How Herriot still inspires Yorkshire’s hi-tech vets
DESPITE all the tech, it seems that James Herriot is still the master for a new generation of Yorkshire vets.
The James Herriot novels and spin-off TV series All Creatures Great and Small continue to inspire young animal doctors, say the team behind hit show The Yorkshire Vet.
The 14th series begins on Channel 5 this week and features cows being fitted with state-of-the-art collars monitoring their health.
When one flags up a twisted stomach, vet Shona Searson, 33, was able to operate in time to save her life.
Despite the advances of veterinary technology, she said she is “carrying on the legacy” of the world’s most famous vet.
Shona said: “I’m quite an old-fashioned person at heart so I love all the old stories and even now I can still look at a James Herriot book and pick up a couple of things.
“A lot of my inspiration from being a vet was from my mother, who was also a vet and worked in the 1970s and early 80s.
“When she was in practice it was much more like how it was in the James Herriot books.
“From communicating with clients to ideas on how you handle an animal, or even on how you diagnose something, you can reflect on what people used to do and use that now.
“Sometimes you just have your own hands, a stethoscope and a thermometer, and you don’t always have access to a blood machine and things like that, so those things are still really true today.”
Also starring in the show is vet Peter Wright, who was trained by Herriot – real name Alfred Wight.
Animal lovers have been following the work of Peter and his colleagues on The Yorkshire Vet since 2015. Now 65, he said his mentor would never have imagined robots would one day be milking cows.
“When I was a young vet he used to be picking my brains about stuff and I was picking his. So it’s pretty much a symbiotic relationship. That’s something Alf Wight always embraced.”
Peter admitted some of the scenes in the new show – in which he performs a caesarean on a ewe with triplets – would be “gruesome” but, after 40 years as a vet, he would be “more than happy” to eat a sandwich straight after an operation.
Peter added he is still going strong in his 60s and recently delivered a 100kg calf by caesarean – the biggest he had ever seen born.
He added that while he “was not as young as I used to be” and needed a week to recover from the effort, “it’s surprising what you can do if you have to do it. Your willpower takes over in that situation.”
The Yorkshire Vet returns on Tuesday at 8pm on Channel 5.
■WE’RE ALWAYS being told not to give out personal information on the internet in case some criminal steals our identity and empties our bank account. So I’m not altogether happy about NASA’S plan to beam a binary-coded message (no, I don’t know precisely what that means either) across space in the hope of making contact with aliens.
“Beacon Inthe Galaxy” will contain all sorts of information about how earthlings roll – maths and physics, images of the human form, information about DNA, a map of the solar system and an invitation for the aliens to beam back a reply. Are they mad? Haven’t they seen Independence Day?why not send everyone’s passwords while they’re about it.
It’s the global equivalent of tellingtwitter and Facebook you’re on holiday in the Seychelles and you’ve left your back door open.
And it’s not just me.the late Stephen Hawking said trying to attract the attention of aliens might not be a very good idea. He said: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.” Quite. Or as astro-biologist David Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute intucson, put it: “If you live in a jungle that might be full of hungry lions, do you jump down from your tree and go, ‘Yoo-hoo?’”
We’ve all made jokes about UFOS and aliens. Anybody who takes it seriously is obviously a weirdo. On the other hand nobody was bothered about a pandemic until…um… we were. Stuff happens. If the aliens are stupider than us then we can live without them. And if they’re cleverer, then let’s keep them at tentacle’s length for as long as possible.