Title: Every Living Thing
Author: James Herriot
Date: 1992
Publisher: St Martins
ISBN: 0-312-08188-X
Length: 342 pages
Quote: “I’ve seen dogs with bad hearts go on for years, but then—you never know. Anything could happen any time.”
This was volume five of five in a delightful series of...
Of what? Memoirs? They’re not straight memoirs; apart from the obvious changes of at least the humans’ names and other identifying details, who knows how many of the episodes were fictionalized, either to make a point about animal welfare or to improve the story, and how many may have been donated by more than one British country veterinarian. Neither are they mere fiction; the writer really was a British country veterinarian. So let’s just say stories.
In some ways volume five may be the most satisfying in the set. Though as long as any of its predecessors it seems to have been given more time and thought, the stories more carefully selected to form something resembling an overall plot. Medical science, including the veterinary branch, was making rapid progress and vets like the semi-fictional “James Herriot” really were making local history with their use of new antibiotics and technology. More of the animals make full recoveries in this volume, I think, without counting. Of course, more of the animal stories are not, in fact, life-and-death. Cats and dogs are better represented in this volume, too, as are the wild animals who become accidental pets.
Of course, there’s a sad aspect of this book to balance its felicities. It’s volume five. The children go away to school. James and Helen aren’t shown growing old, but they’re growing older. After Every Living Thing there’ll be no more of these stories—though at the time readers might have hoped to persuade the writer known as James Herriot to have written some more, especially if they let him use one of theirs or their father’s, or perhaps grandfather’s. But by 1992 the author really was old.
What cat people have to love is the final triumph that unifies Herriot’s final animal story. After saving dozens of horses, cows, sheep, swine, donkeys, chickens, cats, and dogs from what seemed certain death, making a fair number of stupid mistakes, becoming Siegfried’s full partner and training three junior partners, courtship, marriage, fatherhood, and the War, James Herriot finally managed to...bond with a feral cat.
In Every Living Thing the junior partner, Calum, is the splendidly eccentric character who travels with his devoted badger. Calum stays, gets married, rooms above the vets’ clinic and enlivens the place by constantly bringing in wild animals with whom he bonds in the spare time he spends outdoors. Memorable despite its small role in the story is the British heron who prowls about the building looking “big as an ostrich” to startled James and Siegfried.
The laugh’s often on James, with the premium-grade suit the dotty local tailor does and doesn’t cut down to fit him in time for him to wear, the daffy dog owner who confers with him about the dog’s horse and dog racing tips, the new swearwords James learns from a man recovering from a bad electric shock, the temporary bidding insanity he’s able to defend (successfully) to Helen as having raised the price enough to help the widow, his abject fear of a wounded horse and his self-compensation by noting the fearless farrier’s fear of dogs, and several other stories. Nearly all the stories in this volume are funny.
There are gross-outs, too, like a brief discussion of what “abortion” still means to the Greatest Generation (a bacterial infection that causes spontaneous abortion in cattle and can also affect humans), the removal of a large non-fatal tumor from a dog right in the owner’s front room, and the house that’s still infested with human fleas. (Herriot doesn’t explain this to readers as adequately as modern readers may need for it to be explained. If you visit a house infested with dog or cat fleas you may pick up a few visitors; neither species can live on human blood, but fleas do not instinctively know this. When enough fleas have been draining one animal’s blood to affect its health the fleas will try any new animal they find, including humans, and may ride along on the new animal until they find a better potential source of nourishment. You will be itching and you may become ill; you will not be infested, yourself, because you’re not a potential host for those species. But if you visit a house infested with human fleas, those little menaces will move into your home, with results as described in the story.)
In this glyphosate-polluted world where one unaltered pair of cats left alone for ten years will not produce a thousand offspring, Herriot’s almost automatic decision to sterilize the feral kittens whose mother brings them to him can seem like another gross-out. Before glyphosate, however, free-range cats could overpopulate and sometimes did, producing plagues of distemper. In this volume Herriot describes his own initial reluctance to sterilize a healthy animal. Once convinced that the operations were safe and easy, however, he did them frequently. There is a slight suspicion that his sterilizing both kittens was done for the sake of practice.
(Serena: It’s Tortie Tuesday isn’t it? I think your readers need to know something about me, the Perfect Calico, and my mother Samantha, the Perfect “Tortie.”
Samantha had mostly black fur with some orange, some white, and some mixed spots. That’s what you humans call a tortoiseshell or tortie-colored cat. Samantha had a very long tail. It was a nuisance; she had to hold it up to walk.
I have mostly white fur with some black, some orange, some yellow, and some mixed spots. That’s what you call a calico cat. My tail is not very long. I curl it up behind me when I’m eating, the way Ma did, more as a tribute to her than anything else. My father may have had what you call a Manx Gene, and it may have caused several of his siblings to die very young, but it’s never done him or me any harm. And if you think I look fat when I’m not, well, consider that British cat on the cover of this book!
But I have a gene, or genes, that fit a well documented pattern. That’s the pattern of glyphosate reactions where a female shows no reaction to the chemical, herself, but after exposure she gives birth to badly defective babies. Some people in Italy found that in one group of rats, most of the females who didn’t have obvious glyphosate reactions had this genetic pattern and had horribly damaged babies. People in Argentina say it’s common in cows, sheep, and goats. In France they say it’s found in women, too. Nobody seems to know which genes are involved in this pattern or where they come from but the problem is not limited to one species.
I usually have not been sick when my human has been wailing about her glyphosate reactions, but if I was pregnant or had babies, there they went! Every time! Only during the one time when my human wasn’t sick during the whole time I was pregnant did all four kittens come out alive and well.
You may have imagined that during these years with my daughters I’ve been like a human and just chosen not to have any more babies. If so you have been mistaken. I wanted more babies. I’ve tried to have more babies every way I knew. Once I gave birth to eight kittens in one night. There hadn’t been much of that smell in the air before they were born. Seven of those kittens came out full-sized and healthy, with good appetites. Then an evil wind blew over us and all seven babies died.
Samantha was the same way. I was the only kitten she ever brought up but I was one of four fetuses she dropped prematurely—the only one that was close enough to the right time to survive being born. How she and the human worried over whether I was warm and well fed! How could I not have been warm and well fed when I had all the milk my mother was meant to offer four of us? It was friends of my own age, size, and kind, to play with, that I always lacked! I think that’s why I love kittens so. I have been told I’m good at bringing them up but actually I just love to watch them play together, and play with them as they grow big enough. I spent so much time lying alone in my warm little nest, wishing there was someone else to wrestle with or chase around the office!
The human didn’t even write about my other kittens, the ones that weren’t born, or that didn’t live a whole day if they were born. It always discouraged her, and she thought it would discourage you readers too.
When I was little the human thought I might need to be spayed because of the Manx Gene. I soon put a stop to that stupidity! I have never given birth to a kitten with that set of deformities that features an incomplete tail. If people would stop poisoning the air and the food supply I’m sure most of my kittens would have lived.
During one of the years when you readers saw nothing about my having kittens, I was really working at it! I tried four times! The human said I was only wearing myself out, but what else could I do? Despite appearances I’m not growing younger! Every three months of that year I gave birth to something. Most of those poor little fetuses never so much as moved. The last lot came at what the humans called Christmas Day. I had tried very hard to make sure they would be healthy and beautiful. One was even a calico like me, and everyone said how pretty her coat was and what a long tail she had, but I knew just by cleaning her up that she wouldn’t live to see Holy Innocents Day, which is the third day after Christmas.
When all the other humans except the-old-one-who-is-no-longer-with-us had gone home my human said, “If you ever try to start more than two litters in the same year again, I will...”
“That’s enough of that thought!” I said. “If you ever did such a horrible thing I’d scratch out both your eyes. Can’t you see how much I want kittens.”
“But social cats who can’t have kittens of their own usually just adopt kittens,” she said, “and vets can usually recommend some orphans.”
“Not! Another! Word!” I said, biting her fingers for emphasis. “What I want is for humans to stop damaging my kittens!”
Now she asks, “Would you like to add a comment on this book about animals, and especially about the two feral cats, who don’t seem to be social cats so much as just a two-cat hunting team?”
Well I think that old Englishman should have left them alone of course. He would have been so much less lonely when they were gone if he’d had kittens to remember them by!
“Serena, there’ve been times and places when cats were not as badly threatened a species as they are here and now! Only about thirty years ago, about the time this book was written, I saw a Cat Sanctuary in Tennessee go through a population explosion and collapse with distemper. That sort of thing used to be common. It used to be what people like the writer known as James Herriot were worried about. If they lived with two cats, by the time the original two were gone they might easily be living with fifty cats. Then there’d be none because the fifty overcrowded cats would become ill. At least we need to tell readers he had good intentions and valid reasons for the time of writing.”
You can tell them that yourself. I wasn’t alive back then so what would I know.
“Serena, would you consider adopting kittens as a way to prevent your giving birth to sickly babies? You did that last summer, and you and Silver’s kittens were much better off. I am not talking about violating your precious purrson. I am talking about a way to prevent any damage to the miracle of Creation that is your body. Instead of your going to the trouble of producing defective fetuses, would you consider bringing up some ordinary kittens whose mother had died?”
They wouldn’t be as wonderful as my own kittens were meant to be...
“Obviously. But wouldn’t it be sort of wonderful to find out what you could teach ordinary non-social kittens to do?”
Obviously it’s not an option for everyone, and all decisions must be made by the social queen cat on a kitten-by-kitten basis, but humans should know that a social cat is the exception to that line you’ve heard about how “All cats would prefer to be alone with you.” Social cats like our humans, of course, but we were designed to live in our own families. Two social cats is the minimum. Six may be the optimum. We want to keep our mothers and sisters. We want to keep our own kittens, too. When that is not possible, we welcome other cats, so long as they are not violent. It’s hard to resist kittens. Cats can induce lactation quickly if we adopt baby kittens who need milk; sometimes some cats induce lactation just as a treat to spoil kittens who are mostly eating solid food, or just bathe and snuggle them to show that we’ve adopted them.
Having kittens around us reduces the feeling of loneliness social cats have when we’re alone with only humans. Lactation usually prevents ovulation. This prevents us coming into heat and starting kittens when we don’t really need their companionship. While cats’ milk production adjusts to the needs of growing kittens and tapers off after the two months it takes kittens to start eating solid food, social cats often, I might even say normally, choose to stay in a low-production lactation mode all summer; this is how we have only one litter each year, if that litter includes even one healthy kitten.
"What should other humans know about the process of adoption for cats?"
Cats can imagine how things might be different than they are, and pretend that things are the way we want them to be. So, to some limited extent, we can do what humans would call telling lies. A kitten who's not a good hunter might borrow another kitten's prey and show it to the other cats, and/or the humans, as if it had caught the prey itself. A cat who's done something a human doesn't like might pretend not to know the thing had been done, or remember having done it. A cat who's hunting, fighting, or play-fighting, might pretend not to notice what it's going to pounce on.
But we don't fake friendship to be polite in the way humans do. We don't make commitments we don't intend to keep "just to be nice." Orphan kittens want a foster mother, and a cat who doesn't have kittens of her own may want to be a foster mother, but we don't pretend that it's happened before it has. First the cat has to teach the kittens the rules. Even if she's going to induce lactation, for the first few days the kittens have to eat solid food or go hungry. (Unless they're infested with internal parasites, in which case they're not likely to live long anyway, kittens can survive for two or even three weeks without food; growth will be delayed until they resume eating.) Kittens also need to learn how to show respect to their foster mother. So for the first day or two, a cat who intends to adopt kittens will not snuggle and nurse them, and may slap them around and scold them. It may look to humans as if she doesn't like these kittens. Pay attention. If she's careful not to hurt them, slapping is part of the process.
Sometimes a mother cat utterly refuses to feed kittens because they are sick, and need to starve out the infection. If that happens there's not much anyone can do but wait and see whether the kittens improve or die. Medicines given to older cats for bacterial or parasitic infections may kill kittens. Sometimes powdered charcoal in water, given by the cubic centimeter from a syringe, can wash out the infection; sometimes not. Cats just accept that not all kittens grow up. Sometimes humans have to accept that too.
If an adoption is going to work, in two or three days the slapping and scolding will give way to snuggling. Not all kittens want or need for their foster mother to induce lactation, and not all cats do; if that's going to happen, it will take a few more days.
Not that a certain old dried-up Englishman...
“He was born more than a hundred years ago. But if James Herriot did not document a social cat adopting kittens, he documented animals doing other things that showed that they had more good sense and public spirit than humans usually imagine other animals can have. That’s one reason why humans who start to read his books always seem to enjoy them.”
Petfinder shelters are full of unwanted kittens, Gentle Readers. Some unaltered cats are determined to have kittens of their own and will not foster other cats' kittens. Others will accept foster kittens, with apparent gratitude, as a means of birth control. Here are three especially adorable pictures of kittens who need homes. As always, sharing the pictures can help these kittens find homes. People who can't adopt these individual kittens may find, on visiting the shelter, that a kitten who didn't photograph so well is even more adorable, in real life, than the one who did.
Zipcode 10101: Brandon & Megan from NYC
Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/megan-65367037/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/
Isn't that the quintessential image of shelter kittens? They were born in May. Megan is the gray one. Brandon is the black one. Kittens who have other kittens to play with find it easier to learn that humans are for cuddling up to and their siblings are for play-fighting with. These two are so young, they'd probably even learn to recognize new names that are not what anyone you know calls per children or grandchildren.
Zipcode 20202: Triplet and Trilogy from DC
His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/triplet-65537428/dc/washington/humane-rescue-alliance-foster-homes-dc03/
There ought to be one more. Sometimes it's best not to know. Anyway, if you pay the fee to adopt one you can adopt the other one free of charge.
Zipcode 30303: Lentil from Atlanta
Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/lentil-65397579/ga/atlanta/fulton-county-animal-services-ga217/
As with so many shelter kittens, all they can really tell about her is that she and a brother (Crumpet) were brought to the shelter together by someone who didn't appreciate them.
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