The Travelling Vet

INTRODUCTION

‘The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.’

Mahatma Gandhi

There can’t be many vets who have stitched up a dinosaur. It’s not the sort of ambition that would be taken too seriously by a careers teacher. Mine had even advised me against applying to vet school. He felt the course was too competitive and that I might struggle. After thirteen rejections, he might have had a point, but the ambitions of a six-year-old boy were not easily going to be thwarted. And now eleven years after qualifying, not only am I a vet, I have worked in nearly every facet of my profession, across four continents, treated some of the most iconic animals on the planet, and offered veterinary expertize on a multi-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster. As I reflect on it now, I still can’t quite believe it myself.

‘There are a million ways to live a life, my friend.’

Bill’s words echoed around my head as I gazed out of the car window. It was a mild, wet November morning, the kind that feels more autumnal than bracing winter. Bill, a family friend, and I were winding our way through the pretty villages and valleys of the Brecon Beacons, the low-lying mist creating an eerie wonderland around me. I thought of the people who lived behind the doors we were passing, the farmers who worked the beautiful landscape, the shopkeepers, postmen and bus drivers. They were all living their lives, and within each came a multitude of choices, a host of possibilities, stories, tragedies, wonders, that had led them to the life they were living on this wet November day in 2015.

As for me, my life could easily have turned out so differently. I had wanted to be a veterinary surgeon since the age of six. I mean, I really wanted to be one, and nothing could, would or ever did change my mind. Although the clues were probably there when I was even younger. Early pictures show me with chickens or lambs under my arms as soon as I could walk, or falling asleep next to my grandparents’ golden retriever. You could say it was what I was born to do, and I never wavered. Yet on Sunday, 13 August 2000, I found myself preparing to study Pathology and Microbiology at Bristol University, having been rejected at least twice from every veterinary school in the UK – and once from University College Dublin. The previous year I had turned down an offer to study Zoology at Liverpool, and taken an enforced gap year in the hope that I would later get a veterinary place somewhere, anywhere. Where would I have been in 2017 if I had chosen a different path? A different city, different friends, a different career – my mind reels at the millions of permutations. And even within the veterinary career I eventually pursued, it could all have been so different.

I remember sitting round the table one evening, with a handful of friends, in my parents’ living room, towards the end of my eighteenth birthday party, as the music started to fade and lights to come on, supping on the remnants of my beer. Empty bottles, half-drunk glasses, red wine stains on the tablecloth, half-finished plates of finger food and bowls of crisps and nibbles surrounded us. My parents were busily tidying up around us as we continued chatting, entering that marvellous reflective mood, preparing for the next big step of our lives, and contemplating our hopes, ambitions and dreams. Where would we each be in ten years’ time? For me, the answer was quite simple. I would be in the middle of a field at six o’clock on a damp, foggy spring morning, with the sun just starting to break through. My green Land Rover Defender would be parked with its back door open, and two dogs would be running around the field. I would be a few yards away, lying prostrate at the rear end of a recumbent cow, assisting her to calve while the farmer stood over me, offering words of encouragement. All I had ever dreamed of being was a regular, country, mixed-animal vet.

And ten years on, at the age of twenty-eight, that is exactly what I was – though for ‘Land Rover Defender’ read ‘Isuzu Trooper’, and make it one dog – Max – rather than two. I had found myself being offered my dream first job out of vet school, working down in rural North Devon. But then fast-forward another seven years: I had worked on four continents, and had treated over a hundred different species – everything from the routine dog, cat, cow, horse, pig and sheep, to the more exotic snow leopard, elephant, rhino and giant panda (to name just a few). And now I am consulting on film sets, including advising on extinct dinosaurs. It certainly was an unusual and unplanned career path that I had taken. But that’s life: things happen, opportunities present themselves, and choices get made.

So wise old Bill was right, there truly were a million different ways to live a life, not just as one of the 7.2 billion people on the planet, but as one of 20,000 veterinary surgeons in the UK. Now ten years qualified, though, the rose-tinted spectacles had long been removed. I had battled through the application process, competing for a place on the intense and protracted course, eventually qualifying, relocating far from my support network, starting out in a job where the days were long, lonely, demanding and stressful, as well as being both physically and emotionally draining. And despite the pride I have always taken in those privileged initials MRCVS (Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons), it is sobering to reflect that my chosen profession consistently ranks among those with the highest suicide rates, and which, contrary to public perception, generally pays its employees less than the minimum wage when calculated against hours worked. I had a plethora of scars and injuries having been bitten, kicked, scratched, stabbed, cut, stitched up, stood on, squashed, stamped and charged. I’d been covered in every possible bodily fluid: blood, pus, urine, diarrhoea, amniotic fluid, rumen contents, anal gland secretion, decomposing tissue. I had accidentally jumped into a silage pit, driven into two ditches, fallen into a pond and had even been hospitalized with a two-litre pleural effusion after contracting bovine tuberculosis and then having to undergo a year of treatment.

So if I had my time over again, would I change anything? Would I go back and tell my six-year-old self that the game wasn’t worth the candle, and to set his ambitions on something else? Gazing out the window on that November morning, and reflecting on what I had done over those ten long years, the people I had met, both colleagues and clients, the animals I had worked with and treated, the experiences I had gained, and the places I had visited, I knew without a moment’s hesitation that the answer was an emphatic ‘No’.

In fact, it now struck me, I was only just getting started.