I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to animal cages. More particularly, the present invention relates to an animal cage and a process designed for cleaning an infected animal's cage in a veterinarian hospital, laboratory, zoo, or other animal holding facility.
II. Description of the Prior Art
Doctors of veterinary medicine have long sought suitable animal caging for use in a veterinarian hospital for housing an infected animal. Many viruses exist in the veterinarian hospital, laboratory, zoo, or other animal holding facility and can infect other animal patients already stressed and weakened by their own illnesses. Parvo virus is a commonly seen and easily transferable animal disease having infectious micro-organisms present in the excrement, vomitus or urine of an infected animal.
A conventional animal cage does not provide for cleaning of the cage. Since the early days of caging animals, cleaning of the cage has been necessary. The use of a standard animal cage, in which the animal is raised several inches from the floor of the cage, requires the animal to be removed to allow the cage to be thoroughly cleaned and sanitized. However, this type of cage is not convenient to clean when an animal becomes sick many times throughout the day. Clearly, the regular animal cage is limited in value in the circumstances discussed above.
In an effort to overcome the problems of known animal cages, several modifications of the basic animal cage have been attempted. An attempt to use a reverse flow of a large volume of relatively low pressure water for a flushing system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,828,732 to Hill et al. The flushing system for this animal cage discusses self-cleaning housing systems using front to back flushing systems that are feasible only for smaller animal housing systems, and only partially effective for large animal systems, such as for dogs.
Poultry droppings pans are described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,523,615 to Fell and U.S. Pat. No. 2,701,547 to Shaw.
A more recent attempt at cleaning an animal enclosure by flushing away waste material is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,205,627 to Buchanan, June 3, 1980. This patent discusses controlling air flow by pressure so air is not recirculated through animal cages.
While providing some measure of cleaning, all these cleaning systems suffer from common defects, including the lack of the ability to disinfect the cage to control any infectious agent remaining after the flushing.
Accordingly, the problem of frequent cleaning of an infectious animal's cage has not been successfully addressed by prior invention.
The object of the present invention is to provide a veterinarian infectious waste containment system for use in veterinarian hospital, laboratory, zoo, or other animal holding facility that has the beneficial physical qualities of completely removing emitted waste from a sick animal patient and allowing for disinfection of the waste tray without disturbing the animal patient and, yet, has the ease of quick disassembly for thorough sanitation.