“I used to build props and worked in film and television production, and I had a shop in my garage at home,” says Russ Gray, cofounder of Veterinary Simulator Industries (VSI) in Calgary, Alberta. “My neighbour was the dean for the University of Calgary’s new Veterinary School. He knew that I built weird things, so he asked me if I could build the back end of a cow just to garner some interest for the new school at the agricultural fair in Calgary. He wanted the back end of three cows so that kids could reach up into the rectum and palpate a calf’s head. I contacted my business partner, Bryan Pfahl, and we created them for him. At the time we were doing all kinds of jobs for science centres and things like that during the course of our careers, so we just took it on as another project.”