Dogs like to obey. It gives them security.
Animals are unpredictable things, and so our life is unpredictable. It’s a long tale of little triumphs and disasters and you’ve got to really like it to stick it.
No animal is a better judge of comfort than a cat...
I have felt cats rubbing their faces against mine and touching my cheek with claws carefully sheathed. These things, to me, are expressions of love.
I wish people would realize that animals are totally dependent on us, helpless, like children, a trust that is put upon us.
I could do terrible things to people who dump unwanted animals by the roadside.
That quotation about not having time to stand and stare has never applied to me. I seem to have spent a good part of my life – probably too much – in just standing and staring and I was at it again this morning.
At times it seemed unfair that I should be paid for my work; for driving out in the early morning with the fields glittering under the first pale sunshine and the wisps of mist still hanging on the high tops.
I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me.
I am never at my best in the early morning, especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells, finding its way inside my clothing, nipping at my nose and ears.
I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.
For years I used to bore my wife over lunch with stories about funny incidents.
If I had been a little dog I’d have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.
I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.
And the peace which I always found in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly.
I was helped by having a verbatim memory of what happened years ago, even if I can’t remember what happened a couple of days ago.
There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn’t fall, I started to consider retiring.
If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn’t care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.
I will write another book if I feel like it.
They can’t find my house now because I keep it very quiet where I live.