The new school year is just around the corner, and LazyPaw Animal Hospitals is celebrating the start of a fresh season of scholastic achievement with a series on the ABCs of veterinary medicine. Last time we covered abrasions through ectothermic animals, and today we’re getting into everything from the intestines to toxins in cottonseeds. It’s a creepy crawly, warm and fuzzy take on the ABC’s!
Frank blood
Blood is essential for life, and vets need to look for signs of health or illness that are often hiding in the blood. Frank blood is blood that’s visually obvious—aka, in vomit, excrement, or on the hands after touching an animal. Occult blood can only be seen through chemical tests or under a microscope, but frank blood is easy to view and identify.
Gossypol
This may sound like a traditional dance done in the springtime to braid ribbons around a pole, but it’s actually a pigmented material found in cotton plants. It’s poisonous to some animals with simple stomachs, such as swine, poultry, guinea pigs, and rabbits. Dogs and cats tend to have intermediate sensitivity, and goats are more sensitive than most cattle.
Heart girth
This is a unit of measure to approximate the weight of internal organs such as the heart and lungs, usually to determine medication dosage or track the growth and estimated future body weight of animals. The barrel area behind an animal’s front legs is measured, then converted with a table to estimate weight. Heart girth is used to measure horses, cattle, pigs, goats, and more.
Infundibulum
This “fun” sounding word describes a funnel-shaped opening. In horse and other ruminant animal teeth, it’s the part of a tooth that is the central cup of enamel. The infundibulum of hair is the funnel where the follicle grows, and in the heart it’s the outflow portion of the right ventricle. In kidneys, urine flows through the infundibula into the renal area.
Jejunum
This is the chunk of small intestine that is halfway down, between the duodenum and ileum sections (for visual thinkers, it’s in the middle of the squiggly section of the intestines). The word comes from the Latin jejunus, meaning empty or hungry, because the ancient Greeks noticed that when a person died this part of their intestine was always empty of food.