something else I did over the weekend

Nope, not hunting.

Caleb, my brother Jon, and I accompanied my dad to a deer farm where we helped with a massive deer procedure. Operation: deer insemination. I took pictures and now I’m blogging about it. Perks of having a Veterinarian dad. 

The object here is to breed the biggest, the best, the most amazing deer. This is the South and awesome deer are big ticket items. The game is played by carefully matching the does and bucks. The surest way to accomplish this is with artificial insemination.

This is the deer chute. They move the deer through here in groups, capturing them one at a time and injecting them with sedative. Then they are released into a pen where they stumble around for a few minutes before going to dream land.

And the fun begins. These are prized deer so they get to hang out on foam stretchers while waiting their turn. Temperature is really important here. While sedated the deer are prone to overheating, so we had three vets and an army of other folks constantly checking temps and packing ice around the deer bellies.

ps. there are no under-the-tongue temps here. Business is done at the other end. It’s a dirty job. Carry on.

Prep for surgery includes a close shave.

This one is ready to go. “Pick me, pick me!”

Inside the surgical suite, the AI team prep the deer and defrost the male goods.

This is how you make a baby deer in the 21st century.

In true assembly line fashion, one moving out and the next moving in.

Once finished, the deer get loaded in the back of a truck and returned to a recovery pen.

While the deer are out cold, they get checked for parasites and receive any meds they might need before returning to the field.

During a lull in activity, the men down sodas and McDonald’s sausage biscuits while exchanging deer jokes, food jokes, and poop jokes. Just keeping it real.

When the last deer was done we sat around debating whose hands got the dirtiest. I don’t want to know the results.