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Showing posts from April, 2017

4/25/2017: Week 11 – Old Experiences and New Faces

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Welcome back! Because I was only in the lab for one day, and ranch duty is officially over, this post will be shorter than usual. However, even though it's short, I have some new things to cover, so I'll get right into it! EASTER SURPRISE Before I get to the lab, one very exciting thing I want to talk about. One of the mini horses gave birth! Maybe it was all the running around (read the last post), but on Sunday morning, she surprised everyone by giving birth even though all signs were showing otherwise the previous day. As you can imagine, the foal was very small! The mini horse is already the size of a large dog, and this little baby horse was only about the size of a cat! Imagine that! I wish I could've seen this cat-sized horse in person, but I do have an awesome picture: Adorable! Anyway, because of the surprise nature of the birth, Mr. Ames wasn't able to collect amniotic fluid from this one, but he caught it in time to collect amniotic membrane.

4/21/2017: Week 10 – It's Not Quite Over Yet

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Hey everyone!  Week 10 already, wow! It feels like just yesterday when I cleaned out my first stable! Anyway, this was one of the least eventful weeks of the internship (partly because all the work is slowly coming to an end), mainly because I didn't get to go the lab at all this week. However, I heard that all the time in the lab this week was spent finishing up moving, so I didn't really miss anything. LIFE ON THE RANCH Week 10's ranch duty was the shortest ranch duty ever because we only had two very simple tasks, both of which we've done countless times before. First was cleaning out the stables, which went without hitch. We also performed some milk tests, none of which showed any particularly interesting results. The second task was washing the horses, which should've been super easy, but of course, we messed it up. And we messed it up bad... Basically, while we were trying to get the mini horses from the pasture to take them to the bathing area, they

4/16/2017: Week 9 – Moving Near the End

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Week 9 was quite exciting for AniCell, not because a bunch of horses gave birth or we made a lot of product, but because we moved to a different lab! Although the lab is in the same building (it's actually only two doors over), it's significantly bigger and even has a space we can use as a designated clean room. Much of Week 9 was spent helping with the arduous moving process, and because I don't want to bore you with the details of transporting materials and relabeling shelves, this post will be fairly short. LIFE ON THE RANCH I actually missed Week 9 ranch duty due to some prior commitments, so I don't have much to discuss. Based on what I heard from the other interns, the day was spent finishing up final details regarding the tree and simply washing the horses. Here's another picture of those minis I talked about in my last post: Mini Horses Pt. 2 A milk test was also performed that day, with no particularly interesting results. A short post sect

4/14/2017: Week 8 – Eight Horses and a Birth

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Hey everyone, sorry this post is so late! I meant to post this last week but was unable to because I was traveling.  Exciting news: I FINALLY GOT TO SEE ONE OF THE HORSES GIVING BIRTH!!!!!! It was an amazing experience, and I have a whole section of this post (in the middle) dedicated to it! Be sure to read all the way through to find out how it was! Anyway, I have a lot of things to share about Week 8, so let's get started! Warning: Some of the pictures in the second section of the post (regarding the birth) are slightly graphic LIFE ON THE RANCH Remember the tree I talked about last time? Well, we got through a lot more of it this time around. I was also a lot more courageous than last time and helped remove some pretty gnarly branches. Some of them were pretty heavy too! We left the project nearly finished, and now have a huge pile of thorny branches next to the trimmed tree. After taking care of the tree, we also performed some bush maintenance near the border of our ra