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as they were stereotypical. The animal collapsed, its brain penetrated by the steel bolt, which had already retracted back into the instrument.
    Bob bent down, checking for eye reflexes by touching the cow’s cornea. Anything resembling a blink would have meant that the creature hadn’t been properly stunned—although in three years of visits to the slaughterhouse we had never seen this happen. *36 Having been assured that the enormous bovid wasn’t about to right itself, Bob climbed agilely into the stunning box and disappeared behind the cow’s hindquarters.
    â€œThis here’s the most dangerous part of my job,” came a muffled voice from somewhere just south of rump roast. “These cows still got nerves.”
    â€œThat’s for sure,” I said, finally getting to use the anatomical knowledge I’d accumulated over a long collegiate career.
    â€œOne stray kick can break a man’s back.”
    I pondered that image for a moment. “And that would suck,” I added thoughtfully.
    My colleague Kim (an aspiring anatomist herself) nodded in agreement. “Definitely.”
    In any event, I always got a bit antsy when Bob jumped in with a brain-bonked cow, and similarly, I always felt relief when Elsie rose from the floor, hind limbs first, cranking toward the ceiling under the power of a motorized block-and-tackle set.
    Less than a minute later, the insensate animal had been hung so that its head was suspended above a large plastic barrel. Then, with one expert slice of his knife, Bob would sever one of the cow’s jugular veins, stepping out of the way just in time to avoid the powerful torrent of blood that splashed into the blue container.
    Once the cow had been fully exsanguinated (and just about the time that Bob started reaching for the “carcass-splitting saw”), Kim and I slid the sloshing barrel of hot blood to the opposite side of the room. Clad in fishing waders and rain gear, our hands were gloved in rubber for reasons that Mr. Playtex couldn’t have imagined in his wildest nightmares. Even Bob shook his head in disgust—then he fired up the “Ronko Carcass Master 5000” and began the noisy process of carving Elsie into easy-to-carry pieces.
    Standing over the barrel, Kim and I took turns using a metal spaghetti strainer to agitate the blood. By doing so we were actually speeding up the natural clotting process—which had been chemically triggered as soon as the blood left the confines of the severed vein. Although unable to stem the flow of blood from a traumatic wound to a major blood vessel, the hemostatic (clotting) mechanism we were currently stimulating did an extremely efficient job of preventing excess blood loss after minor injuries. For example, a divot-shaped wound of the size inflicted by vampire bats (approximately three millimeters in diameter) would be expected to stop bleeding within one or two minutes. This is not the case, however, in instances in which the wound is created by one of nature’s blood-feeding specialists (e.g., leeches and vampire bats). Evolution has provided these creatures with a number of ingredients in their saliva that can interrupt the process of blood clotting for up to several hours. The end result is that the blood feeder is able to drink its fill, having temporarily halted the very same clotting process Kim and I were currently accelerating with our colander.
    Vampire bats, feeding at a bite they’ve inflicted, use their tongues to draw out the blood. Contrary to popular belief, they do not suck blood from their victims. In fact, the physics involved is very similar to what happens when a phlebotomist draws up a patient’s blood into a capillary tube. Basically, these thin glass tubes work because their inner diameter is so small that the force of attraction between the blood and the glass is greater than the downward pull of gravity. Thus, the blood pulls itself up the inside