Why vets’ drift away from mixed rural practice is a worry
re-read several of the James Herriot books recently, tales of a young Scottish vet in the Yorkshire Dales in the late 1930s and through the 1940s. From first publication Herriot’s stories in the early 1970s sold millions and led to the longrunning television series All Creatures Great and Small.
I think the TV series probably had the greater impact on young minds but it is generally accepted that the rosy glow of nostalgia stories by the unassuming Scottish vet Alf Wight – James Herriot was a pseudonym, borrowed from a Birmingham City goalkeeper – altered a generation’s view of veterinary practice.
That was particularly true of young women. Before Herriot there were women vets, but not many. The same was true of agricultural colleges. When I started college in 1965 I was one of 120 male students starting the course, no women. No one at the time found that odd and I suspect that the ratio would have been much the same at Glasgow and Edinburgh veterinary schools.
Agriculture still lags behind in spite of great efforts made in recent years by the Women in Agriculture movement. For example, and I don’t know how often I have argued for something to be done about this over the years, there are still no women in Scottish NFU leadership positions.
The Scottish government’s Women in Agriculture Taskforce must have noted that, and in almost any other farming organisation you can think of, when it concluded in its final report: “Gender bias means women are not expected to hold leadership positions within agricultural organisations.”
Thereportgaveanumber of recommendations to try to change that. How effective they will be in changing the role of women from their traditional back-up to Man the Boss and don’t you worry your pretty little head is another matter.
In veterinary circles the change has been more obvious. That can’t all be down to Herriot but the fact that “the Herriot effect” is still quoted is significant. By the late 1970s women were starting to qualify as vets in evergreater numbers and now must account for about half of the profession. Many also have leading roles including chief executives of research organisations with international reputations.
Television programmes such as the (flamboyant) Yorkshire Vet and The Pets Factor reel in viewers and it seems as if the public in general can’t get enough of ewes and cows giving birth.
And yet, as far as livestock farmers are concerned, the problem is not that there are as many women vets as men but that too many of both sexes are increasingly in the wrong place. The mixed rural practice that Herriot described is in trouble in Scotland and the large-scale large animal practices seen more often in England, providing preventive disease programmes for 1,000-cow dairy herds, tens of thousands of pigs or vast poultry enterprises are not common.
Somehow, even when lying on a concrete floor stripped to the waist, finally delivering a calf and both having a rub down with a piece of rough sacking, Herriot seemed to see his job through a Doris Day film soft filter. It seemed worthwhile and fun and he earned his half hour by the fire with a sherry and cake with Mrs Pomfrey after five minutes easing her dog Tricky-woo’s impacted anal glands.
That was mixed practice as he saw it and the fear is that it is disappearing. Too many graduating vets want to join the more lucrative small animal practices where the patients come to the vet and not in some field where they might see a sight known to every vet “of their patient disappearing over the horizon”.
Herriot had the chance to move to an easier life with a well-paid small animal practice, but didn’t, preferring to keep making journeys to isolated Dales farms, often at unsocial hours, stopping when he had time to enjoy the scenery, loving the lifestyle and the mix of large animal and small animal cases.
There are, no doubt, many rural vets who still think like that. But too few are joining them and that is a concern for any farmer with a cow, ewe or pig in trouble.