Week 55: Someone's On Fire!

I'm sure you have all heard about how southern California is once again on fire. We aren't in trouble, but another facility was so we were housing some of their animals when they had to evacuate. That was really all that happened the first half of the week. On Thursday, I had a zoo day at the LA zoo's health center. It was pretty fun! They were also housing some animals from that same facility, so I helped care for them, and then I got to watch a few medical procedures! My afternoon was occupied by some paper presentations from a few vet students on rotations. Even those were fairly interesting (to me at least...). Speaking of medical papers, I've comitted to my topic for the paper in vet class: Chronic Wasting Disease in Wild Cervid (that means deer, folks) Populations as a Result of Predator Dessimation. That means deer are getting sick out there and part of it is caused by a lack of predators in the wild.
Any who, on Friday, we went on a field trip to Steve Martin's Working Wildlife (no, this is not the actor, and not the bird trainer.). They are amazing! I had the capuchin from the first pirates of the carribean movie crawling on my shoulder, as well as a brown lemur! We saw Bart the bear, a 1,000 lb kodiak grizzly, and some other really cool animals like foxes, lions, chimps, and more! I'll try to figure out how to hook up my new phone so you can see some pics eventually.
On Saturday, myself and a few others went to check out the Peacock Foundation, a group that works with troubled (abused, neglected, homeless) kids and uses animals to help with their therapy. They are having a fund raiser next week and we are going to be walking around with their animals! It's nothing spectacular. No one famous will be there, and their animals are just domestics and a few reptiles, but they are a great organization and I a glad to help out!