Now for the bad part of my day: this morning I had my first physiology lab. I'm excited about this class, but there's going to be a lot of issues between me and the way that animals are treated in the lab. Today we had to monitor blood sugar levels in a chicken, by forcing it to drink a bunch of sugar solution and then drawing blood from it every half hour for 2 hours. I think it's bad enough that they give everybody syringes and expect them to take blood from the chicken with no instruction on how to do it (I was fine since working with vets I've learned how to do this, but our chicken was pretty much a pincushion with everyone stabbing into it repeatedly without any technique), but the chickens themselves were pitiful. Their feet were bound tightly with course ribbon so they couldn't stand, and they were skinny and looked sick...it turned out that in order to make sure that our readings were accurate, they hadn't been fed for the last few days. The birds were all just slumped over in their trays, clucking weakly whenever people grouped around it to jab it with needles, and falling asleep otherwise since they weren't able to support their own heads. I took over chicken duty for the length of the lab (pretty much cuddling with the thing and trying to get it to calm down), but it's kind of amazing how little regard is given to animals here - people don't really treat them like living creatures. I got an idea of this by looking at the stray dogs around here (a lot of them look very sick, without much fur), but during lab I appeared to be the only person concerned with the welfare of the live animals that we were dealing with. I was upset enough about this, but we got a handout at the end describing our next lab: dissecting a live toad. I feel conflicted enough with dissecting already dead animals, but I am definitely not following the instructions in my notebook to "render the toad unconscious by banging the head on a hard surface until the animal is stunned" and then opening it up. I explained to my professor that I wouldn't do this for ethical reasons, and he said not to worry about it and we'll figure something out, but I still don't feel comfortable with the situation.
Later in the day I had my invertebrate class, where we spent the entire time discussing the many varieties of spiders here and looking at huge pictures of them on the projector. Interesting, but still not my favorite class. So, today was a bit of a downer, but people are talking about plans for the weekend that sound like a lot of fun. The national stadium for Fiji is right down the road from us (I go jogging by it most days), and this weekend there's a massive rugby tournament, so we'll probably spend most of Friday hanging out on the lawn there watching rugby. Saturday morning we're catching an early bus to Siqatoka, where there are apparently huge sand dunes (that you can surf on?) and a really beautiful beach nearby. So hopefully this weekend will compensate for today.
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