Day 6

7-22-10

Today is discount admission day at the zoo, so it’s pretty packed! We did two programs this morning with 10-12 year olds. Dr. Guthrie did a talk on parasites and the things we can learn from poop! Then we took everyone to the clinic where they could look at poop under the microscope, and told them about the transponders (or microchips) we use to identify each animal.

Shortly after we finished with our programs for the morning, Andrea brought us two more prairie dogs they had trapped. Unfortunately, they were both repeats, again! This time however, we marked them on the shoulder with a big black sharpie so we wouldn’t have to waste time bringing the same ones to the clinic again today.

After lunch, I did some bookwork cataloging the animal deaths for the year 2010. I had to record the date of death, species that died, and the reason of death. It was very interesting for me to review the pathology reports and medical records of each case. I spent a lot of time reading the notes prior to reading the final diagnosis and I was pretty impressed with how close I could get to diagnosing the condition. Vet school IS paying off!

At the end of the day, I went with Dr. Guthrie to check on Zeus, the North American Porcupine. His keeper thought she noticed something funny with his teeth, however, we couldn’t see it when we looked so she said she’d let us know if she saw it again. Zeus is incredibly cute and friendly. I fed him some honeydew melon which he very gently took from my hand with his big orange teeth, and then used his long-clawed fingers to hold it and eat it.