WARNING: GROSS ANATOMY of a CAT in FULL COLOR

There are two stainless steel probes that you see sticking out of two holes. The top hole is the esophogus which is where the food goes down. The bottom hole is the trachea. It's hard to see but there is a little flap just below the bottom probe called the Epiglottis. This closes when we swallow our food. Occassionally we can rush through eating, or folks mix eating with drinking, and laughing and we literally "swallow down the wrong pipe". If this Epiglottis fails to close, one ends up choking and thus the Hiemlich maneuver is performed.

At the top, my thumb is holding back the stomach. Just below, the yellow J-shaped area, is the Ilioceccal junction. This is the junction between the large and small intestine. I thought this area was interesting as many of us have had our appendix removed. A cat does not have an appendix, but we obviously do. The appendix is usually located right in front of the cecum, but in my case, I was "retro-cecum" meaning my appendix was behind the cecum and they had a little more cutting to do to get to it.

This is the poor cat that I dissected in Biology. I named him "Mr. Ed" for the the "education" he has given me! He really was a great cat and had superior muscle tone and just a little fat, which made it alot easier to work with, compared to others. These cats are not "farmed" but rather were house cats that were "put to sleep" and their owners wanted them dedicated to science and research.

I hope you enjoyed the little mini-lab I put to gether for you. I need to het back in the lab and photograph these frogs we dissected; they were huge ! The one I had, just fit into a one gallon plastic ziploc bag. I named him too....JEREMIAH...., after the song, "Jeremiah was a bullfrog...."

Okay, I need to get back to studying! Enough for now.