This Veterinarian Does Surgery On Fish, And You Can Watch Him In Action

The Huffington Post | by Arin Greenwood

Posted: 04/03/2014 2:23 pm EDT Updated: 04/03/2014 10:59 pm EDT

It takes a lot of staff to perform surgery on a fish. You need someone to continually run syringes of water over the left gill, another person to take care of the right, and a third to refill the syringes, so that the patient will not asphyxiate during the procedure.

Then there's the surgeon, who is one of the only people in the world taking a knife to this sort of animal with good -- as opposed to good-tasting -- intentions.

Colin McDermott says that not a lot of people really understand what he does for work as one of the four veterinarians on staff at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Even McDermott's fiancée seems a little mystified as to what fills the day of someone caring for some 17,000 fish, birds, sharks, reptiles, bats, sloths, dolphins, turtles and other marine animals, and she's a vet, too -- albeit one for "cats and dogs," he says.

To try to give the general public a little insight into that mystery, about five weeks ago the National Aquarium began opening up its medical facilities to visitors, as part of what they are calling "immersion tours." Folks curious about how macaws can be given anesthesia, for example, can check out the aquarium's veterinary quarters for about an hour and a half or so while McDermott tries to make his work a little more relatable.

Continued

Vet Wants to Legalize Pot for Dogs

Tanya Lewis, LiveScience Staff Writer

Date: 05 April 2013 Time: 11:49 AM ET

Polls show the majority of Americans support legalizing marijuana, but should dogs have it too? It sounds crackpot, but Veterinarian Doug Kramer thinks that the THC in marijuana could help dogs and other pets with painful conditions that don't respond to other treatments. VICE chatted with Kramer about his pot-for-pets campaign.

"A client first brought it to my attention," Kramer told VICE. "She had a pet that was not responding well to any of the pain medications or the steroids that we were giving it, and she wanted to talk about getting medical marijuana."

Some vets dismissed the idea, but Kramer was open to trying it. He gave it to his dog Nikita, who had untreatable cancer, to increase her quality of life. And he gives it to cats too. But blowing smoke in your pet's face for fun isn't cool, he said.

http://www.livescience.com/28477-marijuana-for-dogs.html