If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn’t care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.
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.
Dogs like to obey. It gives them security.
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.
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.