Cats

Cats in the narrative are both practical farm animals and cherished individuals, a contrast made clearest when the Bramleys face an outbreak of feline enteritis. The household’s grief challenges the assumption that farm cats matter only as pest killers, while an experimental vaccine gives five of Topsy’s kittens a narrow, uncertain chance to survive.

Cats in the Rural Veterinary World

Cats appear within a varied world of animal care. Harold Denham, for example, keeps dogs, cats, rabbits, budgies and goldfish, and James Herriot’s early visits to his house include treating an old grey tabby with sinusitis. The cat is one patient among many, part of the ordinary stream of veterinary calls that brings Herriot into owners’ homes.

At the Bramleys’ farm, cats are more numerous and closely woven into daily life. Their cats gather across the property and confidently perch on Herriot’s car bonnet on cold days, finding warmth there. The scene presents them as a familiar presence rather than rare or ornamental pets. Their reputation also has practical force: Miss Bramley takes pride in Topsy’s line of ratters and mousers, and sees the kittens’ conspicuously large ears as a promising sign of their future skill.

The Outbreak and the Bramleys’ Grief

A month or two after Herriot has observed the Bramleys’ cats around the farm, illness begins to reduce their numbers. Miss Bramley comes to Skeldale House nearly every day with an egg basket carrying another sick cat or, at times, several tiny kittens. The basket makes the crisis tangible: each visit brings new patients, and the household’s many cats are no longer just a lively part of the farm but a succession of vulnerable animals needing care.

Treatment offers little reassurance. Herriot explains that feline enteritis is highly infectious and that most of the young cats are likely to contract it. Even with the salicylates and non-specific injections available to him, he has little success. He takes some of the cats into the surgery so he can attend to them several times a day, but the mortality rate remains high. His efforts show both sustained care and the limits of what he can do; repeated attention cannot make the illness reliably treatable.

The family’s response surprises Herriot because, in his experience, farmers often regard cats chiefly as pest killers. Miss Bramley’s distress makes that assumption inadequate. At the surgery table, she grips and unclasping her rough fingers around the basket handle, struggling to contain her tears as she asks whether the infection will go through all the cats. Her particular fear is for Topsy’s five kittens, about ten weeks old and considered the best of the line. Their possible loss matters not simply because they are useful mousers, but because the Bramleys are attached to them.

An Experimental Chance

With no established protective vaccine available to offer, Herriot remembers a report that Burroughs Wellcome is working on one. He asks Miss Bramley to sit while he telephones the laboratory. The researchers respond cooperatively: their results with the new vaccine are encouraging, and they agree to provide five doses on the condition that Herriot reports what happens. The intervention is therefore both a practical attempt to protect the kittens and a small field experiment whose outcome the laboratory wants documented.

Herriot does not promise success. He tells Miss Bramley that he cannot guarantee anything, but that there is nothing else to do, and arranges for her to bring the kittens in on Tuesday morning. When the vaccine arrives, he injects the five small animals while Miss Bramley points out the enormous, sail-like ears that make their faces seem smaller. Her confident reading of this feature—as the mark of a good mouser—briefly returns the encounter to the future she hopes the kittens will have. Herriot repeats the injection a week later; the kittens are still looking well. He asks Miss Bramley to let him know the outcome, but at that point the result remains uncertain.

The Report and Its Limits

Several months pass without word from the Bramleys, and Herriot has almost forgotten the experiment when he finds a grubby envelope apparently pushed under the surgery door. The report, written in a careful, spidery hand, is brief: “Dere Sir, Them kittens is now big cats. Yrs trly, R. Bramley.” The growth recorded in the note supplies the concrete outcome Herriot had requested: Topsy’s kittens have survived long enough to become big cats.

The letter does not claim that every sick cat recovered, nor does it establish on its own that the vaccine caused the kittens’ survival. Its significance is more measured. Against an outbreak marked by repeated losses and treatment with a high mortality rate, the five kittens’ transformation from tiny patients into big cats gives the experiment a hopeful result. The contrast between their vulnerable arrival in the egg basket and the plain, delayed report of their growth also captures the passage’s understated emotional force: for the Bramleys, the cats’ survival is news worth sending, and for Herriot, it is the answer to a clinical question he had nearly stopped expecting to have answered.