The emotional and commercial value of farm animals

The emotional and commercial value of farm animals is a recurring tension in James Herriot’s account of rural veterinary life: animals are part of agricultural economies, but their practical value does not cancel the attachments formed through work, care, and shared hardship. A discussion at Skeldale House sets the issue as a question about scale—whether someone who owns many animals can become attached to individuals—and John Skipton’s treatment of two retired horses makes that question impossible to answer with a simple distinction between sentiment and commerce.

The economic question

The theme is introduced through a newspaper claim, reported by Siegfried Farnon, that farmers have no feeling for their animals and regard livestock as commercial units rather than as individuals. The claim provokes a distinction between different kinds of animal keeping. Kit Bilton, a lorry driver in Darrowby who raised a pig at home for his family’s food, was overcome by grief when the animal was killed. His family prepared the meat while he mourned. The episode makes clear that an animal’s intended use does not prevent affection: Kit’s attachment remains real even when the household proceeds with the practical purpose for which the pig was kept.

Siegfried’s question is more narrowly directed at large-scale farming. Kit is not a farmer with extensive stock, he observes; the harder issue is whether a dairy farmer responsible for perhaps fifty cows can feel fondness for particular animals among them. The exchange treats numbers as a possible constraint on intimacy, not as proof that it is impossible. James Herriot initially agrees that small farmers may be more likely to care for individual animals. He points to farmers in the high country who keep only a few animals and give their cows personal names, including Daisy, Mabel, and Kipperlugs. Naming makes the individual visible within the working herd, while the imagined scale of a large dairy operation seems to threaten that attention.

Work, scale, and seasonal attention

The book places these questions within an agricultural routine in which care is practical and recurring. In spring, sheep shift from the margins of veterinary life to its centre: for roughly ten months they scarcely enter the day-to-day scheme, but in the other two months their needs can dominate it. Lambing arrives when other work is already pressing, and the season brings a succession of problems among ewes and lambs. This calendar shows animals as part of a system of production and labor, demanding concentrated expertise at particular times. It also cautions against imagining affection as the only measure of how people attend to animals; routine responsibility, diagnosis, and treatment are woven into the work of maintaining stock.

The wider setting gives that labor an economic history. In 1937, veterinary work was shaped by depressed agriculture, while the draught horse that had long supported the profession was disappearing. Later, tractors were already changing farm practice, although horses remained numerous enough in some places to require regular work. These changes do not establish that farmers felt less for animals as their economic roles changed. Instead, they place the question of value in a landscape where animals could be indispensable, costly to maintain, or increasingly displaced by machinery. Commercial usefulness and personal regard appear as overlapping realities rather than mutually exclusive categories.

John Skipton and the retired horses

John Skipton seems at first to embody the distance between a large owner and individual animals. Dennaby Close is a substantial farm, and Skipton’s success is the product of a lifetime of hard work and unusual agricultural judgment. Once an uneducated farm laborer, he became a wealthy landowner; besides Dennaby, he owned two large arable farms lower down the Dale, each about four hundred acres. His scale and business success make him an apt test of the breakfast-table argument about whether a farmer with many animals can care for particular ones.

The decisive evidence is not a speech about kindness but a long-established daily practice. Two old horses had done no work for about twelve years and remained on the farm in retirement. Skipton visited them every day, whatever the weather, bringing something for their feed or bedding. He could have sold them to horse-flesh merchants, and the people around him regarded his continuing expense and attention as unusual. When he explained that the horses had been slaves while he himself was a slave, the parallel revealed a bond grounded in a shared history of labor. Their retirement was not merely a convenient end to their usefulness: he provided them with comfort in their final years, though he had not allowed himself the same ease.

That practice overturns the assumption that sheer numbers make individual attachment implausible. Skipton’s farms contained hundreds of animals, yet the two horses’ years of service remained particular and memorable to him. Herriot considers the daily journey down the hillside and the care given to the horses, then concludes that love is the only adequate explanation. The force of the episode lies in the contrast between economic calculation and repeated action: the horses had ceased to work, but Skipton continued to spend time and resources on them.

Affection beyond the farm ledger

The account of Miss Stubbs offers a related, though distinct, perspective on animals’ emotional value. It concerns her three dogs and two cats rather than working livestock, so it does not answer Siegfried’s question about farm scale directly. It does, however, show how profoundly an animal bond can matter to a person whose life is otherwise constrained. Miss Stubbs had been confined to her bed for a long time and did not dwell on her own illness when James Herriot visited; her chief concern was what would happen to her animals.

After one of her dogs died, Miss Stubbs said that she feared she might not see her animals again after death. Her worry was not resolved by an abstract argument: she asked Herriot to be honest about what he believed. He told her that wherever she was going, the animals would go too, and she accepted that he meant it. This encounter places loyalty and attachment beyond an animal’s usefulness, while carefully presenting the reassurance as Herriot’s sincere belief rather than as an established doctrine. Beside the working horses and the household pig, the scene broadens the article’s central distinction: economic purpose may shape human-animal relations, but it does not exhaust the value people find in them.

Meaning of the contrast

The examples resist a verdict that small keepers are affectionate and large farmers are not. Kit’s grief complicates the separation of food production from personal attachment; the named cows make individual recognition visible among small herds; and Skipton’s conduct supplies the strongest counterexample to the idea that scale excludes affection. The differences among these cases matter: grief at slaughter, attention to named cows, and twelve years of daily care are not interchangeable gestures, but each shows that animals can be understood as particular beings within arrangements that also have commercial purposes.

The theme therefore rests less on claims about what farmers feel than on observable conduct and its costs. A pig raised for food can be mourned; retired horses can continue to receive feed and bedding after their working lives; and a person facing death can be troubled above all by separation from her animals. Through these contrasts, Herriot’s account treats economic value as real but incomplete. The animal may be worker, stock, or food, yet its history with a person can persist after its productive role has ended—and can matter more than the calculation of what it might still be worth.