Day 4

7-20-10

Today, we vaccinated and trimmed feet on some of the goats at the farm exhibit, and we also castrated a young male goat. Dr. Guthrie talked me through the whole procedure, and now that I have watched and helped with multiple goat castrations, I think I could do it myself!

After that, the keepers brought in a fifteen-year-old Rewenzori Long-haired Fruit Bat. He has had some old age changes occurring in the bones of his wings, so his fingers are getting crooked and raw from rubbing on the walls of his enclosure. He is also extremely skinny. Dr. Guthrie cleaned his wounds, gave him fluids, pain meds, and antibiotics, and told the keepers to watch him for the next week to make sure he is still eating and his quality of life is still good. She suspects some other disease process is causing him to go downhill, especially because it took him a long time to wake up. Sometimes liver or kidney problems can cause the anesthetics to be metabolized much more slowly. Therefore, in about a week, we will examine him again to check his body weight and possibly draw blood to assess his condition more fully.

For the rest of the day, I reviewed the papers that Dr. Guthrie is in the process of getting published. She is on the track to becoming board certified in zoo medicine, and one of the requirements is that you have to be the primary author on at least five publications! Therefore, she spends a lot of her downtime writing, submitting, and reviewing her papers. She explained the process to me today, and showed me the guidelines that the different journals require for submitting a paper. They are all different and very specific, so it’s really just one big headache.

While we worked on different things in the office, we took breaks to run back and forth to the clinic to examine the prairie dogs that the zoo volunteers were trapping. We need to examine three specific babies that have not yet been micro-chipped, and one adult that has a tooth problem, however, the same dumb prairie dogs get trapped every time, so getting the ones we want is proving to be a slow, frustrating process. Dr. Guthrie has decided to mark each one we catch by either dying their hair or painting their toenails so that the volunteers will know if they need to bring the caged ones into the clinic, or just release them and try again. Surely that will save a lot of time and energy… but we’ll see.