This weekend I volunteered at a TNR (trap/neuter/release) clinic. TNR is one way to deal with the feral cat population: volunteer trappers trap the cats and bring them to clinics like this one, where they are vaccinated, spayed or neutered, perhaps given some other basic medical care, and returned to the trappers, who release them. Maintained colonies, provided food by caretakers, can be surprisingly healthy, and this sort of birth control keeps their numbers reasonable and in fact allows them to gradually decrease in size as cats age. If, on the other hand, colonies are destroyed outright, new colonies will move in to take over.
I rotated through all the stations, so I got to see how the entire clinic worked. The first station was anesthesia. The animals arrive in traps, with sheets over them to make things a little less scary for them. Some of them are pets gone feral, but some were born feral and have never interacted with humans. The cats are forced into a corner of their trap, either with a long stick or with a separator pushed through the bars of the trap; truly feral cats are often too scared to move at this point, and therefore can be easier to handle than the moderately tame cats, which may be less scared and more angry. Then a volunteer injects them with sleepy juice. This is an IM (intramuscular) injection, and I had only performed my first IM injection earlier that day, on an anesthetized animal that I could handle at my leisure to find the muscle. Sticking an animal through the bars of a trap, when the animal was liable to suddenly start wriggling around again, was challenging. A tech showed me how to find the muscle and make sure it was not bone (that would hurt!). By the end of this rotation I was able to confidently say I’d found muscle and stick the animal without the tech’s assistance.
Because we can’t interact with the cats while they’re awake, they have to be given somewhat more anesthesia solution than an owned, handleable animal would be, because they have to stay out for the physical exam before the surgery; they also can’t be checked out for heart problems before being given anesthesia which are a warning flag for potential problems. I have heard people ask why owned animals can’t be included in these clinics as a way of expanding low cost spay/neuter services, and the answer is, owned animals are and should be handled differently than ferals. For one thing, you’re moderately sure an owned animal has had its rabies vaccination!
After the cats go under, some after a booster dose to get them there, they are transferred to the physical exam station. It was so relaxing to get to practice a physical exam to an unconscious cat who wasn’t trying to kill me when I looked in his mouth! I checked eyes, nose, mouth, ears, double checked gender, listened to hearts (I heard some arrhythmias, but only ones which were normal for the anesthesia solution that was being used), and checked breathing rates. I also did a full body check for wounds. Cats coming in with wounds can’t be released because of the risk of rabies. They can be isolated, or they can be euthanized. I did find one cat with obvious bite wounds, but his trapper was able to promise to isolate him for the required period. We also noted the physical condition of each cat, which varied considerably; some were well fed and shiny, others dirty, skinny, and matted. The cats are weighed, and the number of their trap is written on the inside of one ear, so that they can be put back in it later.
After the exam, cats move to pre-op, where the relevant bits are shaved and exhustively cleaned. Shaving testicles is a tricky thing! They were given a booster dose of sleepy juice here and sent off to surgery. Some cats were getting light (starting to wake up) at this point, so the booster was sometimes very necessary.
In surgery, I watched a spay and a neuter. You wouldn’t expect female cats to be pregnant at this time of the year, but it is the policy of almost all TNR clinics to spay even pregnant females. In addition to the spay or neuter, cats have the tip of one ear removed. This provides a visual indication of the fact that they don’t need to be trapped again. All the surgeons were volunteer veterinarians and veterinary students; they seemed to be mostly people who wanted some extra surgical experience.
At the post-surgery station, cats are given vaccinations and pain meds, and then the reversal agent to wake them up. The reversal is given last, as it can take effect quickly. The cats are returned to their original trap and taken to the recovery area, where they are watched by volunteers as they wake up. One cat had trouble regulating her body temperature and had to be taken back out of her trap and placed on a heating pad for a while.
As we were cleaning up at the end of the clinic, I asked the animal control officer who had brought in a lot of the cats if she was seeing a difference in her community. She replied yes — she’d received only three calls for kittens last year, as opposed to thirty in some previous years.
It was a tiring day, but a good one. The clinics happen about once a month, and I’m intending to attend some more, for good hands-on clinical experience during a year when I’m otherwise very research-oriented. This kind of work might also be a good way to not forget all my clinical learning during years spent earing a PhD, if that does turn out to be my next step.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Links post
- Rebooting science journalism - thoughts from Timmer
- This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post
- Open Access to Scientific Publications: The good, the bad, and the ugly: "Open Access is a valuable goal, but the scientific community is overly naive about the whole business of scientific publishing."
- Depressing DNA: On genetic diseases and the future of pet-dom
- Rebooting science journalism - on blurring boundaries, money, audiences and duck sex
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Links post
- How to produce, publish and distribute a journal these days: that is, a scholarly journal, not a personal one
- Animal Minds: Radiolab podcast about animal cognition. Radiolab is my current favorite podcast. It’s so well-produced, demonstrating podcasting as an art form and not just some guy yelling at a microphone (not that I don’t very much enjoy it when Wil Wheaton does that).
- Science Online 2010: Lessons for IRs and data curators: thoughts from an academic librarian about the future of institutional repositories
Saturday, January 16, 2010
The father of stress
In order to gain some context about the study of stress, I’ve been reading The Stress of Life, by Hans Selye. His story is a nice example of how the scientific process sometimes succeeds in ways it isn’t really expected to.
As a newly-minted researcher in the 1930s, Selye was studying reproductive hormones by injecting rats with extracts from rat ovaries and placentas. He was hoping to discover a new sex hormone. At one point, he thought he’d found one: a particular extract caused the rats’ adrenal cortices (the outer part of the adrenal glands) to enlarge, their lymphatic structures (part of the immune system, clubhouses for white blood cells) to shrink, and stomach ulcers to form, in a reproducible triad of reactions. He writes, “You may well imagine my happiness! At the age of 28, I already seemed to be on the track of a new hormone.”
As Selye continued to test his new hormone, however, he found that extracts from the pituitary gland caused the same reaction. (Maybe the pituitary makes this new hormone as well?) But he also noticed that the less pure his extracts were, the greater this triad of reactions was. If the reactions were happening because of a new hormone he had isolated, less pure extracts should cause smaller reactions, not greater ones. So Selye injected the rats with formalin, to see how they responded to something toxic that was definitely not a new sex hormone. And the same triad of reactions showed up, even more dramatically.
Young Selye was crushed. “I do not think I had ever been more profoundly disappointed! Suddenly all my dreams of discovering a new hormone were shattered. All the time and all the materials that went into this long study were wasted.” He sulked for days, unable to focus his energy on his work.
As Selye marshalled himself to return to work, he began to realize that, in fact, he had isolated a general reaction to damage to the body. Any damage will have some consquences specific to the type of damage (trauma, infection, ongoing difficult social situations), but Selye realized that he was now able to describe the general consequences that are associated with all damage. In fact, he enthused, “I could find no noxious agent that did not produce the syndrome.” He was re-energized and hugely enthusiastic about this new direction of research.
Unfortunately, Selye’s mentors and co-workers thought he was crazy. A respected friend called his new direction “the pharmacology of dirt.” However, one mentor, who happened to be a Nobel laureate, did support Selye. Without that one supporter, he might have given up, and it might have been many more years before we were able to start to talk about the health effects of stress. Or perhaps the enthusiasm (or lack of perspective) of youth would have carried him through. Who knows.
Selye first published about his new “damage syndrome” in 1936, and a few years later borrowed the term “stress” from physics as a more concise name. He insists that despite common usage today, “stress” is caused by a “stressor” (a neologism of Selye’s making), so if you are being precise, you should say that you have “stress produced by interpersonal relationships,” not “interpersonal stress.” Being a reasonable sort of guy, however, he allows as to how we are all going to say things imprecisely from time to time, and he’s okay with that. He shares the lovely story of his lecture on stress to the professors of the Collège de France, in French, at the end of which the professors earnestly argued about how to translate “stress” into French (dommage? aggression? tension? détress?), at the end of which it was agreed that a new French word must be coined; that the term must be masculine (he didn’t quite understand why); and so henceforth he might refer to his syndrome as le stress.
Towards the end of his book, Selye reflects on why he felt compelled to write about stress for the layperson:
Hans Selye, M.D. The Stress of Life, revised edition. McGraw-Hill, 1978.
As a newly-minted researcher in the 1930s, Selye was studying reproductive hormones by injecting rats with extracts from rat ovaries and placentas. He was hoping to discover a new sex hormone. At one point, he thought he’d found one: a particular extract caused the rats’ adrenal cortices (the outer part of the adrenal glands) to enlarge, their lymphatic structures (part of the immune system, clubhouses for white blood cells) to shrink, and stomach ulcers to form, in a reproducible triad of reactions. He writes, “You may well imagine my happiness! At the age of 28, I already seemed to be on the track of a new hormone.”
As Selye continued to test his new hormone, however, he found that extracts from the pituitary gland caused the same reaction. (Maybe the pituitary makes this new hormone as well?) But he also noticed that the less pure his extracts were, the greater this triad of reactions was. If the reactions were happening because of a new hormone he had isolated, less pure extracts should cause smaller reactions, not greater ones. So Selye injected the rats with formalin, to see how they responded to something toxic that was definitely not a new sex hormone. And the same triad of reactions showed up, even more dramatically.
Young Selye was crushed. “I do not think I had ever been more profoundly disappointed! Suddenly all my dreams of discovering a new hormone were shattered. All the time and all the materials that went into this long study were wasted.” He sulked for days, unable to focus his energy on his work.
As Selye marshalled himself to return to work, he began to realize that, in fact, he had isolated a general reaction to damage to the body. Any damage will have some consquences specific to the type of damage (trauma, infection, ongoing difficult social situations), but Selye realized that he was now able to describe the general consequences that are associated with all damage. In fact, he enthused, “I could find no noxious agent that did not produce the syndrome.” He was re-energized and hugely enthusiastic about this new direction of research.
Unfortunately, Selye’s mentors and co-workers thought he was crazy. A respected friend called his new direction “the pharmacology of dirt.” However, one mentor, who happened to be a Nobel laureate, did support Selye. Without that one supporter, he might have given up, and it might have been many more years before we were able to start to talk about the health effects of stress. Or perhaps the enthusiasm (or lack of perspective) of youth would have carried him through. Who knows.
Selye first published about his new “damage syndrome” in 1936, and a few years later borrowed the term “stress” from physics as a more concise name. He insists that despite common usage today, “stress” is caused by a “stressor” (a neologism of Selye’s making), so if you are being precise, you should say that you have “stress produced by interpersonal relationships,” not “interpersonal stress.” Being a reasonable sort of guy, however, he allows as to how we are all going to say things imprecisely from time to time, and he’s okay with that. He shares the lovely story of his lecture on stress to the professors of the Collège de France, in French, at the end of which the professors earnestly argued about how to translate “stress” into French (dommage? aggression? tension? détress?), at the end of which it was agreed that a new French word must be coined; that the term must be masculine (he didn’t quite understand why); and so henceforth he might refer to his syndrome as le stress.
Towards the end of his book, Selye reflects on why he felt compelled to write about stress for the layperson:
Here, I have ventured into pure philosophy: a very dangerous thing for a medical scientist to do, and a thing for which I shall no doubt be severely rebuked by some of my more reserved and reticent colleagues! But, you see, it is part of my philosophy that I must express myself, so I cannot help it. It was indeed very stressful to spend all my adult life in the laboratory, working on stress; it was perhaps even more stressful to express my thoughts in the form of this book and of the many lectures I gave about its substance. But well do I know that not to express all this would have deprived me of much eustress and caused me much more distress.It’s a charming book and I’m glad I took the time to read it, even though I’m unlikely to be able to cite very much of it in any papers that I write, due to its age.
Hans Selye, M.D. The Stress of Life, revised edition. McGraw-Hill, 1978.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Building positive online environments
A while back, rrp (after the flood) posted “burning up the thread, online political discourse,” in which she argued that “a snappy, cogent, or brutal put-down of a troll” is often rewarded by readers, whereas thoughtful, well-reasoned posts are more often ignored. Recently, Coyote Crossing responded, in “Online fires,” with thoughts about how hard it is to keep to writing such well-reasoned posts and how useful it has been to receive positive feedback on them from users.
As rrp says, writing thoughtfully and reasoning out all of one’s arguments is time consuming and challenging. Why should someone take the time and effort to do it if they aren’t rewarded? Why shouldn’t people default to writing flames, if that means that they’ll receive more positive responses?
In dog training, in order for a behavior that you like to start appearing more regularly, it should be rewarded. (When the dog sits quietly, he gets a treat.) However, if the reward is delivered too late, it isn’t linked to the wanted behavior, and the dog doesn’t learn the lesson we want him to learn. (If I start hunting for the treat bag when the dog sits, and he has stood up by the time I actually deliver the treat, I have reinforced standing, not sitting.)
It’s the same for us internet dwellers. We need our rewards to come pretty promptly. We can wait an hour for a response post that says “good job putting that idiot in his place! You really showed him!” That reward might reinforce our recent behavior of sending nasty mail in response to someone we disagreed with. We are less likely to wait a year and be able to look back on all of our posts to a list and tell ourselves, “I did a good job this year of posting only polite and useful things and restraining from making people feel bad about themselves.” That was more societally useful behavior than a rude post, but the reward is too little and too late to encourage us to do more of the same in the future.
Coyote Crossing suggests that, in fact, he has started receiving rewards for his more thoughtful posts this year, and that that’s been helpful to him. That’s good news. Is it extensible? I’m dubious that we can all just choose to reward people more for their thoughtful posts, and refrain from rewarding people for their snarky posts (no matter how much we agree with them), but if we can, it would go a long way to improving the emotional environment of the internet. I love the idea that eventually we could all develop an online community in which thoughtfulness was valued more than cutting rhetoric.
As rrp says, writing thoughtfully and reasoning out all of one’s arguments is time consuming and challenging. Why should someone take the time and effort to do it if they aren’t rewarded? Why shouldn’t people default to writing flames, if that means that they’ll receive more positive responses?
In dog training, in order for a behavior that you like to start appearing more regularly, it should be rewarded. (When the dog sits quietly, he gets a treat.) However, if the reward is delivered too late, it isn’t linked to the wanted behavior, and the dog doesn’t learn the lesson we want him to learn. (If I start hunting for the treat bag when the dog sits, and he has stood up by the time I actually deliver the treat, I have reinforced standing, not sitting.)
It’s the same for us internet dwellers. We need our rewards to come pretty promptly. We can wait an hour for a response post that says “good job putting that idiot in his place! You really showed him!” That reward might reinforce our recent behavior of sending nasty mail in response to someone we disagreed with. We are less likely to wait a year and be able to look back on all of our posts to a list and tell ourselves, “I did a good job this year of posting only polite and useful things and restraining from making people feel bad about themselves.” That was more societally useful behavior than a rude post, but the reward is too little and too late to encourage us to do more of the same in the future.
Coyote Crossing suggests that, in fact, he has started receiving rewards for his more thoughtful posts this year, and that that’s been helpful to him. That’s good news. Is it extensible? I’m dubious that we can all just choose to reward people more for their thoughtful posts, and refrain from rewarding people for their snarky posts (no matter how much we agree with them), but if we can, it would go a long way to improving the emotional environment of the internet. I love the idea that eventually we could all develop an online community in which thoughtfulness was valued more than cutting rhetoric.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Spring semester springs
This semester I have (almost) no classes. My one class is Journal Club, which mostly involves listening to other people present journal articles. One week in March I will have to present an article myself, which will involve a frenzied burst of activity, and then again a return to just research.
Just research! I am looking forward to it, although to be honest, last semester’s classes (biostatistics and bioethics) were surprisingly rewarding. The didactic part of this Master’s degree feels much more relevant and interesting to me than the majority of the didactic classes in the DVM coursework. That revelation is part of my increasing interest in pursuing a PhD in the future.
The distraction of classwork last semester caused a lot of dog videos to stack up, waiting to be analyzed. I was pulling in 2-3 videos of 20 minutes each per week; in theory, I would also analyze them every week, breaking each into 5 second bins in which I use a small web application which I wrote to note the dog’s location (front, middle, or back of the run), position (lying lateral, lying sternal, sitting, walking, etc), whether the dog is panting or not, whether the dog has moved at all in the last five seconds, etc. It is a somewhat tedious process, but on the up side, the good DVD player is in my bedroom, so I get to do the analysis in bed with my animals. I’m trying to analyze one or two videos a day for a while until the stack gets thinner. They take 1-2 hours to do, depending on how often the dog changes what it’s doing. The ideal video is of a dog lying still and not moving for 20 minutes. Two dogs have done that so far. I am fond of both of them.
Yesterday I scored two videos in the morning. The mid part of the day I spent reading about cortisol, for use in a summary paper about markers of stress. The summary papers provide useful background immediately, and should become part of my thesis paper this summer.
Then I went in to try to enroll dogs. I continue to work out the best timing strategy for this. There is a sweet spot somewhere around 5:30 pm. Too early, and I miss some dogs which haven’t yet filtered in unannounced. (It’s nice when dogs have appointments two days in advance, but sometimes people call to make surgery appointments and get scheduled for the next day, in which case the only way I have of discovering that dog is finding it in B Ward in the evening.) Too late, and the surgeons have all gone home, so I can’t find them to ask permission to use their patients. (I embarrassingly once said “awesome!” when told “Dr. Depardeau is still here even though it’s eight o’clock at night because his patient is bleeding out and he’s stuck in surgery.”)
Last night, I went in around 4 pm, and scouted. One dog looked like a great candidate. He was in the hospital for, I kid you not, a migrating foreign body in his foot. A tech and I discussed this as we stared at the anesthesia schedule for the next day: a migrating foreign body in his foot? His hospital record didn’t completely explain why they came up with this theory. I looked at the dog in B Ward, and indeed he had an open lesion on his foot, but he was mobile and alert and looked like a good candidiate. However, he had had imaging (radiographs and ultrasound) earlier in the afternoon, and had been sedated for that. It takes six hours for sedation to wear off to the point where I feel comfortable saying that it no longer affects their behavior, so I wouldn’t have been able to enroll him until 9 pm. That’s outside my window; enroll dogs at extremely different times of day and you risk seeing cortisol levels that differ because of cortisol’s diurnal cycle, not because of stress level differences. Oh, well.
I went to the gym for an hour, and came back around 5:30 in hopes that some new dog had shown up. No. I think the hospital is not quite back in full gear after the holidays, and also Mondays are typically slow. At this point I started looking more closely at the two smaller dogs that I had discarded before. I don’t like to use small dogs; they are put in cages, not runs, so I have to ask someone to move them into a run for my use. I also have a feeling (unscientifically) that small dogs react to stressful situations differently than large dogs do. But at this point I just wanted someone to enroll. One of the two turned out to be on meds which disqualified her. The other probably would have worked out — but his doctor had just gone home, so I couldn’t get permission to use him. (Surprising! People on a medicine rotation, as this resident was, are generally around much later than 5:45.) The lesson: if you think you might possibly want to use a dog, get the permission proactively. Don’t wait to see if someone better shows up later.
Then I went home and read more. I can’t quite get over the fact that I get to spend a year reading and writing. It’s great.
So that seems to be my routine for the early part of this semester. So far, so good. Soon I have to start doing things like doing the actual cortisol assay for the dogs I’ve enrolled, and build the results into a stress scale, but for now things are in a pretty solid rhythm.
Just research! I am looking forward to it, although to be honest, last semester’s classes (biostatistics and bioethics) were surprisingly rewarding. The didactic part of this Master’s degree feels much more relevant and interesting to me than the majority of the didactic classes in the DVM coursework. That revelation is part of my increasing interest in pursuing a PhD in the future.
The distraction of classwork last semester caused a lot of dog videos to stack up, waiting to be analyzed. I was pulling in 2-3 videos of 20 minutes each per week; in theory, I would also analyze them every week, breaking each into 5 second bins in which I use a small web application which I wrote to note the dog’s location (front, middle, or back of the run), position (lying lateral, lying sternal, sitting, walking, etc), whether the dog is panting or not, whether the dog has moved at all in the last five seconds, etc. It is a somewhat tedious process, but on the up side, the good DVD player is in my bedroom, so I get to do the analysis in bed with my animals. I’m trying to analyze one or two videos a day for a while until the stack gets thinner. They take 1-2 hours to do, depending on how often the dog changes what it’s doing. The ideal video is of a dog lying still and not moving for 20 minutes. Two dogs have done that so far. I am fond of both of them.
Yesterday I scored two videos in the morning. The mid part of the day I spent reading about cortisol, for use in a summary paper about markers of stress. The summary papers provide useful background immediately, and should become part of my thesis paper this summer.
Then I went in to try to enroll dogs. I continue to work out the best timing strategy for this. There is a sweet spot somewhere around 5:30 pm. Too early, and I miss some dogs which haven’t yet filtered in unannounced. (It’s nice when dogs have appointments two days in advance, but sometimes people call to make surgery appointments and get scheduled for the next day, in which case the only way I have of discovering that dog is finding it in B Ward in the evening.) Too late, and the surgeons have all gone home, so I can’t find them to ask permission to use their patients. (I embarrassingly once said “awesome!” when told “Dr. Depardeau is still here even though it’s eight o’clock at night because his patient is bleeding out and he’s stuck in surgery.”)
Last night, I went in around 4 pm, and scouted. One dog looked like a great candidate. He was in the hospital for, I kid you not, a migrating foreign body in his foot. A tech and I discussed this as we stared at the anesthesia schedule for the next day: a migrating foreign body in his foot? His hospital record didn’t completely explain why they came up with this theory. I looked at the dog in B Ward, and indeed he had an open lesion on his foot, but he was mobile and alert and looked like a good candidiate. However, he had had imaging (radiographs and ultrasound) earlier in the afternoon, and had been sedated for that. It takes six hours for sedation to wear off to the point where I feel comfortable saying that it no longer affects their behavior, so I wouldn’t have been able to enroll him until 9 pm. That’s outside my window; enroll dogs at extremely different times of day and you risk seeing cortisol levels that differ because of cortisol’s diurnal cycle, not because of stress level differences. Oh, well.
I went to the gym for an hour, and came back around 5:30 in hopes that some new dog had shown up. No. I think the hospital is not quite back in full gear after the holidays, and also Mondays are typically slow. At this point I started looking more closely at the two smaller dogs that I had discarded before. I don’t like to use small dogs; they are put in cages, not runs, so I have to ask someone to move them into a run for my use. I also have a feeling (unscientifically) that small dogs react to stressful situations differently than large dogs do. But at this point I just wanted someone to enroll. One of the two turned out to be on meds which disqualified her. The other probably would have worked out — but his doctor had just gone home, so I couldn’t get permission to use him. (Surprising! People on a medicine rotation, as this resident was, are generally around much later than 5:45.) The lesson: if you think you might possibly want to use a dog, get the permission proactively. Don’t wait to see if someone better shows up later.
Then I went home and read more. I can’t quite get over the fact that I get to spend a year reading and writing. It’s great.
So that seems to be my routine for the early part of this semester. So far, so good. Soon I have to start doing things like doing the actual cortisol assay for the dogs I’ve enrolled, and build the results into a stress scale, but for now things are in a pretty solid rhythm.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Links post
- Dogged Blog: Real blogs allow comments : Thoughts on what makes blogging different from “just publishing.”
- Dolittler: Oops...I did it again (and other tales of kittens past) : Philosophizing on whether veterinarians should continue to see clients who get pets from inhumane sources
- ZooBorns: Zurich Zoo's Wolf Pups : Baby wolves!
- Not Exactly Rocket Science: Who are the science journalists?
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