Diary of new vet
6 Aug 2025
“I’m now going to hold the legs and pull the skin up and away to exteriorize that breast muscle and that keel bone. Next, to make it easier, I like to butterfly the bird by dislocating the hips so the hips lay flat and the bird isn’t tossing back and forth”. In the video I was studiously replaying for the 2nd time over a breakfast of poached eggs, freshly laid by hard-working chooks at Wairarapa Eggs, Alex-Kate was demonstrating in a webinar how to carry out a chicken post-mortem. This was my second day on the job as a poultry vet.
I knew the back end from the front end of a chicken, because I was a backyard poultry owner, with a few fancy breeds and some reliable egg machines (shavers), and I remember a lecture or two about poultry in vet school 20 years ago, but TBH, the learning curve rose exponentially from there. These animals are not horses and they’re not cattle, the species with which I’d had the most experience in my vet career to date, nor were they any use on a cold Waikato day when historically I could have made some excuse out in a frozen paddock to do a rectal exam to warm up.
But here I was – the newest poultry vet in the industry. Shadowing Alex-Kate on farm at some customer operations, I quickly realized that I’d better get schooled up on data and acronyms. Lighting schedules, feeding schedules, quantities and composition, egg weights, chicken weights over time (to work out FCR!), shed ventilation, temperature, humidity, yolk colour, albumen and shell quality, dust and ammonia levels, quality and quantity of litter… [insert mind-blowing emoji here].
One of my favourite parts of the week (and only a vet would ever say this but at least this time I’m not verbalizing it over dinner), was finding, in my very first chicken post-mortem - tapeworms! The tiniest tapeworms I ever did see, but tapeworms none-the-less. The farmer was probably not as excited.
The other best parts were being on farm again (it had been a while), meeting the farm managers, attending an AgriHealth poultry seminar in Tuakau where there were some really interesting topics covered and industry people present, and… cuddling some chicks (perk).
So that was my first two weeks – next week I’m off to Australia to learn about how Aussies do it – I feel like everything is bigger and more dangerous in Australia: could that be true of the foul as well?
