Calweton Veterinary Group needed a way to teach difficult birthing procedures without a live animal. We scanned a cow hip bone and a lamb hip bone, redesigned both to be printable, and have produced them for the practice ever since.
Calweton Veterinary Group
Cow hip bone and lamb hip bone
3D scanning, design for manufacture, production
Ongoing repeat production
Assisting a difficult birth is a day-one skill for anyone working with livestock, and one of the hardest things to teach. A malpresented calf or lamb is an emergency: it happens without warning, often at night, often in poor conditions, and the outcome depends on someone knowing what they are feeling for and how to correct it.
There is no way to learn it calmly on the job, because by definition the situation only arises once it is already urgent. The Royal Veterinary College, describing its own investment in simulation, put it plainly: calving is an emergency situation and a day one skill, and practising beforehand builds both confidence and competence.
Simulation carries a welfare argument too — every repetition performed on a model is one not performed on an animal. The obstacle has always been access. The RVC’s bovine calving simulator was funded by an award of nearly £31,000: a realistic figure for a veterinary school, an unrealistic one for the farm training courses that reach the people most likely to be first on the scene.
Calweton Veterinary Group runs exactly that kind of training — practical, small-group courses for farmers covering DIY artificial insemination, foot trimming and lameness, ram fertility and responsible medicine use.
Give Calweton’s students an anatomically accurate way to rehearse birthing procedures by feel, for both cattle and sheep, at a cost proportionate to a farm training course — and in a form the practice could keep restocking as courses continued.
— Michael Hunt, 3D Printing Consultant, 3D Printing Cornwall
That is why the work started with a scan of real skeletal anatomy rather than a generic model bought off a shelf.
We scanned a cow hip bone and a lamb hip bone directly, capturing the true geometry of each rather than working from generic reference. A student learning by touch is learning specific dimensions and contours; a model that is approximately right teaches something approximately wrong.
Scan data is not a printable part. Each hip bone was redesigned as clean, manufacturable geometry — resolving the overhangs, wall thicknesses and internal structure that determine whether a model prints reliably, while preserving the anatomical landmarks students orient by.
Cattle and sheep present different problems at different scales, and the practical technique differs accordingly. Producing both meant training could address each species on its own terms rather than asking students to extrapolate from one to the other.
A training aid lives a harder life than a display piece. It is handled by group after group, worked with wet hands and lubricant, transported between sessions and stored between courses. Both models were designed with that duty cycle in mind rather than as one-off display prints.
Because the geometry was rebuilt properly rather than left as raw scan data, each model can be reproduced on demand — identical every time, with no rescanning and no drift between batches.
This is the part that distinguishes the project from a one-off commission. Calweton did not buy a pair of models; they gained a supply. We continue to produce both hip bones for the practice on an ongoing basis, so worn or damaged units are replaced and new courses are stocked without the training programme having to work around availability. A digital model that has been properly rebuilt does not degrade, get lost, or go out of production.
Calweton can demonstrate and let students rehearse birthing procedures directly, on anatomy matching what they will meet in the field, as part of its existing practical course programme — with replacement models available whenever they are needed.
Species modelled — cattle and sheep
Live animals required to practise
Pounds awarded for a comparable commercial simulator
Simulation-based training has a well-established evidence base in veterinary education, but its benefits have historically been concentrated where the budgets are — in schools and universities rather than in the practices running courses for working farmers.
Scanning and reverse engineering change that arithmetic. An anatomically accurate teaching model no longer requires a commercial simulator budget, and once the geometry exists it can be reproduced indefinitely at the cost of the material.
For the animals involved, the argument is simpler still: the more practice that happens on a model, the less that has to happen on them.
Calweton Veterinary Group training — calwetonvets.com | RVC Animal Care Trust, bovine calving simulator — rvc.ac.uk
Anatomical replicas and training aids, scanned from real reference, designed to print reliably, and reproducible for as long as you need them.
