Tales from the Tail
End: Adventures of a Vet in Practice, by Emma Milne (Summersdale, 2012, 250
pages, $13.95)
Are you one of the millions of fans of James Herriot*, that
ultimate British animal storyteller? Are you someone who just can’t read enough
veterinarian memoirs? Then you will race through Tales from the Tail End by Emma Milne, like
I did.
Niche
To become a famous singer or to be awarded a PhD, for
example, you need to be good or at least unique. You need to find a niche that
nobody else is currently filling – a subsubject that nobody else is studying, a
new approach to solving an old problem, something different. Plenty of
wonderful veterinarian memoirists exist, from the British James Herriot to the
British-born-but-now-living-in-Massachusetts Nick Trout** - but not too many of
them are women.
Enter Tales from the
Tail End and Emma Milne.
How To Be a Vet
In England, one becomes a veterinarian after only five years
of university (in the US, after four years of college, followed by four years
of vet school). In Milne’s final year at vet school she was filmed for a TV
show (but didn’t make the final cut) but for the next seven years, she appeared
in a reality series, “Vets in Practice.” Tales
takes us from one hilarious client team to another (a vet actually has two
clients for every patient: the animal is the patient and the human is the
client), through births and deaths, to surgeries to rescue swallowed socks and
toys, to pregnancy checks and broken bones, yet all of them mesmerize us and
some even make us laugh out loud.
Yes, Entertaining
Milne is a real person, just like you and me. She is normal
– doesn’t like cold English winters on the moors so staying a large animal vet
didn’t appeal to her after just a few years. She is a divorcee. She lives with
a menagerie of cats and dogs, including one who loves to watch dart games at
the local pub and even enters the pub alone.
Milne is a teacher and her biggest lesson for her readers
with dogs is to warn us not to let them play with sticks, especially not ‘Fetch
with Sticks.’ To hone her lesson further, she relates the tale of a dog who
became impaled on a stick he was fetching but most of the tales are terribly
terribly funny. Milne actually ended up doing a lot of writing and speaking,
even for the Beeb, the BBC. She is also quite active in the rescue movement and
is diametrically opposed to tail docking and the current state of purebred dog breeding.
Very British
When you go to the movies, does it take a while to
understand what the English or Australians or Scots are saying? Many popular dog
training and behavior books are penned by British authors as are many vet
memoirs. You can usually skip over an English word you are not sure of or guess
at the meaning but Tales has much more
of the British vernacular than I have ever come across. For example, I erred in
understanding a few phrases until the next paragraph, such as “As is so often
the case, . . . the dog decided that his owners being away was the perfect time
to pop his clogs and land someone else well and truly up the creek without a
paddle.” (In our vernacular, the dog kicked the bucket and I guessed wrong!)
In a Word – Funny!
Have you ever wondered why there are more
veterinarian-memoirs than writer-memoirs or dentist-memoirs? Are vets funnier
people or do their clients find themselves in more interesting situations? Read
Tales to find out!
*All Things Wise and
Wonderful, All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Bright and Beautiful, The
Lord God Made Them All, etc.
**Tell Me Where It
Hurts, Love is the Best Medicine,
etc.
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