The Sleeve

Today I worked on a project Sarah gave me looking up cases of pyometra, which is an infection of the uterus, in big cats at our facility. This was sent in by a research student doing her thesis on this subject. I have actually been working on this for the past few days but it is much too big of a project for me to do on my own so the vet students helped me go through the cat records. Unfortunately we don't have all our old records in a computer system so we had to go through all the hard copies by hand. I was able to finish going through the last records with Rayna's help today and should be able to get this project sent back out on time which is by Tuesday. Other than that not much to report form today, but had an exciting event yesterday. First off here is Tau being the adorable lion that he is.

Contemplating Life

Hide Burrito time

 The previously aforementioned excitement is that we finally got the bear sleeve for voluntary blood draws in place. I had been waiting to start Donna on this training until she had "Paw" down but she is doing quite well on it now. So we got the sleeve in place and began training. It took her quite a while to actually put her paw in it, but once she did she repeated the behavior about four times. All in all, a very good first training session.

Set up for training

Trying to reach the berries

Paw in!!

I am so proud of my bear!! She also did this today, but unfortunately she used her other paw. Still, I am glad she had her paw in a gain. The idea is eventually she will grab that black bar and hold it while we shave, spray down, and draw blood from the cephalic vein. It will take a while to get to that point, but we will make it there!! Off for the next three days, and then some very exciting events in the Cheetah Department :) More info coming soon!!