Diary of a Fourth-Year Vet Student: That'll Do, Pig, That'll Do

I have spent this week in a preceptorship that really put me on the spot in a lot of ways. I was constantly grilled with thought problems based on real-life scenarios that this person had experienced. I had to use a leg hook to catch feisty chickens--much harder than it looks, you have to be committed once you grab one. I had to get blood from many different types of chicken, and under time pressure. Sure, the basic anatomy is the same but some were so small I could barely tuck them under my arm (in this world, you hold your own bird to collect blood). Apparently I was only the second student in 10 years who had managed to bleed one particular strain, and even better, I pulled about 40% of the needed samples in that barn, which was not shabby at all.

And today, I got to do postings (the word used in the poultry world for field necropsies) on guinea fowl. They were not reaching target weight. Based on observation in the house and discussions with Clemente, the farm manager (who spoke only Spanish), we suspected coccidia, a type of intestinal parasite. It is such a problem in chickens that we vaccinate for coccidia, but guinea fowl do not get this vaccine. So the farm manager grabbed a transport crate and turned it on end, and we euthanized five birds who were not doing well. And I did the necropsies right there. I like to talk when I necropsy, probably annoying to some, but it is helpful if people who have never seen a necropsy before are watching you: "Hmm, the trachea and larynx are clean. Look, there is no feed in the crop. The liver looks great, smooth, no lesions. Oh, look at that gall bladder--a bit bigger than it should be, but then the bird hasn't been eating for a few days." And so on.

When I was done, the guy I am working with this week suggested a picture. There is only one commercial guinea fowl producer in the US and we were not only standing in one of his barns, we were doing field necropsies on the birds. Not many vet students get that opportunity. A picture! Great idea! Suddenly, the farm manager jumped over and put his arm around me.

And that photo is priceless to me. It says a lot that I could walk in and get the confidence of that guy in a couple of hours. Those are his birds in the sense that he takes care of them every single day. He wants to do what it takes to help them get better.

My mentor told me in the car afterwards that I had done an excellent job with the necropsies, and with Clemente.

Diary of a Fourth-Year Vet Student: On the Hunt

I am on the hunt for a job. Yes, I haven't even taken my board exams yet. I have barely started my clinical year of vet school. But I am focused on getting a job--because after all, isn't that the whole point of getting a professional degree like a DVM?

I am at a big veterinary conference in Denver. The American Association of Avian Pathology (AAAP), one of the largest professional poultry groups in the US (maybe in the world, it has an international reach despite the name), schedules its annual meeting at the same time and place as the annual meeting of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), which is the largest vet med group in the US. Even though AVMA caters to vet techs, students, and veterinarians of all types, it is heavily focused on the small animal clinician. So it is with some satisfaction that we poultry folks look around and see that we represent a rather substantial number of bodies at this conference.

I had some grand plans to get a job while at this conference. I have a dozen copies of a carefully groomed resume all ready to hand out. Those plans were probably a bit ambitious. Instead of job offers, what I have gotten so far is excellent advice about what kinds of jobs I might expect to get and how to go about marketing myself to get them.

AAAP is incredibly dedicated to serving its student members. They offer lots of scholarships. I got one last year in support of my research project. We published the first set of results from that project in December, and I've got a poster up at this conference with the next set of results and have another manuscript that will probably be ready to submit to a journal in January, so their investment in my research project was money well spent. This year, AAAP gave me a prestigious scholarship that will help pay some of the expenses of the externships that I have to complete during my fourth year. And they gave me another high-profile scholarship just for grins and giggles (joking aside, my reference letters were stupendous, which helped a lot with this last one). 

AAAP also has a mentor program that is unique in the vet med world. When I told my classmates last year that AAAP had matched me with a mentor who could give me advice on fourth-year externships, career planning, and just about anything else I might want to know, they couldn't believe it. No other professional vet med association has this kind of formalized mentoring program.

But wait, there's more! Tonight, AAAP had a "meet the expert" event. It was like speed-dating for aspiring poultry vet med students. A dozen round tables were each labeled with a specific sub-discipline in the poultry industry (technical services, layer production, government, small flock consulting, etc). There were at least two industry professionals at each table. We students had ten minutes to pick a table, pick their brains, then a bell would ring and we would have to move to a new table. It wasn't as rushed as it sounds as you could easily linger at a particular table for two rounds if you wanted to. And AAAP generously had an open bar with beer and wine to keep our throats from getting parched. That isn't to imply that this was a drunken debauch--it only lasted an hour or so and there was far more talking than drinking. But it is the little things that make a simple, no-frills activity feel more special.

I got such amazing and helpful advice. All of those professionals were so generous with their time and quite willing to share their experience. I am still not quite sure which direction I will head with respect to where I want to end up in the industry but I feel better prepared for what I need to do to market myself appropriately.

One of the best pieces of advice I got was from a layer consultant. He said, treat every day of every externship like a job interview. Even if I don't get an offer from that company, the poultry vet med world is a small one, and in one way or another I will be their future colleague. 

Chickens Have Outies

I've plowed through 69 pages of a nearly 400-page dissertation, dug up half a dozen cool papers on the role of the gut microbiome in such diverse things as mammalian radiation into diverse habitats and development of metabolic diseases (obesity, diabetes), and started building an enormous spreadsheet listing all of the published poultry flaxseed feeding trials since the mid 1980's along with a brief summary of their outcomes. I also spent half an hour at the barn and five hours in the lab this morning. Time for a break!

I thought I would share an amazing discovery with you: chickens have outies. Okay, I know, birds aren't placental mammals so technically they don't have belly buttons, innie, outie, or otherwise. But they most certainly have the functional equivalent to a structure associated with the belly button.

What is a belly button? The scientific word is omphalos, Greek for navel or center. I love the word omphalos. The navel marks the spot where the placenta attaches to the embryo during gestation. In mammals, the navel is an external feature, an embryological scar if you want to think of it that way. Birds don't have a placenta but they do have a structure that links what eventually becomes the GI tract of the embryo to the yolk, its energy source during development in the egg.

Just before birds hatch, they absorb the remaining bit of yolk into their intestinal cavity. They use the lipids in the yolk remnant for the energy that they need to break the shell then begin their search for food and water. If you've ever cut up day-old chicks (they are fed to snakes, raptors, etc) you might have noticed the runny yellow yolk remnant inside its belly.

As the birds age, they use up the yolk but the small bit that connected their GI tract to the yolk remains. It is called the Meckel's diverticulum and it specifically marks the start of the lower part of the small intestine in birds (the ileum). Meckel's diverticulum resembles a tiny outie belly button hanging off the outside of the chicken's gut. We have a Meckel's diverticulum that hangs off our lower small intestine too; originally it attaches to the placenta but once we are born, it shrivels up a bit, detaches from our belly wall, and becomes vestigial.

Photos after the break. Don't click if guts bother you.

Research Project Progress Report

Besides mucking about with the straw business, I've been quite busy with the actual working parts of the latest feeding trial. Last Sunday, I collected about 10 g of fresh excreta from each pen. On Monday, we sacrificed one chicken from each pen. We collected the digesta from the lower part of their small intestines. This involved removing the GI tract from the esophagus to the cloaca, including the liver, pancreas, gall bladder, and spleen, which are pretty much integrated with the intestines, weighing the whole mess then pulling it all apart and cutting out the lower part. I then squeezed the contents of the lower part into plastic vials, sort of like gently squeezing stuff out of a long, cooked ziti pasta. We want to look at the digesta and the excreta because we want to know if the enzyme we are adding is helping the chickens digest the whole flaxseed better. That is, we want to know how much of their diet is just passing through and how much of it are they actually incorporating. If the enzyme is helping them digest the flaxseed, we should see that reflected in their digesta and excreta, and we should expect to see an increase in beneficial fatty acids in their tissues at the end of the trial.

Collecting the excreta turned out to be no big deal. Chickens fed these kinds of special diets don't have poop that looks like what the blue jay shat onto your car windshield two days ago. These broiler chickens poop out sticky turd-shaped poops. It doesn't smell all that bad either. Sure, if they keep shitting on the same litter for months and months, the ammonia smell will increase but remember that broilers are sacrificed at 6 weeks of age. Plus, after years of owning dogs, I'm not terribly wound up about poop. Well, that's not true. I'm rather interested in it but I'm not afraid of it or squicked out by it.

Then on Tuesday, we mixed the second-stage diets, 100 lbs each of four diets. That basically involves me weighing each 100 lbs out in 3-pound-scoop increments. Good for toning the arms. We make the diets ourselves by mixing calculated amounts of ground corn, wheat middlings, soybean meal, canola oil, flaxseed, and extra vitamins and things such as salt, calcium, amino acids. We have to weigh the remnants of the first-stage diet, emptying all the feeders, then refill them with a weighed amount of the new diet. Lots of scooping and weighing and hauling buckets from one end of the barn to the other. It's hot, dusty, physical work. By the end of feed mixing days, I am covered from head to toe in a fine, pale dust. It takes two wash cycles to get my clothes clean.

Today, I started analyzing the digesta samples. The dry matter determination involves weighing the samples out then drying them in an oven. Oddly, they smelled kind of sweet, a lot like the whole grain bread that I eat. I'll do the same procedures on the excreta tomorrow. I am afraid to even speculate what chicken poop will smell like when it is drying in the oven! I don't think it will smell like whole grain bread. Those gut bacteria have had their way with things once the food is turned into excreta. 

I'm pretty pleased with my advisor's management style. She prints up protocols for sample collection and analysis procedures, shows me how to do lab procedures once all the way through then simply turns me loose to sort it out myself. I have made some mistakes but none that are costly in terms of data or equipment. Two weeks ago, I had a bunch of unexpected and unwanted null results. After thinking about it for a day, I devised a set of three sensitivity tests to figure out what I was doing wrong. Using those tests, I isolated the problem and I expect to be back on track with those analyses quickly. I'm glad that she is letting me flail around a bit--she's busy and can't micromanage me but I don't think that's her style anyway. It is working out well between us.

On top of all of this excitement, I have set a goal that I must read at least two papers every day, summarize them, and get the information into my thesis draft. I plan to have the literature review/introduction done by the end of the summer. So far, so good. The thesis draft is 32 pages long (1.5-line spacing with section headings but otherwise unformatted) and I've read and incorporated half of the more than 100 references I've collected to date. I keep having to dig up new references though, especially when I need to get a primary source (in that case, those are actually the older papers). "John said that Mary said that this is so" doesn't work when writing a thesis (or dissertation). You need to try to get Mary's original paper to find out what she said. I add two or three new papers for every half dozen that I read. But I know from experience that this will slow down as I start to hone in on the most important concepts. 

Doing Science

This morning, I went into the lab next door to get some distilled water (the still is set up in that lab; you can buy lab-grade distilled water but most labs that don't need an extreme level of purity simply make it). The department I am in is called Animal and Rangeland Sciences, and the lab next door is being used by some of the rangeland folks. They study all aspects of rangeland: development, ecology, flora/fauna, hydrology, grazing, etc. One of the faculty has a grad student or post-doc, I'm not entirely sure of his status, visiting for the summer. I walked in to find this visiting researcher filling a 10-gallon aquarium with dirt and water. Um, I asked him, are you making a tank of mud? Yep, he said. I said, why are you doing that? He told me they wanted to test a set of subsurface temperature sensors that will be installed in a muddy area--he was replicating the field setup in the lab. With a tank of dirt and water. I laughed and said, that's pretty neat, and I'm glad I don't have to clean that up!

Then again, on Sunday, I have to collect 10 g of clean excreta (that is, chicken poop) from each of our 16 pens. The samples can't be contaminated with anything like litter or feathers. Imagine a poop lying there: I have to scoop off the top part that isn't touching anything. And I have to find enough fresh piles to make 10 g from each pen, which isn't much in terms of actual volume (a paperclip weighs about a gram), but I will have to hunt around each pen to find the freshest, cleanest poops.

Science is fun!

Enriching the Broiler Chicken: Update

The straw seems to be just the thing. They are scratching around in it, pulling the flakes apart. They climb on top of the flakes, flap their little wings madly, and jump off. I watched one chick use the extra height to launch itself into the feeder rim this morning--that was pretty funny. Broilers commonly develop metabolic disorders that are caused by the rapid increase in muscle tissue and the inability of the skeletal and cardiovascular systems to keep up. The extra exercise they will get from climbing around the straw will be very good for them.

Enriching The Broiler Chicken

One of the big buzzwords in animal science these days is "enrichment." This is sort of ironic because our feeding trials are attempts to enrich poultry meat with health-positive omega-3 fatty acids, but we are talking about two different kinds of enrichment.

It's no longer sufficient to provide research animals (or zoo animals, for that matter) with clean bedding, water, and food. The researcher is also required to provide additional items in the animal's environment that will stimulate it physically or mentally. Even so, enrichment can't of course interfere with any particular experimental goals.

There is a slight disconnect since enrichment is not used in commercial production settings. If your experiment is supposed to mimic that commercial setting, you probably shouldn't provide enrichment. But wouldn't it be better if we turned that argument around? Why not provide enrichment in commercial facilities? I think this could be an interesting area of research. 

Broiler chickens are typically kept in buildings that house hundreds of thousands of birds and there is an accepted mortality rate of 2 to 5 %. If you could show that enrichment could reduce the average mortality by even 1%, it might be possible to convince commercial producers to give it a try. Of course, whatever enrichment you put in place must have a total cost of implementation and management that is less than the profit that a producer would get from that additional 1 % of birds that survive. 

All universities and companies who do animal research and who receive federal research dollars to do so are subject to intensive, repeated reviews and site visits by IACUC, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees. The IACUC-specific paperwork associated with live animal experiments is thorough and time-consuming to complete.

Currently, the OSU IACUC has a bee in their bonnet about enrichment. I decided to give it a try. Our second feeding trial began 17 days ago. About one week in, I added stalks of celery to the pens. The chicks weren't too interested. Last weekend, a large tree branch from my neighbor's tree fell into my yard. I cut it up and hauled leafy branches to the barn, enough for each pen. The chicks didn't seem too interested. Keep in mind that modern broilers have been genetically selected for many generations to be eating, breast-meat-growing machines. Plus we keep them on a 23/1 light cycle: 23 hours of light, one hour of dark. Chickens don't eat when it is dark. So whenever they wake up from a nap, they start eating again.

My next enrichment experiment was straw. This morning, I divided a bale of straw into the 16 pens. According to the farm manager, "IACUC loves straw!" I won't really know how well the straw works until tomorrow or Friday.

A flake of straw, the dried out leafy branch, the wilted celery stalk. Enrichment. The chicks are more interested in the fresh water I gave them. They will be using the line watering system by the weekend.

We will be switching the chicks over to different diets next week. Once they settle into those, I'll put whole carrots in their pens. And I have a final enrichment experiment: shiny balls which I will make from aluminum foil. Apparently the farm manager has heard that ping pong balls can be used but I don't have any of those. I do have some foil in the cabinet.

The straw may be the only effective enrichment feature because they can climb on it, nest in it, and move it about by scratching in it (they can do this with their litter too but the straw is a different texture and composition). I at least have given enrichment for broiler chickens a try.

It is a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma

I am continuing to analyze the samples from the first trial. Chicken parts ground up in chloroform have a distinctive odor that is a mixture of meat and chloroform, but chicken parts ground up in acid (perchloric acid, to be precise) smell like vomited-up, partially digested chicken. Yum, yum. 

Our second feeding trial started last week. I keep a daily log, doing head counts, checking water and feed levels, room temperature, litter quality. Today, day 9 of the trial, there was a surprise waiting for me.

I really hope that our newest batch of chicks have not developed some mad telekinetic skills. It seems that we had an escapee in the 24 hours since I was last in the barn. One pen had only six chicks in it this morning--it's supposed to have seven! I counted again and again. I counted the chicks on the other side of the partition. Maybe they developed the ability to levitate? Nope, the proper number of chicks was on the other side. I started sifting through the litter drifts--maybe it was dead and the others buried it? (If chickens are developing burial rituals, well, we've got bigger issues than a missing chick.) I found nothing, smelled nothing (dead chicks quickly get pretty stinky since their pens are kept between 80 and 82 degrees).

There are other workers at the farm. I thought that perhaps one of them found a dead chick in that pen but failed to record it. That's sloppy record-keeping but easily corrected. There is usually a 2 to 5 % mortality rate in the first 10 days or so so a chick death isn't unexpected. We've already had one chick die (it was really small, just failed to thrive). There is no internet access out there so I decided to complete my morning rounds and email the farm manager when I got to campus.

Directly across the hall is another room with two more pens on the same diet. In the pen by the door there was EIGHT chicks! I couldn't believe my eyes! I counted them over and over to be sure. I randomly grabbed one and put it in the other pen.

Was one of the student workers yanking my chain? Did a chick slip out of a room before I closed the door yesterday and I didn't notice it? Believe it or not, this is one of the things I check for before I leave every day.

The farm manager has since confirmed that rarely a smaller chick might squeeze under a door but never in her years at the farm has she known one to squeeze under twice.

So basically we are back to telekinesis. We are doomed.

(link to source of post title)

Liver Shake

Yeah, that sounds really appetizing, doesn't it? But that is pretty much what I made yesterday. Today I made abdominal fat pad shakes. Tomorrow it's thigh meat shakes. Mmm, mmm!

How does one make a liver shake, and why do you want to do it? The why is easy: making a liver (or heart or thigh) shake is the first step in a total lipid extraction of our tissue samples. From there we can do all sorts of fancy analyses of different types of lipid (AKA fats). 

The how is a bit more complicated. Fats are typically extracted using organic solvents. I am using a mixture of chloroform and methanol, a fairly standard mixture for lipid extraction from biological samples. I took a piece from each of our sample livers, chopped it up, weighed it, added the solvent, ran it through a "homogenizer"--an expensive, lab-bench-top puree device (the end result is the liver shake), and let it sit overnight. 

I then filtered out the solid bits (bits of cell walls, proteins, fibrous bits--the liver is full of nasty fibrous bits), pretty much anything in the liver that wasn't dissolved by the solvent.

The next step is pretty cool. What we really want is lipids and chloroform. But the chloroform and methanol are mixed. To separate out the methanol, we add a weak salt (sodium chloride, table salt) solution. Some tidy organic chemistry happens, and the less dense methanol/salt/water separates to form a white, cloudy layer above the clear yellow chloroform/lipids layer.

   
We did this exact same procedure, minus the lipids, in the organic chemistry lab I took last summer. I was pretty excited to see my advisor demonstrate the procedure on one sample--I could have written out the balanced equation for the reaction since separating two organic solvents by adding a salt is standard stuff. She was pleased that I was able to put it all together so quickly. Anyway, she's told me that her goal is to turn me into an organic chemist for the summer! So far, so good. 

Our goal is to complete all of the lab work for both feeding trials by the end of August. Then we can focus on the numerical analysis of everything in the fall, I can start writing it all up over the winter break, and maybe even finish up by April or May. That would be setting a land speed record for a master's research project, especially one involving live animals.

And no, I haven't lost sight of the end game. I took the GRE last week, and started my online vet school application over the weekend. I'll be posting about that soon. I totally understand now why I was told, over and over, that it would take weeks to complete (I never doubted this information, but it's good that I have confirmed it for myself).

Sample Collection Day

Yesterday was day 35 of my first feeding trial. For several reasons that I won't get into here, my advisor and I decided to terminate the trial after five weeks, not six. In commercial production settings, broiler chickens would have been euthanized on day 42; that loss of a week of mostly fat production won't affect our results. We got a final weight on all the pens and remaining feed. We also selected eight birds from each of the three diets from which to collect samples.

Despite the tone of the title of this post, collecting samples from poultry feeding trials is not benign. In fact, it requires that the chickens be euthanized and cut up, with specific parts removed, weighed, and bagged for later analysis. Since the weight of the parts is normalized to the weight of the individual chicken, we got a final "live weight" on each bird and euthanized them separately, one by one. The most humane method, and in fact the method required by the university laboratory animal protocol, for euthanizing small animals (mice, rats, birds) is with CO2 gas. While the trauma isn't zero, it is much less than the animal would experience from other more, well, let's say, hands-on methods.

You can do the math--we processed 24 birds today. Thankfully, my advisor wrangled a couple of undergrads into helping us. We assigned B* the very important job of recorder: he wrote down weights of everything on prepared spreadsheets. He also helped us keep track of which bird was being worked on and which bird was in the CO2 box waiting to be processed. I started out weighing parts, putting them in ziplock bags then into a cooler filled with ice, but when the second undergrad showed up, I was promoted to the job of parts collection. My advisor took considerable time to show us all the various organs and some unusual variations that turned up in one or two of the birds. She also showed me how to quickly disassemble a whole chicken.

When I was a kid, you could still get your meat from a butcher, but those styrofoam-plated parts wrapped in shiny plastic, lined up so neatly in the supermarket, were quickly becoming the norm. In short, I've never had the opportunity to cut up an entire chicken--one that still had guts, feathers, skin. One that was still warm. One that died after I put it in a metal box and turned the valve on a gas cylinder. It was quite an experience. There is of course a method but there isn't a lot of finesse. A fair bit of hacking and cracking is involved.

It was a tiring, messy morning. A shower and a good meal were necessary before the metallic taste left my nose and throat. And to be honest, it might be a few days, maybe a week or two, before I can eat chicken again. In fact, I think this is what surprised me the most about this morning. The birds weren't pets but I have cared for them daily for weeks. They weren't individuals. Still, they were living creatures. We were all appropriately respectful (no chicken corpse dance routines or chicken head ventriloquism, for example), but there is no escaping the fact that we killed and cut up 24 chickens this morning.

On the other hand, knowing how to humanely kill and butcher an animal is a perfectly respectable and useful skill. My research has fairly direct applications to human and poultry health and welfare. It wasn't a pointless exercise, or one done with glee or pleasure.

There are pictures but I have put them below the fold. If you are squeamish, DO NOT click the "read more" link. I won't force anyone to look at the reality of broiler chicken research. 

* It feels weird, not using full names. Echoes of living and blogging in the Magic Kingdom. But there are plenty of people who have radical ideas about animal research. No need to stir the flames.

Growing Chicks

Today is day 20 of the first feeding trial I am conducting for my master's research project, so we are almost at the halfway point. We are using "life stage" diets, which means we change the diets to meet the changing metabolic needs of the chicks. They were on starter diets; today we switched them all over to grower diets.

They were without food for about two hours while we emptied the feeders, weighed what was left of the first diet, then weighed out the new diet and filled the feeders and put them back in the pens. Two hours without food to a genetically selected eating machine is an eternity!

Here's a photo of one of the pens letting us know they are quite happy with their new diet.

They are going through a bit of an awkward phase at the moment. No longer cute and yellow and fuzzy, they are growing so fast that their feathers are not quite keeping up. Everything should fill in during the next week but they all have bald patches. And you can see that most of them are starting to get a bit, well, round. It's not fat--they are growing breast muscle at an amazing rate. The actual science part is happening inside the chicks as they process their diets (we are feeding two experimental diets and a control)--we won't really know the results until we analyze the samples we will collect at the end.

Godzilla

I hope you took a look at the Meat Atlas link--it's a fascinating read. If you did, then you learned that global production of poultry meat products was 106.4 million tonnes (that's metric tons or 1000 kg or 2204.6 lbs) in 2013, 34.5% of the global total of animal meat produced. Poultry products are projected to increase to about 126 million tonnes by 2020 and be valued around $1000 per tonne, or $126 billion dollars globally.

That's a lot of chicken nuggets.

At the risk of horrifying you further, I will leave this here:

My advisor is really bad about citing figure sources in class lectures, which really annoys me, so I don't know where this came from. But it depicts a typical broiler chicken in 1957, 1977, and today (which is probably 2002 or so; just guessing). Just as we have genetically selected dogs to have certain body shapes and colors and sizes to please our whims (compare the labrador retreiver and Chinese crested), we have genetically selected broiler chickens to have large, meaty breasts, the part of the bird with the largest market value. As a result, within only 50 years or so, we have created an eating machine: Godzilla, the modern broiler chicken. Three out of four molecules of food that go into the broiler's mouth are converted to muscle.

Back in the 1950s, it often took 10 or 12 weeks for a bird to reach "market weight." Modern broilers reach that now in 6 weeks. They are white because making pigmented feathers wastes energy that could be redirected to muscle tissue--all of the color was selected out of these genetic lines. The same two or three broiler breeds are used worldwide in a sort of poultry monoculture.

Don't think that free range or organic chickens are always better off. There are severe restrictions on the types of feed and supplements that they can receive and most of the free-range broilers destined for market develop severe nutritional deficiencies (most environments are very nutrient poor for foraging chickens, at even small production scales, and you can't supplement their feed with vitamins because those aren't organic) and parasites (can't give drugs either, so forget prophylactic dewormers). No broilers ever receive hormones--chickens don't have the metabolism to use them and it would basically have the opposite effect than that intended--it's a complete myth that chickens receive hormones. Cows, now that's a different story. Even in small production settings, female cows are given multiple hormone shots to force the herd to ovulate at the same time so that the AI servicing can be done on all of the herd in one go.

We selected for chicken Godzilla, generation after generation of broiler chicken, to feed our own insatiable need for nuggets and breast fillets (ironically, I detest both), just as our whimsy led to myriad breeds of dogs. 

Naughty, Naughty Chickens

The chicks are still sort of cute and yellowish. They get measurably larger each day. I know this because I am doing a daily check on them (and recording my observations on log sheets). In a couple of the pens, some troublemakers decided to hop into their feeders and scratch around. They are in floor pens with deep cedar shaving litter so they have plenty of scratching material. We'd prefer that they not toss their food out since one of our experimental variables is total food consumed per pen. Hard to determine that if they are pitching it all over the place. I ratted the naughty chickens out to my advisor, she laughed, and told me to raise the feeders so they'd really have to reach to get their dinner! What, we are trying to turn them into giraffes, I said. (That's a classic Lamarckian joke right there. How about that, I can be funny in French and in animal nutrition studies.)

In one of those "you can't make this shit up" stories, I ran into that troublesome, Lewis-Black-channeling-prof while I was out at the poultry barns this afternoon. Turns out he also does poultry research--on dietary factors that affect rooster sperm motility. I SWEAR TO YOU THAT THIS IS THE TRUTH! He's got an entire barn filled with the damned things. They screech and crow continuously, and you can hear them a good couple of hundred yards away. I've not dared to peek in there, mainly because he is using the barn located on the most remote corner of the property. I'd have no excuse whatsoever for being there. And DO NOT ask me how he obtains the samples. Jeebus on a cracker.

We chatted for about 15 minutes and he told me that he's decided to change the class up a bit, for the better, I think. He suggested that my comments made a difference. He even made some jokes, some normal type jokes, not screaming, profanity-laden Lewis Black rants, and smiled...and I realized that for the entire 10 weeks I was in his class last term, I had never seen him smile. Good grief.

But now that we've sort of broken the ice, I think I'll approach him about the general topic of poultry research. I've matured my vet school research from looking into specific schools to matters of funding--how will I pay for this expensive folly? Turns out there's money in chickens. There are groups that will pay a lot (most? all?) of your vet school bills in return for a couple of years of service in the poultry hinterlands. I'd like to get some outside opinions on that.

I should mention that my current advisor asked me if I was sure if I wanted to go to vet school as she had a big grant coming in and needed a PhD student...! Forget plastics, the future is in chickens.

I know quite a few of my friends have said, oh, you'd make a great vet, I'd bring my little Fluffy to you! Well, I'm not so sure that I'd be the best clinician. But I'm not in vet school yet, am I? Chickens may get me there, but I may be helping you care for your Fluffy when all is done.

The Student Gig

I've got some big news! You'll recall that a few posts back I was bemoaning the fact that I wasn't having any more fabulous, exotic travel adventures. But quitting my job and going back to school has certainly opened up new kinds of adventures. I suspect that for some of you, becoming a student again sounds like entirely too much work. Well, I'm getting ready to take the student gig to a new level.

But first, some backstory (isn't there always a backstory?). With the exception of microbiology which I'm taking next term, I have finished the additional coursework that I needed to apply to the vet schools that I'm interested in (I have a short list of four schools at the moment).

All of the vet schools in the US use a single, online application form. They all use the same deadlines too. Applications are due this September for consideration for entry into vet school for fall of 2015. Yes, that's a year in advance. Actually, you are informed by March 2015 or so if you are accepted but you won't start vet school until that fall.

So I was wondering what I could do for the next 18 months. I didn't want to keep taking classes; I don't need them and college is damned expensive. I figured that I would try to get a job in a vet clinic as a tech and hang out here and see what happened. No point in moving anywhere until I knew where I might end up (my vet school choices are scattered across the US; OSU is one of them, however). And my chances of being accepted to vet school on the first application are not guaranteed. Many excellent candidates have to try a second time. I might be among them. 

I thought that for the spring and summer, I might try to get in on an undergraduate research project. I approached the professor who taught the Animal Nutrition course in the fall. I really enjoyed the course, and I learned that she had quite a lot of funding for undergrad research. So in January, I went to talk to her about this.

As she asked me more questions about my background, she got more excited, finally proposing something that I never even saw coming. 

She asked me to do a Master's degree with her in the 18 months' "gap". She's got research funding and several projects from which we could choose. She mentioned a fellowship that could pay my tuition and a small monthly stipend. She felt it was all quite doable.

I immediately sought some advice and information from a couple of other people in the department. Was I crazy to even consider this? It will be a lot of work. But the advantages are perfectly clear. Being accepted into an Animal Sciences graduate program then executing and completing a research project and thesis will be a significant boost to my vet school application. Half of the battle of going to grad school is finding an advisor and a project and funding. All of those things are being handed to me!

But wait, there's more! This professor works with poultry. Chickens, you are thinking? Really? Consider this: chickens are just about the only meat source without any major religious prohibitions and as a result chicken and egg production are taking off internationally. There is a TON of funding for poultry research from both the government and private sources. There are excellent, well paying jobs in the poultry industry all over the world. I am in fact interested in a possible international work experience. Why aren't more students flocking (heh, bad pun, it stays!) to poultry science? As one prof told me, chickens aren't cute and furry. Bah, I said. You don't have to take them home and make them pets. With respect to my vet school application, I am weak in my experience with production animals so working with chickens will help me out a lot there too.

Even better, the professor who asked me to work with her has a very strong focus on nutrition. It works both ways, you see. Better  nutrition for the chickens results in better nutrition for people who consume chicken products. Among other things, she studies how poultry diets affect the nutrient profiles of eggs. I am particularly interested in the tangled intersection of diet and disease (details are best reserved for a future post), but many vet schools don't even teach basic nutrition courses anymore. So I also see her offer as an opportunity to learn about specific topics of great personal interest to me.

So, in short, I applied and was accepted to the OSU graduate program starting in the spring term (which starts a short two weeks from now). In about 18 months, if all goes as planned, I will be getting a Master's degree in Animal Sciences with a focus on poultry science and nutrition. It was confirmed today that I'll get the fellowship that will cover my tuition.

And although this had little to do with my decision, I would mention that since I already have a BS and a PhD but not an MS, upon completion of the degree I'll have a complete set! Not a matched set since the other two are in geological sciences, but a complete set nonetheless. Sort of like shopping for dishes at Goodwill. My professional email signature will get really interesting. Imagine what it will look like if I add DVM to the list!