I just finished my RVP (Rural Vet Practice) rotation. That is one of the most highly rated rotations, even for small animal folks, because it is so hands-on, and the clinicians and techs are great. You spend one week doing horse dentals, and one week doing a lot of pregnancy checks on cows.
Let's break those two things down a bit. Horse dentals, at least when they are done according to recent standards of care, involve honking big power tools with scary grinding surfaces. The clinician shows you how to do it on the first patient, then lets you do all the work for the rest of the week. Horse teeth grow continuously, not like human teeth, and they can develop some really crazy points and sharp corners and waves and wonky bits that result in malocclusions and ulcers on oral mucosa and tongue. They also get fractures, abscesses, and other things that require tooth extraction. The extraction tools look just like the ones we use for dogs and cats except they are many times larger and enormously heavy. Think medieval torture implements except these are clean and shiny. Horse dentals are extremely satisfying because with just a bit of training and 20 minutes of work, you can make that horse so much more comfortable. But the actual procedures? The best metaphor I can come up with is thrash rock--lots of yelling and hammering and blood and spit flying around. When you are done, you are covered in tooth dust, spattered in blood and bits of feed, and sweating like a, well, a horse. It is exhilarating.
Preg checking cows takes a lot more practice to become proficient. It is done via rectal palpation. By feeling through the rectum, you have to find the cervix then pull the uterine horns up onto the pelvic rim and palpate along each horn to the ovaries. You often have to shovel poop out of the rectum before you can feel anything. As a bonus, the cows also pee, poop, and fart on you. The first dozen times you put your arm up a cow's butt, it feels like nothing more than a huge, very warm bag of gooey guts in there. For some people, that's true for the first hundred times they do a rectal palpation. But managing pregnancy, particularly for the dairy industry, is a critical component of that business. Misdiagnosing a pregnancy, saying a cow is pregnant when she is not and vice versa, is a costly mistake. It is quite challenging to work at this procedure and get better and better every time you do it.
The RVP rotation also offers plenty of other kinds of exciting opportunities for students to do procedures on large animals. For example, I did a field castration of two yearling horses...by myself. The only part that I did not do was tie them up once they were sedated and on the ground--that was a matter of safety for all personnel so the clinician did this part himself. Field castrations are not sterile, although they are done as cleanly as possible. We use devices called emasculators, which do exactly what you think they do based on that name: they crush the tissue of the spermatic cord and other bits in that area. One of the yearlings was an Arabian who was so nasty that his owner was covered in bruises from his hooves. It was super satisfying to cut his testicles off, let me assure you.
And I got to help manage a bull who needed some serious hoof trimming. He was so large, weighing in at well over a ton, that he would not fit in our squeeze chutes. Although he was used for breeding, he was treated like a pet and was quite docile, so we walked him out to a horse paddock and did the procedure outside. Here's a picture of me keeping a hold of one of his legs so he didn't decide to wake up and kick the clinician working on his hooves:
The RVP service rarely has in-patients since most animals are treated during farm calls, but I happen to have one this weekend that I'm taking care of following a procedure we did on Thursday. A friend pointed out to me that this alpaca is the very last patient that I will ever have in vet school. So to honor that bittersweet milestone, here's a quick pic of me and Stefan:
We are getting so close, so very close, to being done.
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