participate in very many of the student clubs. First, there are dozens of them, and second, I'm not that interested in most of them. But I am a dues-paying member of the Ag Animal Club. Most clubs are run by second-year students who joined as first-year students and learn how and what the clubs want to accomplish. I could not have been more excited last spring when my two gross anatomy sheep dissection partners, Becky and Sydney, put themselves forward as the vice president and president, respectively, of the Ag Animal Club. The two second-year students they were replacing are horrible young women. I refer to them as the "mean girls." If you've seen the movie by that name, you'll know exactly what I mean. 

Sydney shared my opinion of the mean girls, and decided she wanted to put her own stamp on the Ag Animal Club, make it more inclusive, have more speakers and activities. And one of the changes she made is to arrange for vet students in the club to volunteer at the university sheep center with the lambing crew. 

I eagerly signed up for my allotted number of two-hour shifts, and went to the first one yesterday. I got to bottle-feed lambs. I got to give ewes with mastitis intramuscular injections of antibiotics. And I got to milk a ewe to collect milk for a tiny little lamb, the runt of triplets, who was not nursing on her own yet. 

My total experience with milking anything was pulling some colostrum from the beef cow project a couple of years ago. But nobody else had been able to get any milk out of this ewe, so I said, sure, I'll give it a go. 

I pulled an ounce out the first time, and fed it to the little lamb. You can't see anything at all, it's all done by feel, and it was very satisfying to hear that stream of milk hit the bottom of the plastic bottle. I went back two hours later and pulled two ounces, and fed that to the little lamb. And then I pulled two more ounces on top of that for one of the volunteers to take home with her to feed the other survivor of that set of triplets.

Everyone was very impressed. I'll be the first to admit that beginner's luck was probably involved. I will also admit that I didn't know that sheep only had two teats until I started rooting around down there. But sometimes we display skills that we didn't even know we had. And just think, in order to have this experience, all I had to do was show up.