Today was our first chance to get stuck in, looking to see if we could identify the structures and tendons we've been learning about over the previous days. This really was the most amazing eye opening day, to be hands on, dissecting the structures one by one really helped to understand so many factors, like just how close the tendons are under the surface of the skin and how tough the coronet band is.
We all had an individual lower limb to work on but also helped each another too, so as much as we had a leg each, we pretty much worked as a team.
What amazed me was how different each limb was to work with and how hard it was to remove the hoof capsule varied so much.
The hoof I was working on was fairly easy but a couple were really difficult. We were able to see just how thick (or not) the soles were, we could feel the difference in the digital cushion and see the differences in the lateral cartilages. We surmised about what we thought could be pathologies and discussed with Jayne as to our thoughts on what we were seeing.
It might not be for the faint hearted but we all got stuck in and I think we all learnt an awful lot from the day (not least that when a scalpel comes anywhere near your fingers it takes a sneaky bite without you noticing - note to self, take plenty of plasters lol).
Our final day focused on a research project. We had three limbs to work on and had to come to a conclusion as to whether the depth of the sole could influence the angle of the pedal bone.
We worked in teams of three for this and had three limbs per team. We ended up choosing the pathology set of limbs (out of two sets remaining after we had planned our methods) the other two sets were a trimmed group and an untrimmed group.
Our pathology set was fascinating, we had some desperately bad abscesses and awful flare. One of our limbs was from a horse which had also previously been shod and so we were interested to see what impact that might have. One thing we did notice is that the limb with the worst flare and the one with numerous bad abscesses were a lot more fragrant than either our third limb or any of the others. I think this further highlights how an unhealthy hoof is affected by and also affects so many other factors within the body.
We had to take a section so that we could measure the sole depth and how and where we did this was left to us to decide.
Our team chose to take a frontal section, parallel to the dorsal surface of the hoof. This was done using a saw, which also provided the first ever attempt of sawing anything from one if our team members (and to think most of us just cut up a little bit of wood - Megan, you're probably one of the only people who will never forget the first time you used a hand saw )
After marking up, measuring and logging our findings we had to present to Jayne and the other two teams.
Interestingly, all teams with the different sets and our shod pathology hoof also in the mix, all came to the same conclusion - that you cannot rely solely on the depth of the sole to ascertain the angle of the pedal bone. We had varying measurements and no clear correlation between any of the sets of figures we had all taken.
Jayne agreed with our findings and we were all pleased that despite using slightly different methods to research, we had still all come to the same conclusion.
We managed to finish a little early that day and so set of home, letting it all sink in and to start preparing to complete the Anatomy homework.
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