As I was walking back to school this afternoon, I passed by the pathology lab as usual. Sometimes there is a waft of dead coming from there; sometimes there is something dead sitting on the loading dock like a morbid UPS package.
This time there was a dead horse being taken to the path lab on the forks of a fork lift. It had no feet.
This is one of the research horses for a certain equine clinician (I think, I would assume.). He's studying laminitis. Laminitis is this disease where the little fingerlike projections that hold on the hoof start to die. The hoof can fall off and the toe bone can rotate. There are varying levels of the disease. Some horses never can walk again and have to be euthanized; others become fully functional again after lots of supportive care. Horses get this disease for a variety of reasons including some unknown ones. We had a horse have this. Sometimes its called founder.
Anyway, this clinician decided that in the time it took to euthanize the horse (in which he induced laminitis), chop off its feet and walk them a 100 yards to pathology, that there was too much necrosis.
So instead he anesthitizes the horses like you would for surgery and chop their legs off while they are still alive! Then he euthanizes them.
I can think of multiple ways that this could be done better. Such as RUNNING the chopped off feet to the path lab. Or perhaps giving the horse something for the pain, walking it alive to the path lab, putting up a screen and euthanizing the horse right in front of the pathology lab on the parking lot.
Whatever. This guy is stupid anyway.
[EDIT-Originally, published to Blogger on May 22, 2011.]
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