» Work Experience

Slicing a dead horse
My work experience was at a highly respected teaching establishment for the training of vets.

On my first day, I was taken into a vast room where the students do their practicals. I was led to a pile of preserved cold dog legs. My morning’s task was to sort them into front lefts, front rights, back lefts, and back rights.

After spending a day in labs, and a day in the freezer cleaning gristle from sheep skulls, my worst task was explained. Disposal costs of animal remains are not cheap, and there is no weight to cost ratio. There are fixed prices for animal types, the larger the more expensive. There is also a price for miscellaneous 25 kilo bags. The miscellaneous price is MUCH cheaper than whole carcasses. That morning, they had done a post-mortem on a race horse. It was my task to put this horse into 25 kilo plastic bags, thereby saving the institution a hundred odd quid in disposal costs. I was a dopey child, so when I presented with a scalpel to carry out this task, I did not complain.

A race horse weighs about 500 kilos. The head had been taken for further examination, but that still left about eighteen bags for me to fill with horse. Worst parts: a scalpel’s blade is an inch long; a horse’s guts fill more than one bag; having to break its spine by cutting away surrounding flesh, manoeuvring it over the edge of the table and letting its own weight break it; being elbow deep in horse trying to find the back bone… and my dog licking my boots clean when I got home. I replaced the scalpel blade five times.

Twelve years later. I must salute the guy who made me do it. I was a prick of a public school kid and I needed a taste of the real world.

It could have been worse, the guy that went next week “collected” semen samples from randy rams… and the fool told everyone when he got back to school.

Errr… Some joke about a horse’s cock…
(Fri 11th May 2007, 16:22, More)