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WORKING
TOGETHER
FOR A HEALTHIER FUTURE...
25
LIVESTOCK MATTERS
A long way up
STUDENT DIARY
Alice McLeish
, Edinburgh
Third year student, Edinburgh University
Most vet students who want to work with
livestock seem to have come from a farming
background. However, lack of experience is
no excuse at the vet school, or in practice, so
I had to quickly try to catch up, and it was a
long way up! Many practical classes later
(including memorable ones such as lambing
dead lambs out of simulators, and getting
thrown half way across a barn trying to
mouth gag a cow) and we were deemed
ready to be let loose on the real world.
An advantage of not coming from a farming
background is that I can't just go home for
experience; I've had to go out into situations
that I don't know, and made the most of this
by getting as varied an experience as possible.
Lambing placements have definitely been the
highlight of my first few years; one at a
5,000 acre hill farm in Skye, where the main
duty was a quad-bike-ride check every few
hours; to the opposite, a farm of around 500
cheviots and mules, all lambed indoors, with
close to 24 hour supervision, fridges full of
medicines and everything possible done to
help the lambs. Three weeks there went
smoothly enough after the initial worries, and
I have never learnt so much in such a short
space of time; although what will always
stick in my mind was being asked to lamb
a ewe in front of a visiting class of school
children. This ewe was not keen to be
caught, dragging me round the pen,
knocking a massive bottle of lubricant over
my head in the process. The children, and
farmer, needless to say, found this hilarious.
My vet friends and I have decided that
what vet school really teaches us is the
ability to laugh at the ridiculous things
that happen to us. My ‘moments’ have
included being screamed at down the
phone in Gaelic, which I don't speak,
trying to take milk orders at a dairy in
Lewis; chasing an escaped giant rabbit
down a main road in Edinburgh, and
being hit in the face by a flying roof panel
when trying to evacuate dogs from a
kennels during a storm. I wouldn't change
it for anything though.
This semester for third years at Edinburgh is
a cat and dog course, but I'm planning to
see practice with large animal vets in the
near future, before our farm animal course
starts after the summer! I look forward to
telling you more next time.
About me
Twenty-one years ago, I met my first sheep
while on holiday on the Isle of Skye. My
delighted parents realised they'd finally
found something to keep me occupied, as
I spent the whole week pressed against
the window of our house, baa-ing at all
the sheep that went past. Jokingly, they
said I must be going to be a vet (I couldn't
say ‘Mummy’ or ‘Daddy’, my vocabulary
consisting entirely of animals and animal
noises). Several years on, here I am in
my third year studying to be a vet in
Edinburgh, the city I grew up in, with the
hope of becoming a mixed practice vet
once I graduate.
From an outside point of view though, I am probably not the most
obvious candidate for veterinary medicine, especially the farm side.
I was brought up in inner-city Edinburgh, in a family with no vets or
farmers. I'd begged my way into a few weeks here and there of
helping out on farms or surgeries, but, as I realised when I arrived
at university, I was more than slightly out of my depth!
Doing the rounds on Skye
Pet lamb pen in Edinburgh
Feeding the one pet lamb in Skye