Thanks to funding from the Madison Initiative for Undergraduates, students in one University of Wisconsin class were able to help animals conceive offspring.
UW Animal Science professor John Parrish said the MIU funds enabled the class to hire another teaching assistant, which made hands-on learning by students possible.
Students in the class learn about animal reproduction, said UW senior Ty Hildebrandt, including the reproductive cycles of pigs, horses and cows.
Students actually got to artificially inseminate animals this semester, which Parrish said he did previously with a TA.
Now, however, Parrish was able to assign one cow to a group of four students. Each group had to come up with a hormone protocol and give their cow its shots at the designated times.
Over three weeks, Parrish and his two TAs supervised students for more than 80 hours as they gave the shots to their animals.
Hildebrandt said he knew how to artificially inseminate a cow already, but actually getting to execute what he learned in class gave him a different perspective than a textbook could.
“It’s one thing to learn it through a book,” he said. “That’s not how I learn very well, so for me to actually be able to do it … it’s a lot harder than a book makes it sound.”
Artificially inseminating the cows involved thawing semen and someone actually reaching into the cow through the anus to place the semen in the cervix, Hildebrandt said.
The process happened over the process of the entire semester, Hildebrandt said, and it was interesting seeing how his classmates reacted.
“One of my partners in the project was from the inner city of Milwaukee,” Hildebrandt said. “For her to go from never touching a cow to … reaching inside it, – it definitely was a lot of growing she did and to see her satisfaction after she did was pretty cool.”
The third round of MIU proposals closed yesterday, said Vice Provost Aaron Brower in an e-mail to The Badger Herald. Deliberation will take place in January and February with final decisions forwarded to Chancellor Biddy Martin in March.
