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Hi, I'm Shellie and I'm here at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington DC.
Today we are visiting the Zoo's Veterinary Hospital to learn about some "unZOOsual" careers.
Before we meet our guests, I'm going to give you three clues. Can you guess what they do?
Number one, they visit animals and animals visit them. Number two, they work with every animal in the Zoo,
from catfish to elephants. And number three, using math and technology is vital to monitoring animals vitals.
Can you guess what they do? Let's go meet our guests.
Hi, I'm Katharine Hope one of the associate veterinarians here at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington DC.
Part of my job as an associate vet at the National Zoo is to ensure the health of our animals in the collection.
Hi, my name is David Olsen, I work at the National Zoo here in Washington DC.
I'm a veterinary technician here at the hospital which basically means I am kind of the nurse of the hospital.
So what's the difference between a vet and a vet tech?
The veterinarian does the diagnosis and prescribes the treatment.
Technicians are basically here to get all of the samples that the veterinarians need to do that work.
Today we've brought Peter the panda up to the hospital to demonstrate for you how we might monitor and take care of an animal if we have it at the hospital.
When you go to the doctor you might get your blood pressure taken. We put blood pressure monitoring on
our animals when they're asleep so that we make sure that the blood that's within their system is
getting to all of their vital organs. Similarly again to you going to the doctor's office,
this little gadget that we just put on Peter's ear is a pulse oximeter and that measures the amount of
oxygen that is in the bloodstream. So when you go to the doctor they will have you stick your
finger in a little white sleeve that looks, that does exactly what this pulse oximeter does on our
animal's ear. It doesn't always go on the animal's ear, it goes on whatever most most hairless part
of the animal we can find, because hair tends to obstruct the reading of the pulse oximeter.
And then we'll do an exam. The veterinarian will do the physical exam. So physical exam we try to do
systematically, so we start at the head we go down through the body, we make sure we listen
to the chest, we feel his tummy, we make sure all the joints are moving.
This is an ophthalmoscope, so just like at the doctor's office when they peek in your eye, we use an ophthalmoscope to
look in our animals eyes, make sure their eyes are healthy. We'll then use the otoscope head of
the ophthalmoscope handle to look in their ears, make sure we don't see any gunk in their ears .
We will look in their mouth. A lot of the times if they need a dental procedure done we'll call
our veterinary technician over and they'll do a cleaning for us.
We like to check their teeth out because it's pretty hard to check teeth out on an animal like a tiger when they're awake.
Because I don't really want to stick my arm in a tiger's mouth, that's not gonna be a lot of fun for me or the tiger.
But a lot of times it's up to the technicians to clean those teeth and then we talk
about the problems to the veterinarians of what we saw while we were in there and then they'll take a look for themselves.
I will listen to their heart and their lungs make sure that everything sounds
just as it should. I have this monitoring equipment set up on Peter and that tells me
that the heart is functioning well in some ways but it can't tell me everything, so I still have
to listen. And then we will get radiographs or x-rays.
So we're going to take an x-ray on Peter the panda now, and what that involves is using one of these plates you probably
if you've ever had an x-ray done you've seen these. This is the plate that takes the image
from the x-ray machine and then puts it onto the computer so the doctors can look at it.
Then that's going to shoot the x-rays right through Peter's leg through the
table and onto the plate. And then what happens is it communicates with our computer here.
Now this is a sand cat image not Peter the panda. When we're looking at x-ray if you see all these white areas
that's looking at the different bones like here's his skull. And you can see some of the softer parts
like his eyes and mouth, you can see his teeth up here. These are his arm bones here's all of his
ribs. The black area is air and then the other gray areas are tissues like our heart, our intestines,
our stomach. And the veterinarians use this to look inside the animal to see if there's anything wrong.
And then once we're done doing a full exam we will usually get some blood work on our animals.
So this means we take a needle and a syringe and we get some blood out of their veins so that we
can send it down to the lab and just check to make sure that all of their organs really are
functioning the way that they're supposed to be. Pandas oftentimes here we don't actually need to
put them on the anesthesia table to get blood from them. Our giant pandas and several of our
other species of animals are trained to get blood while they're awake. So that means that
our giant pandas will sit in a little chute and they'll stick their arm out for us and we can
just get blood straight from their arm while they're getting fed treats and biscuits and
honey and juice and they're perfectly happy to give us samples. So we don't always have to get
the animals to go to sleep to get blood from them which is really helpful. Finally oftentimes we'll
have to use the ultrasound machine. So this is our ultrasound machine. The ultrasound machine is very
good at showing a soft tissue details which means when we're looking at something like your tummy
or your abdomen the ultrasound will help us look more carefully between the different organs in
the abdomen. So we can look at specific organs and see if there's something specifically wrong with them.
So that's how we do a thorough exam on our animals at the National Zoo.
How did you become a veterinarian and a veterinary technician?
I'd never heard of a zoo veterinary technician or
veterinary technician in general. It's kind of a new career, I was thinking about going on to
veterinarian school but, I was intrigued by the veterinary technician. I thought that might be
a good stepping stone. So I went to a specialized school called the Veterinary Technician Institute
in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and I got an associate's degree in veterinary technician basically. And that allows me to do the job that I do.
To become a veterinarian you go through
high school and then you go through four years of undergraduate degree and then at that point
sometimes people will take a little bit of time off because when you apply to vet school you
need to have a certain number of hours of animal experience and sometimes people need to have some
time off after university to gain that. Once you get the animal experience you apply to vet school
and that's another four years. And then after vet school if you want to be a general practitioner
you can just go straight into practice. If you want to specialize in zoo and wildlife medicine
usually you will then do an internship in dog and cat medicine or equine medicine or
sometimes exotic animal medicine. At least one-year internship sometimes two one-year internships.
And then a three-year residency at a zoo institution. So some place like the National Zoo
which provides a residency program, sort of a stepping stone to becoming a zoo and wildlife veterinarian.
If you're interested in going into a career whether it's as a zookeeper
a veterinary technician or a veterinarian, do good in school, keep loving animals because that's one of the best ways to do it.
Thank you so much for joining and learning about some
"unZOOsual" careers like a veterinary technician and a veterinarian. It was so fascinating to
learn what they do when a bird feels 'under the feather,' that they don't call a 'hambulance' when
the hogs get sick, and they may prescribe a snake an 'antiHISStamine.' Thanks for watching!