I just dissected a horse!

I dissected lots of horse legs for my dissertation at uni and 1 camel!

Most of the legs came from the local abbatoir, the phd student I was working with use to go and come back with a huge plastic bag full of them and we had to try and pair them up. Also harder than you think trying to work out left and right when cut off below the chesnut. I had to take cartilage and synovium from the fetlock joints and then grow the cells in the lab so I could run experiments on them.

A few times we had ex-police horses come in that were PTS on site. I never went to watch, always made sure I didn't arrive until it was dead. I did end up dissecting the whole horse with another student one day and he kept telling me how much it looked like his horse at home whilst hacking bits off it :-S. It was pretty much first come first served, you had to fight the vet students for the bits you wanted!!
 
I have to cut up human intestine on a regular basis, to isolate crypts for primary culture. It's quite therapeutic, once you've removed the mucosal layer from the bloody tissue. However, I cringed like eck at the sight of a piece of 'human skin' on CSI the other night, lol!
 
I have disected a human leg. The worse part for me was seperating the knee cap from the patella tendons and holding it my hand! Ive got a phobia of knee caps, im not sure why!!. This was a 'fresh' specimen though, some of the other leg cadavers had tags on them dating back to 2004, so they had been painted with preservative so many times by students that they were very brown looking and rather dry.

I have also disected a horse forelimb, head,and stomach in my 1st degree!.
 
i also helped cut up a horse for lion meat (in africa), didnt really get to study the anatomy then though! thought it was slightly ironic that i was wearing a riding club tee-shirt as i was doing it. its not nice to think of a horse being chopped up to be eaten but its just a fact of life is suppose in "the circle, the circle of life..."
 
I have done a few horse's legs at College, I really enjoyed it and learnt lots.
also done the digestive system which smelt bad but could really understand how the horse digests food.
 
I'm glad I haven't had a nasty comments on this I was expecting stuff like "how cruel" Just wondering if anyone know how you would go about donating a horse for science, like if anything ever happens to Koko?
 
I don't know the exact details, but the best way is to contact your nearest veterinary/equine science place and see what they say. For quite a lot of research, its important that the animal is euthansed on site, as other than legs, most viable tissue has a very limited life span. So you would either have to not mind your horse travelling, or be able to get the knackerman to transport your horse. If being ethanased on site for teaching/research, I would expect them to do it for free.
 
Have done all the main animal species - dog, cat, horse, cow sheep, chicken, plus a dolphin in south africa. I don't find it particularly interesting - in the first few years of uni we used to spend whole days dissecting staffies, the novelty quickly wore off for me! I did watch a post-mortem though recently on a horse that I had been looking after at uni, and that was interesting as we were able to find out what had led to his death. Also had to PM a foal on a monday after spending the weekend looking after it - I didn't know it had died until it appeared on the hoist :-(
 
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