Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>RACHEL TURNER: I had one of those … school books where
every year you fill in the information about yourself, and since … kindergarten, I would
write in “what you want to be when you grow up” veterinarian – before I even knew
how to spell it. My name is Rachel Turner, and I am a senior
majoring in animal science, and I’m from San Jose, California. My career goal is to
be a conservation veterinarian. I think a big aspect of conservation medicine
is research, because there’s just so much that we don’t know about wildlife. And there’s
so much we don’t know about how they reproduce and how they behave and what they eat and
what their habitat is like and things like that. And all that information really, really
impacts how we are able to keep them in captivity and how comfortable we are able to make them,
and then how we are able to bring back their species and rehabilitate them and reintroduce
them into the wild. My research on equine colic was actually more
of a data study, and I was working with Dr. Matt Gerard out at the N.C. State Vet School.
And what we were doing was going through the records of surgeries – horses that had come
to N.C. State for gastrointestinal, colic-related surgery. We wanted to figure out for the horses
that had failure in those stitches – so in those sutures, they had either gotten an
infection that led to drainage or seepage, or some sort of issue with that incision.
We wanted to figure out if there are specific risk factors, so if there are specific things
we could change in surgical procedures or in recovery procedures that could prevent
that from happening. My internship in Sri Lanka was with the Millennium
Elephant Foundation. They do rehabilitation with injured elephants in the area. They have
a mobile vet clinic that goes out into the community. They also have four elephants that
they use for education purposes. So these are healthy elephants, and then they have
tourists that come in and they can interact with the elephants in a lot of different capacities
– they can ride them or they can feed them -- and it kind of gives them an idea of what
conscientious interaction with elephants is like.