My Favorite Dog Books
The first time I met Tom more than 20 years ago he was complaining, good-naturedly, about being old and worn out. He wore an old slouch hat, glasses down on his nose, scraggly beard and crooked smile. He had Tuffy, a golden retriever, in for puppy shots and was still mourning the death of his beloved old black lab, Buck. “Tuffy’s gonna be a good dog, she’s learnin’, but she’ll never be another Buck. Old Buck and I, we rode all over the west in my truck and walked through all the mountains together. I tell you Doc, I miss that dog.”
Now Tuffy is long gone, as well as Poki Ann, and Polly Ann, and Tom lost his wife Jean too along the way. But now he has Penelope Ann, another black lab, and the last time I saw him he and Penelope Ann were planning a road trip in Tom’s old camper truck. I asked if anyone was going with him. “Heck no, Doc, just me and Penelope Ann. She’s the best company I’ve got and all the company I need.”
It reminded me of John Steinbeck’s book “Travels with Charlie.” In 1960 he took a long road trip in a camper truck with his standard poodle, Charlie, and wrote about the America he saw and Americans he met, and about Charlie and the conversations they had. I don’t know if that book planted the idea in my head to go to vet school but it prepared and fertilized the ground for it.
Like Tom with his dog Buck, and Steinbeck with Charlie, a dog has been a constant traveling companion, from all the farm calls in the early days with my old Lab Ben, to commuting, or walking, back and forth to work now with Maggie, my Australian Shepherd. When the phone rings in the middle of the night and I have to go to the clinic, she jumps in the car with enthusiasm that makes me feel guilty.
A few weeks ago another client told me her grandson was named Tristan, after a character in James Herriot’s book “All Creatures Great and Small.” That book really pushed me on my way towards a veterinary career. While I was still in the Air Force, stationed in Thailand in 1972, I stumbled on the Reader’s Digest excerpts from Herriot’s book and began cutting them out and saving them for a scrapbook to keep in the waiting room of the practice I would someday own.
The book is about a young Veterinarian just out of School, James Herriot, who goes to work for an older veterinarian name Siegfried, in a small town Yorkshire, England, in the 1930’s. Siegfried has a younger brother named Tristan.
Although the book is set far away, in Yorkshire, and 80 years in the past, it is completely relevant to a young person contemplating a career in veterinary medicine in the United States today. Some things don’t change. The challenges of examining and treating patients who are often uncooperative and sometimes aggressive are much the same. I’ve found among the clients I’ve known in my 30 years a near match for each of the many types of clients Herriot writes about. Their idiosyncrasies, from the endearing to the maddening, are all there. I’ve seen facets of myself, my employees, and colleagues, in James Herriot and his boss Siegfried.
Reading a good book is the closest you’ll come to seeing the world through another’s eyes, whether it’s a road trip with a dog through America in 1960, or being a veterinarian in Yorkshire in 1935.