Monday, February 7, 2011

Ahh statistics, what fun you are...

So we have started our lectures for statistics and disease occurrences. I can tell you right now, I've only ever taken one stats course and I studied for exams, passed the course, and then flushed everything from my memory. Really, statistics? Statistics is my least favorite course and I find it difficult to focus during the lectures... Not fun! Then again, how do you make statistics a fun subject? We had a lecture on the clinical exam of the cat and the professor that lectured us was a cat nut! She was giving us all of these tips on how to communicate with cats and how to never scruff them. She was also saying something about when you are looking at a cat, you smile at it by blinking your eyes slowly. At the end of her lecture, she went on to tell us this story of when she went to cut a canary's toe nails.

The story goes as follows: She was talking to the owner about how a Canary's heart can dramatically increase and that there is a risk that her Canary would stress from the nail trim and die. The owner was well aware of this but still opted to have the nails trimmed since she couldn't cut them at home. So she took the canary back for the nail trim. Unable to find any proper nail trimmers for small birds, she resorted to using large toe nail trimmers that are used on dogs. She positioned the clippers on the first nail and squeezed the handles together. However, the handles stuck and the clippers slipped down the nail further. She cut the nail and quickly looked away and held the canary up. When she looked down, she had clipped the nail and missed the blood supply, but unfortunately when she raised the bird as she was clipping the nail, she popped the canary's head off! Apparently they glued the head back on and told the owner that it was the heart that failed. Oh jeez!!!

Also, she told us a story of an ostrich she knew. Apparently the ostrich caught it's lower jaw with it's claw as it was running and ripped it's own head off! Now that is shocking! We were not expecting her to tell us these stories!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Brings a whole new meaning to bird brain....