Day 33

0930: No material this morning. I took the time to go and start sorting through the results. At the moment, the old house is outperforming the new house in terms of stillbirths and dead piglets at farrowing time, so it looks like I won't have to formulate a business plan after all. Not that I'm complaining!

RM has decided that we'll have one more day of data collection, on Monday, as we're going up to the farm then to get the last of the Salmonella samples. Which means at least one more morning in the PM room! Although it also means I can't start properly analysing my data until Monday evening :(

1500: A foal has just been brought into the PM room from the horse hospital on site, with horrific injuries to its legs - it looks like it was caught somewhere for a period, maybe in a fence or cattle grid. All legs have cuts and scratches, and on two legs there are huge gaping wounds, through the tendons and down to the bone.

1530: Chief pathology lecturer has just appointed me in charge of the PM room and the two technicans, R and M, until he gets back! He's busy and can't come to look at the foal, so he says I have to decide what photographs to get and what tissue samples to take.

1531: Being in charge, I delegated responsibilityto R and told him to decide what photos to take.

1630: Relieved of responsibility, and just in time. Senior horse lecturer arrived to see what was wrong with the foal, and started asking me questions about what was wrong with it and what was abnormal. It turns out the foal was stuck in a wire fence - we were right!

Need to go and revise equine forelimb anatomy.