Nanny berries

I have a tickle in my throat and that concerns me. I hope I'm not getting sick.

Did I mention that on Friday I was involved in fecal sampling? I will now. On Friday I participated in the collecting of  fecal samples (aka poop, nanny berries, etc) from the dairy goats and then assisted in detecting parasite eggs in them via a microscope (not a telescope. if you confuse those two words, people will laugh at you). There are two collecting methods we utilized:

1. Chasing the goats around until they got riled up enough and their insides had jiggled around enough to poop.   This was kind of fun, but also a little frustrating.  I felt like a goat bully.  I was running after them, yanking on their tails and pushing them around.  When you see them start to excrete the nanny berries, you open your little ziplock baggie and catch. If that doesn't work . . .
2.  You take a more direct method.  You extract them directly from their . .  the end of their digestive tract.  We only had to do this with two goats.  I held them still while another reached in.

Don't worry, I was wearing gloves for all of the above.

So that was exciting.

I feel like there was something else I wanted to share.  Hm.  I just got out of class.  The farm has class every Monday and Thursday afternoon over topics about agriculture, missions, world hunger, or religion.  Today was about Islam.  It was intriguing.  The fundamentals of Islam were discussed, as well as how a Christian should approach a Muslim person.  The emphasis was on listening instead of arguing, love instead of hostility, repentance instead of attack,  conversation instead of evangelism, looking at a person instead of a religion.  That sort of thing.  There was good discussion.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have some goats to milk. (I feel like I know them a lot better now that I've looked inside their excrement.)

 

3 comments:

Nancy said...

Very interesting post!

And thanks for your comment on my joke blog. Sometimes I think there's no one out there.
But then, there is!

caroline said...

that is very gross... and yet fascinating at the same time!
man, the things you don't get to do in the city...

Anonymous said...

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