ArticlesMy father, Joe, taught biology. Sometimes at parties and the like, I would meet former students of Joe’s. While postgraduates would remember his generosity with red wine, his undergraduate students would often remember the Sheep Practical.
If you are going to study biology, at some stage you have to come to terms with the fact that your chosen career is not just about patting dolphins and trekking through the forest. You need to know something about the workings of the icky insides of an animal. For many students, the Sheep Prac was that moment.
An anaesthetised sheep – completely free of pain – was opened up on an operating table, and Joe would demonstrate a number of basic functions of mammal anatomy and physiology. The students didn’t need to pick up a scalpel or touch a thing; they just watched and took notes and – often, it seemed – found the whole ordeal very confronting. Students would sometimes rush out of the room or simply faint where they stood.
Joe claimed that, after doing the sheep prac for many years, he was getting quiet good at reading the student reactions. He described once how he had started explaining a point, kept talking as he walked over to a student in the crowd, gently caught her as she started to faint, carried her into an adjacent room to rest and get her bearings, and returned to the prac, to complete his sentence as though nothing had happened.
I explained to him once that I met a man at a party who, eyes wide open, gesticulated about seeing Joe – a big and strong man – wildly tearing open the sheep’s still-breathing carcass with his bare hands. Joe looked a little hurt at the accusation. He explained that if you make a clean incision into a vein or artery with a scalpel it bleeds for a long time. If you make a rough tear, it clots quickly. There was a physiological reason to tear the flesh roughly rather than cut it cleanly.
I actually watched the sheep prac once. I was 14 years old, and was hanging around his office that day. I helped set up the equipment. (I didn’t witness any flesh-tearing, though!) Later, I sat amongst the students for the practical.
The first part of the practical was fascinating. The trachea of the sheep was connected in turn to several plastic rubbish bags inflated with different proportions of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen gases. The respiration of the sheep could be watched. I was amazed to learn it wasn’t the oxygen content but the carbon dioxide content that most affected how quickly and deeply the sheep breathed.
The second part of the practical was a bit more technical. He was measuring the speed of signals through nerves. Four years later, I went on to study and understand this (using cane toad nerves rather than sheep). However, aged 14, it wasn’t keeping my interest. I eventually wandered out to find something else to do.
One of Joe’s colleagues – an old family friend – saw me a few minutes later, and asked if I had been watching the infamous sheep prac.
“Yes, I watched the first part, but I found the second part about the nerves a bit boring.”
“Boring?” he laughed, surprised. “Oh, yeah, I see, boring! Right!” he tapped the side of his nose knowingly.
“No, no! Really!” I tried to explain, “Boring!”
He winked, and left, never believing for a second that I hadn’t run out of the sheep prac nauseated.
Comment by Improfane on June 15, 2007
Fortunately we haven’t had to open anything up living but I suppose in the UK we don’t do anything living anymore. I wouldn’t want to do the sheep practical.
I couldn’t watch that sheep being opened. (Silly question: does it live after the experiment?)
We all got to open up a dead heart and the teacher squirted water from it as a demonstration…
Comment by Chris on June 15, 2007
My father worked as a tradesman who occasionally worked at the University of new England. I remember going with him to a job at the Rural Science portion of the university. I remember walking into a room where there was a sheep on a table where a couple of vinyl-clad surgeons were working around a tap which was being somehow inserted into its internals to get easy access to its digestive system. There were loads of animals around with plastic spigots in their stomachs at UNE.
I remember departing quickly. I don’t recall it being boring.
Soon afterwards I started playing the Call of C’thulhu role playing game (Shotguns and Shoggoths, as we caled it). We invented scenarios in the local area set in the 1930s up to the recent past. We got a lot of creepiness value from my invented local cultists, disguised as academics, who had optimized reading goats’ entrails to the point where you could commence the rite with a turn of a screw-cap on the side of the goat.