What The Dog Saw

Noel Fitzpatrick, The Celebrity Vet Behind The Channel 4 Show The Supervet, Recounts His Often-surprising Journey In A Memoir That Celebrates The Bond Between Humans And Animals

- Deepan Joshi

THE IRISH are fascinating people. Ireland has a population of just 5 million but there is something special about it. Sigmund Freud, the Austrian who founded psychoanalysis, observed, “The Irish are the only people who are impervious to psychoanalysis.”

The small population has produced giants that have left an imprint on the consciousness of humankind. The veterinary surgeon Noel Fitzpatrick is one more addition to an already impressive list. Fitzpatrick and his team star in the Channel 4 series The Supervet in which pets that otherwise might be beyond saving receive cutting edge treatments and surgery.

Fitzpatrick penned a memoir of his journey starting as a 10-year-old boy, growing up on a family farm in Ballyfin, Ireland, in 1978. He used to check on the sheep in the night shift throughout the lambing season in spring and his father always did the morning shift.

It is perfectly normal for an Irish to write a book called Listening to the Animals and it is even more normal to visualise the Irish author doing it. The 11-year-old Border terrier Keira is the love of the supervet’s life.

Fitzpatrick’s simple prose generates an atmosphere of almost palpable authenticity; one reads the book in a kind of trance of trust, certain that the writer is incapable of pretence and falseness. The Sunday Times bestseller is not about runaway specialisation and marks and degrees, it is a book that shows the reader the love of a craft.