A day at the exotic animal shelter...

So, after two weeks off from classes, we started Endocrinology yesterday and will be going over a lot of other areas of the animal body in the coming months. Exams are over and now we have a lot of new material and a lot of animal handling practicals. Yesterday we had a clinical skills practical in which we learned about performing a physical exam on a dog. We had "Copper" as our patient and he was a border collie that was a tad bit nervous. Ok, physical exam stuff was very easy, I pretty much knew everything Dr. Hudson was talking about but at least I got to play with a dog! Today we had classes and then at 2.30 we had to go to the exotic shelter. We were split up into two separate groups (one group with small mammals and one group with reptiles). We had reptiles first and was glad at that because apparently there is a higher chance of being bitten by the snakes after handling the small mammals. So, we got to play with reptiles for about an hour. A corn snake was the first reptile we got to play with. It was a really nice snake that had a cool copper color to the scales. One person in our group was absolutely petrified of snakes and she had the look like she had seen a ghost when it first came out. In the end, she touched it for a second, but ran back to her seat and had to take deep breaths. I felt bad, she had a serious phobia of reptiles (herpetophobia to be exact). The next reptile to come out was a tortoise, then a large fat-tailed gecko and finally a bearded dragon (which was really cool). We then rotated to the small mammals and got to play with a rabbit, hamster, chinchilla (I had never seen one before and it was really cool looking), a rat and a guinea pig. We had to demonstrate basic restraint of each. Was very simple and we will be tested on restraint techniques in April. Have an early day tomorrow and get out around 1pm. Will be going to a Christmas party around 7pm and then off to a movie with Kristen before she heads back home for Christmas on Thursday. I am looking forward to coming home soon and the nicer weather as well! Hope everyone is doing well and can't wait to see you all!