Britain’s deadliest animal… the horse!
NEVER WORK WITH ANIMALS by Gareth Steel (HarperElement £14.99, 336pp)
WHAT is Britain’s most dangerous animal? Forget venomous adders, snarling pitbulls or killer hornets; the most lethal of them all, according to Gareth Steel, is the horse.
As well as being capable of biting, crushing and head-butting you, it can deliver a potentially deadly kick with those metalshod hooves. Being an equine vet, he declares, ‘is one of the most dangerous peacetime occupations in the UK’.
Steel has been a vet for 20 years and this is his warts-and-all account of what the job is really like, far from the highly romanticised view given by books and TV shows.
while human medics tend to work in specialist teams and make collective decisions, vets usually work alone and need to be able to cope with anything that’s thrown at them, from lethargic hamsters to cows in labour. In the space of a day, he writes, he needs to go ‘from neurologist to dermatologist, orthopaedic surgeon to obstetrician, from assassin to saviour’. Steel is particularly good at describing what goes on in the operating room: the blood and gore, the panic when something goes wrong, the procedures tried as a last resort and performed with a medical textbook propped by his side to guide him.
he is also a dab hand at improvisation. During one complicated operation on a dog, he realised he didn’t have the vital piece of equipment he needed to cut through a bone. he dashed from the surgery to the nearest hardware store and bought a chisel. The dog was saved.
Steel loves his patients, marvelling at how calm and trusting most of them are, even when in pain, but their owners are another matter. Steel tells a woman who wants her healthy dog put down: ‘I’m obliged to prevent unnecessary suffering, but not to put animals down on a whim.’
Some of his customers are prepared to spend thousands on their pet, while others baulk at paying for a single blood test. But then, who can put a price on an animal’s life? how much is it ‘reasonable’ to spend to save a beloved pet?
Vets themselves aren’t particularly well paid; in 2020, the average full-time vet earned £42,000, compared with £60,000 for a lawyer and £100,000 for a GP.
There are many highs in Never work with Animals, like the time Steel brings a labrador back from the dead. But there are also crashing lows, when he lies awake agonising about the cases that have gone wrong.
he points out that the suicide rate for vets is four times higher than that of the general population and believes mental resilience must become part of veterinary training.
This gritty yet tender-hearted book is essential reading for anyone thinking of training as one. It will leave you with renewed respect for Britain’s vets and the difficult, emotionally draining work they carry out.