Day 30

Today was full of classes, but fascinating classes! I started bright and early with my Comparative Animal Physiology lab, where we measured water intake in toads – poisonous toads! I got to wear my official UniMelb lab coat and inject toads with different chemicals to see how it affected their water intake. It was far too long, seeing as we just measured their weight every 20 minutes for 120 minutes, so in between those readings we didn't have too much to do, but I still had fun actually working with animals besides beetles and daphnia.

I then had my Human-Animal interactions class, arriving late on purpose to avoid encounters with that of the jerk kind, but he never actually came to class (thank goodness). Our speaker today was AWESOME. She was an animal wrangler for movies, working with dogs and horses specifically, although sometimes camels. She brought in her german shepherd named Luther, who was absolutely precious and I spent most of the class staring at him. But she also was involved in training and wrangling the animals in movies such as Red Dog (a movie coming out in Australia soon!) and, wait for it, LORD OF THE RINGS. She was one of the many wranglers who helped the actors work with the horses in all those epic battle scenes that I have yet to see most of but I heard they are quite epic. As hard as being an animal wrangler would be, having to work long hours with terrible directors and actors, I think it would be So. Much. Fun. Even though at the end of every movie may never see the animal that you worked up such a relationship with ever again because the animal goes back to its owner. That part would be hard. Apparently a lot of the actors in Lord of the Rings grew to have such a relationship with their horse that they bought them at the end of the movie (15-20,000 dollars per horse!). Crazy.