So how DO you make a chilly otter hotter? Cover it in bubble wrap of course!
The life of TV’s Highland Vet is one of constant surprises – and some very unusual patients...
GUY Gordon is standing in a barn in his surgical scrubs, preparing to deliver a calf. ‘I can’t think of anything finer than being out in the middle of the Highlands lathering yourself up for a surgical procedure on a cow,’ he declares, soaking his arms in soapy water.
That said, he’d better get on with it. Gordon has a date: he’s going ballroom dancing with his wife this evening.
Such is the glamorous life of Gordon, also known as The Highland Vet, star of the Channel 5 TV show of the same name.
Gordon spends much of his life performing surgical procedures on cows, and, yes, ballroom dancing, something he’s been ribbed for mercilessly by some of the farmers he’s regularly called out to. ‘Perhaps I should invite some of the farmers along,’ he says drily, ‘as long as they don’t wear their wellies.’
Made by the same production company behind The Yorkshire Vet, The Highland Vet has become a real hit. Narrated by Downton Abbey actress Phyllis Logan and featuring the staff of DS McGregor and Partners Veterinary Surgeons in Thurso – the most northerly vet practice in Britain – it is gentle, charming telly, albeit TV that packs a substantial emotional punch.
Whether it’s a sheepdog that’s been hit by a bus or a ewe in distress while trying to give birth to a lamb, for the past three years cameras have been faithfully following the highs and lows of a practice that deals as much with large farm animals – not to mention the occasional otter cub and seal pup – as it does with family pets.
The pandemic has changed much about how the practice goes about its business – for months pet owners had to wait in the car park for news of their furry charges and the surgery has been operating with a skeleton staff in recent months as Covid swept the Highlands – but its basic stockin-trade remains the same.
‘I was on call the other week, up in the middle of the night pulling lambs out of sheep and calves out of cows,’ says Gordon. ‘You have to be able to deal with any species that’s thrown at you and to me, that’s one of the beauties of the job.’
Now Gordon has written a book, The Highland Vet: A Year at Thurso, a thoughtful meander through the seasons of 2021 as the practice faces Covid lockdowns, a wide range of farming emergencies and even the odd feisty puffin.
‘Some of the stories in the book have already been told on the TV but the book meant I could hark back to stories from earlier in my career which have stood out, as well as some of the stories other vets in the practice have experienced,’ he says.
THERE are also, as one might expect from a vet with more than 30 years in practice, nuggets of useful advice, from how to keep your pet calm on Bonfire Night to keeping dogs away from chocolate at Christmas.
‘I quite enjoyed writing that in a way that’s easy for the public to understand,’ he says.
‘But there is also a big section in the book on telling people how to calve cows and sheep.’
There certainly is. Gordon is what he likes to describe as a ‘leg and bone man’ – essentially, a dab hand with a scalpel – and devotes a whole chapter to grisly procedures that are, he says, ‘best not to try at home’.
Endearingly, whenever he performs surgery in the field (sometimes quite literally), he always lays out his surgical implements on an old tea tray his wife Jennifer, whom he met while studying in Edinburgh, used to serve tea on.
It’s a job not without dangers, particularly when dealing with cattle, and Gordon reveals a number of hair-raising incidents he and his colleagues have experienced, including when fellow vet Ken Wilson had his arm broken after a hard hoofing by a stirk, a large weaned calf.
Then there was the time a stirk kicked out while Gordon was midway through a castration and he managed to sink the scalpel he was wielding deep into the back of his hand. ‘It must have hit an artery, as the blood squirted out of me in an arc some two feet into the air,’ he relates.
Nevertheless, after a quick trip to hospital he was back out on call that night, and conducted two cow caesareans.
‘Often you rely on the farmer being aware of his own animals and saying “You’ve got to watch this one, she’s a bit crazy”,’ he says. ‘But all animals are unpredictable. Especially if their hormones are raging.’
He has huge respect for the farmers he works with, and sympathises with those who, even in their old age, refuse to give up the job.
‘Eventually, all they’ll be left with is a puckle – a small handful – of animals, but they can’t bring themselves to let all their livestock go,’ he writes.
‘Take the animals away and you take away their reason for getting up in the morning. You take their identity. You take away their life.’
For an area as vast as Caithness, it is perhaps not surprising that much of the practice’s work is farm-based.
The surgery treats animals from more than 1,000 square miles of farms, smallholdings, moorland and villages, not to mention Thurso itself. It is estimated that there are around 700 farms in the surrounding area alone.
Originally from the north of England, Gordon moved to Scotland to study veterinary science at the University of Edinburgh where he met ‘long-suffering’ wife Jennifer – and then worked in Fife and Perthshire.
He didn’t plan to move to Thurso, but when a job there came up in 1998, he went. Although he was immediately taken with the scenery – in the book he writes about the Northern Lights flickering in the skies on clear winter nights – it wasn’t quite love at first sight.
‘It’s not like it was a different planet, but it did feel quite far flung,’ he says. ‘I think I possibly arrived at the wrong time of year as well, between Christmas and New Year, so my first experience was of the darkest and dreariest months.
‘It took a while to grow on me because it was just wild, windswept and dark.
‘But when the sun came out and the days got longer I started to feel much more at home. After a few years I started to get the sense that I could never live anywhere busy again.’
Unlike many urban vets that operate normal office hours, the Thurso practice gets call-outs at all times of the day and night, with Gordon pointing out wryly that animals rarely respect the clock, particularly when giving birth.
NO wonder then he describes it as a vocation rather than a job, and says you have to be a certain type of person, ‘both emotionally and physically resilient’.
Just the other week he had been called out to a calving and didn’t get back home until 3am.
He says: ‘I literally put my head on the pillow for one minute, maybe two, and the phone went again with another call-out. That’s just the worst feeling. I think I might have said something to my wife like, “Why am I still doing this?”
‘But then you do. You carry on doing it and you know you can catch up on your sleep. You keep going.’
He clearly develops emotional bonds with many of the animals he treats, and is also a pet owner himself (the family’s current dog is named Milis, Gaelic for sweet).
After one difficult calving, the farmer asked him to name the calf. Gordon plumped for Brianna, the name of his eldest daughter, and when its calf was born in turn he called it Cara, the name of his other daughter.
One of the chapters in the book deals with a situation familiar to all pet owners: the terrible moment when you have to say goodbye. Like so
many members of his profession, Gordon understands all too well the emotional upheaval the loss of a pet can cause.
‘When you’re a new graduate the critical thing is just not making a mess of it. But once that becomes second nature you can take a step back and very quickly you realise that there are grieving human beings in the room with you.
‘It touches me emotionally more now that I’m older than it ever did when I was younger.’
He recalls one old lady who brought her dog in to be put to sleep, a little Yorkshire terrier that had provided comfort and companionship after the death of her husband.
‘This dog was all she had left,’ he says. ‘And she said to me, “You might as well put me down too”. It’s very difficult not to get a lump in your throat when people say things like that to you.’
Lockdown has led to a huge rise in pet ownership, and along with it, some more unusual pets appearing at the door of the practice.
‘I’ve seen an alpaca or two recently,’ he says. ‘I never thought I’d be treating things like that, but we do see people who keep them.
I’ve yet to treat my first spider, but it can only be a matter of time.’
The odd wild animal also makes its way into the surgery, and over the years they have treated everything from a red deer to kestrels, otter cubs to a puffin with ‘a bit of a feisty side’ that was successfully rehabilitated and released.
‘Often it’s the SSPCA that deals with wildlife, but sometimes the public will present a wild animal to us,’ says Gordon.
‘We’re the animal people, so if they bring us an animal in distress we’ve got to deal with it.’
Last year, in a moving encounter described in the book, one of his colleagues, Shondie Maclean, had to put a dolphin to sleep that had beached, become dehydrated and developed an infection.
And in an episode of the most recent series of the show, the team treat an otter cub, found freezing and alone by a farmer, and resort to wrapping its feet in bubble wrap in an effort to warm it up.
As vet Eilidh Macdonald remarks: ‘I haven’t treated an otter before, but it’s about treating them like you would treat any other small creature.’
Fans of the show will be delighted to learn that a fourth series is currently being filmed, as Gordon and the team face the challenges of a new farming year.
Has there still been time for ballroom dancing?
‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘But I can handle the flack.’
The Highland Vet by Guy Gordon, published by Ebury Spotlight, is out now priced £16.99. Gordon will be giving talks and signing books at Toppings in Edinburgh today and Toppings in St Andrews tomorrow.