First week of vet school!

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I’ve just come back from my first week of DVM, granted it was an animal handling course so no studious lectures yet. About half of us enrolled in DVM drove 3 hours away to Dookie campus to stay in dorms and learn about livestock handling.

We were divided into groups and on the first day I headed down to the sheep shed. The sheep/wool industry isn’t particularly large in Canada so I found this pretty interesting. In the classroom we. Looked at,different breeds of sheep and different stages of the wool during processing. In the afternoon we headed out to learn how to draft sheep in the boiling Australian sun and then tip sheep!

The second day was spent with pigs, similar breeds between Aus and Canada. However the barn I’m used to at home is a shower-in shower-out facility and this one was open air.
we learned how to draft pigs and restrain them using a mouth snare. The fact I found most interesting about the Aus swine industry is that the immuno-castration vaccine was developed here and is used quite commonly!

Beef cattle day was taught about 1 1/2 hours away in Mansfield while it rained. I need to investigate more about DSE… dry stocking equilibrium (I think?) a concept developed by the Aus government. We spent time in the paddocks practicing our low stress handling.

The last day was dairy cattle, my favorite! We woke up quite early to see a rotary parlour in action before heading to a double herringbone parlour. Dairy cattle here are rotationally grazed between each milking! Last stop of the day was to a new robot dairy!

It was a great week of meeting a ton of people, getting back into barns and making some memories 🙂

“I’m new here”

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Hello from Australia!!

I arrived in Melbourne almost a week and a half ago. We are staying in an apartment hotel close to the university and have spent the majority of our time here researching properties and completing apartment inspections. In the evenings we’ve done a bit of exploring — strolling down Lygon Street (similar to whyte ave) and sampling gelato from some of the many stores. The Yarra river was busy and looked gorgeous under a sunset another night! Carlton (the suburb we are currently in) is heavily influenced by Italians so its a foodies heaven!

Jessica and I have spent a lot of time getting lost, explaining our accent, and asking questions —-how long until “I’m new here” is no longer a valid excuse?? Haha

Today, after some very stressful searching, we finally selected an apartment and will hopefully move in in a couple of days!! We should be able to bike or tram to school; and the area seems lovely with lots of shops and a nearby park! Tomorrow there is a well deserved trip to the beach planned and then adventures at Queen Victoria Market in the evening with other vet students!!

Hello World!

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Hello everyone! This is my first blog post on my freshly made website. I’m not exactly an overly computer savvy person so I have been slowly working away at this website until it got to a state I was pleased with. I want this website to be a place for all my friends and family to stay updated and involved in what I’m doing in Melbourne. I also wouldn’t mind if new friends, co-workers, and collegues checked out the site as well.

So its just after Christmas, my room is in a state of constant disaster: half packed, half un-packed and I have just over 30 days left until I move to Australia. I’m really excited to go, and I can’t wait to start learning everything! But I’m also a bit nervous about leaving my whole life behind.

Welcome to my site, welcome to my life… and I would be thrilled if you left a comment or a question 🙂