Colourful tales of life as a rural vet
Lifestyle - Locum vet Austin Donnelly shares his passion for animals, nature and humanity in a new account of his work in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Humorous, insightful and entertaining, it’s complemented by illustrations from Spiddal artist Ruth Cadden. They talk to JUDY MURPHY about working on the book and its rich cast of human and animal characters, including some from Galway.
Not long after qualifying as a vet, Austin Donnelly took up a locum position in South Galway, an experience which has left the Armagh man with many memories, happy and thought-provoking.
These feature in his debut book, Whiskers, Feathers and Fur: Veterinary Tales, which is illustrated by Spiddal artist Ruth Cadden.
One of the Galway stories, ‘Peadar and the Lads’ is a life-affirming, gently humorous tale of postman and nature-lover, Peadar. Having inadvertently destroyed a robins’ nest that had been built in a post box, he took it upon himself to transfer the nest, complete with chicks to the glove compartment of his post van.
All the chicks survived and were successfully launched into the world, with the aid of Peadar’s wife Kate, when he eventually informed her of his unusual project.
The other Galway story, ‘Nancy Reilly and the Fine Pair of Wellingtons’, is about a landowner with a large herd of badly tended cattle, who rang the vets’ office to arrange a TB test and announced that she didn’t want “a female vet or any foreigners or I will run them with my pitchfork”.
Austin’s account of carrying out the test with the aid of several local young men, and his memories of the state of Nancy’s animals and her farmyard is sobering. So too is her treatment of all animals, including her long-suffering collies.
The vets’ secretary, a shrewd, kind woman who knew Nancy well, remarked that it took someone who was either ‘mad, bad or sad’ to mistreat an animal or fellow human.
Nancy has since died – that’s in the book too, but clearly, all names have been changed and some characters are composites, as Austin explains.
“People ask if I’m the new James Heriot,” he says, referring to the vet in the Yorkshire Dales who wrote the books on which the popular TV series All Creatures Great and Small (1978-1990) was based.
But he’s not. Although James Heriot suffered from depression, his books were almost always upbeat.
With his memoir Austin wanted some happy, light-hearted stories, but that wasn’t all.
“I also wanted to give an insight into other aspects of a vet’s life,” he explains.
And so, there’s the story about Nancy Reilly, as well as an episode from Austin’s Armagh childhood, The Sow’s Nest, which is one of the saddest, yet loveliest chapters in the book.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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