Week 7
Well, I have some good news! I finally was able to get some hands on experience this week. Whisper Kelly agreed to help me learn about this process. My goal for the week was to learn how to implant an embryo. Although we were unable to make it totally realistic, I found it very helpful. Because it is the wrong time of the year, we could not actually breed a cow. However, we could replicate it for the most part. If you were actually going to implant an embryo, you would wait until the recipient cow was seven days post heat. This allows the embryo to be put into an environment very similar to the one it was extracted from (remember you flush the embryo from the donor cow at seven days). Next, we moved onto something I actually got to take part in. We started by ultrasounding the recipient cow to deermine which ovary has ovulated. Since only one side ovulates each time they come into heat, it is important to implant the embryo on that side, or it will not work. We did not have very good...