Slaughter Day

Today was goat slaughter day! Since Yohanna is injured and Nuru is sick I helped hold the goat so Yohanna could cut its throat. When Yohanna was done me and a couple of other students grabbed one of the feet and dissected it. We skinned it and then Andy (the kid who screamed "NO!" at a dirty puppy who was walking towards him so pretty much the last person I would expect to voluntarily grab a dead animal) grabbed one of the tendons and started pulling on it so the foot was waving at people. Then I started saying "hellloo." It was great. Andy walked around camp waving the foot at people and then he finally came back and said "I guess I should put my friend down..."

After Andy had given up his goat leg friend he picked up the goat's head and tried to close its eyes. Then I decided that we should dissect the head so we started skinning it. I did half and Postal and Andy were making fun of me for nicking a blood vessel. But then Andy tried skinning the other half of the head, saw how many blood vessels there were, and promptly shut up.

After skinning we decided to try to take the eyes out of the head. Since I saw a vet at the humane society remove a cat's eye my goal was to approximately replicate that: with a pocket knife. It is very difficult to remove an eye with a pocket knife. The knife itself was okay because it was pretty sharp but eyes have an incredible range of movement within their socket and are very slippery so it was very hard to secure it well enough to cut around it. I could have gone and gotten my tweezers but I borrowed them from another student in camp and I didn't think she would approve of them being used to remove eyeballs... I got my eye out without much trouble but Andy struggled. His ended up coming out with a bunch of connective tissue still attached and a big chunk of the optic nerve. Postal just stood there and asked if he could pop an eyeball yet.

Once we had removed both of the eyes we let Postal pop one and then we dissected the other. Postal popped his pretty uneventfully but then squeezed all of the clear jelly innards out everywhere. Andy actually dissected his nicely (well as nicely as you can with a pocket knife...). I had never seen an eyeball dissected. It was awesome. Inside there is clear jelly, a lens, the iris, and a pretty reflective section on the back of the eye. I didn't realize the pupil is really just a hole into the eye. I also had no idea that the lens was little a clear hard ball. It's absolutely amazing that we can see through that. The reflective part of the eye was really neat too.

The disappointment of the day was my corn. I went to the tailor as a favor to some other students and asked Yohanna to watch the corn I was roasting on the fire. Apparently he didn't hear me cause I came back and half of my corn was burnt to a crisp. Then I tried to turn it and cook the other side and it fell. So then I had half burnt corn and half ash-covered corn. Good thing dinner was good cause I was really sad that my corn was ruined.