Up close with the 'yuck' factor

The stitches go in one by one, the black surgical thread pulling the flaps of skin together to close the cigarette-length gash the blade left.
Isabella Monti, 15, holds up the banana for teacher Olive Ashworth to check her suturing skills. It has the neat zipper pattern that would do any heart surgeon proud.
We are at Future Vets Kids Camp in Sydney. With two days to go, the yuck factor has yet to force any of the group of 14- to 16-year-olds to drop out.
They have drawn red cordial from a fake dog’s leg, been in an operating theatre as a real veterinary surgeon cut out a spleen, and themselves jump-started the heart of a dying dummy dog.
Just before they skip off to open their lunchboxes in the playground, there is a horror movie to watch: a surgeon pulling live, beetroot-coloured worms the size of small snakes from what is left of a very sick labrador’s bloodless kidney.
Beth Leach is adamant that she will hold her lunch down.
“It doesn’t put me off,” the freckle-faced 14-year-old insists. “Yesterday we watched a vet operate on a dog and I was okay.”
Scott Bainbridge, who has a veterinary practice himself, has run the week-long summer-break course for four years.
He is happy in the knowledge that what will spur some teenagers on to join the profession will convince others their future lies elsewhere.
“What I like about the camp is that it gives kids a real taste of what the profession is all about,” he says. “We don’t coat it here. When you go to the equine facility, you see a mare being inseminated, you see a surgery and you realise it’s about blood and guts and it’s not this kind of fairy-tale lifestyle with the animals.”
He does not shy away from daily grind of most vets: the job is not fitting an injured elephant with a prosthetic leg one day and clipping the claws of a falcon the next.
“I want them to realise what the profession is all about: that 25 per cent of my caseload is vomiting and diarrhoea, 10 per cent of it is lameness and stuff.”
Ashworth, a second-year veterinary science student who teaches on the course, said inspiring youngsters was the main aim, but that it also helped to show them what they were in for.
“It’s best if you realise you don’t want to do it early on,” she says. “I know people who have got a vet science degree who realised the third or fourth year that it was |really not for them, it was not what they expected, and they’ve wasted all this time and hard work. So if you can know at this stage, it’s a head start.”
Running a small-animal practice, which is the bulk of the profession, requires much more than clinical competence and a love of animals. It is a retail business that demands customer service skills and management attributes. The clients do not come in on their own. And they are not the ones who pay.
Brian Pickering, who |runs an Internet site |popular with vets called PetTalkPeople.com, reinforces the notion that the profession is about owners and not just pets.
“A lot of vets get into veterinary practice because they don’t like working with people,” he says. “So they think they’ll be working with animals – but the reverse is true.”
Ashworth advises would-be vets to get in on the ground floor by doing what she did and volunteering to work where there are animals. A stint at a pound, or at a vet practice, would open their eyes to some hard truths about the profession.
“They don’t realise how much death they see, how much cruelty they see,” she said. “And they don’t realise how difficult it is to deal with clients sometimes.”
Bainbridge decided to be a vet when he was in short pants.
“I tell the kids I love this job because the animals can’t speak to us. So every day is a mystery,” he says. “Yes, I’ll see the same things over and over again but every day I’ll also see something I haven’t seen before. I get up in the morning and I’m dying to look at the blood results of my animals. I find it very intriguing.”