Herriot’s fear of working with horses

Herriot’s fear of working with horses is not simply fear of injury: it is the strain of doing dangerous work while believing he lacks the instinctive authority that horses recognize in a true horseman. Seasonal castrations make that insecurity routine; an enormous stallion turns it into weeks of dread, a painful kick, and an unexpected change in how Herriot approaches horse work.

Seasonal Work and Its Risks

As spring advanced, the foalings gave way to the castration of year-old colts, and the workload could reach a hundred animals. Herriot disliked the operation, which cast a shadow over that spring and many that followed. The older method involved casting and tying the colt, a laborious procedure that left the animal completely restrained and allowed the veterinarian to concentrate on the operation. By the time Herriot qualified, standing castration was becoming more popular: a twitch was applied to the upper lip, local anaesthetic injected into each testicle, and the operation begun without casting. It was quicker, but the danger to the veterinarian and helpers was greatly increased.

The new method’s hazards were visible even before Herriot’s own difficult cases. Kenny Bright, a local farmer who regarded himself as an advanced thinker, brought Major Farley to demonstrate standing castration to a gathering of farmers. While Bright held the twitch, the colt reared as the specialist touched its scrotum with antiseptic and brought a forefoot down on Bright’s head. Bright was carried away on a gate with a fractured skull and spent a long time in hospital. The farmers laughed at the incident for weeks, but it did not dissuade them: standing castration continued to gain ground. Its spread meant that speed and risk became inseparable features of the work Herriot already dreaded.

The Horseman Herriot Believed He Was Not

The work was sometimes straightforward and sometimes violently unpredictable. Herriot reckoned that nine jobs out of ten would be easy, while the tenth could become a rodeo: a colt might kick, throw itself on top of the workers, or simply go mad. That uncertainty made him tense on castration mornings, even though most cases went smoothly. The prospect of the exceptional case was enough to darken the ordinary ones.

Herriot attributed his apprehension partly to a limitation he considered fundamental. He believed he was not, and never would be, a horseman: the sort of person who could soothe and quiet an animal and mentally dominate it. In his view, that ability was either inborn or acquired in early childhood, and it was too late to develop it in his mid-twenties. He distinguished this skill from veterinary knowledge. He believed he could treat sick horses efficiently, but did not confuse clinical competence with the separate capacity to command a horse’s trust or submission.

That distinction sharpened the contrast with cattle. A cow, as Herriot saw it, might kick regardless of the person handling it; a horse seemed to know whether the person beside it was an expert. The horse’s awareness made Herriot feel exposed to judgement as well as danger. On castration mornings, the instruments rattled on an enamel tray on the back seat as he drove out, wondering whether the colt would be wild or quiet and how large it would be. Colleagues preferred the larger two-year-olds, saying they were easier to grip. Herriot, with no such confidence, preferred the smallest animals he could get.

A Stallion Becomes an Unfinished Task

At the height of the season, Siegfried Farnon assigned Herriot another job: remove a tumour from a horse at Wilkinson’s of White Cross. Herriot boiled a scalpel, tumour spoons, and syringe, and set them beside local anaesthetic, iodine, and tetanus antitoxin. The procedure appeared simple once the growth was examined. The tumour hung from the horse’s belly, roughly the size of a cricket ball, with a lobulated surface like a little cauliflower and a narrow enough attachment to make removal with the spoons seem easy.

The animal itself changed the calculation. Herriot thought it must weigh more than a ton, and the tumour could only be reached by going beneath its broad abdomen, within range of its feet, to inject the local anaesthetic. The technical problem was small; the danger of placing himself beside the horse was not. After the appointment, Herriot hurried to his car and drove away. Siegfried was surprised that nobody had been there and told him to ring and arrange another visit. The task remained unresolved, and postponement did not make it recede.

In the weeks that followed, the stallion repeatedly entered Herriot’s dreams with flaring nostrils and flying mane. He began waking abruptly at five in the morning and mentally performing the operation; on an average morning, he had taken the tumour off twenty times before breakfast. He tried to persuade himself to arrange the visit and finish the job, while also wondering whether he was waiting for the tumour to fall off, shrink away, or for the horse to die. Although Siegfried was good with horses and could have taken over, Herriot’s confidence was too low for him to pass the job on without making that failure feel worse.

The Kick and Its Aftermath

When Herriot returned, the stallion burst through the stable doors into the yard, dragging two men behind it on the halter shank. After they manoeuvred it against the barn wall, one man fitted and tightened a twitch on its upper lip while the other held the halter. Herriot filled the syringe with cocaine, watching the clear fluid rise to seven, eight, then ten cubic centimetres. If he could get the injection in, he thought, the rest would be easy; his hands were trembling.

He approached the horse as though watching an action on film, feeling that the person moving toward it was not quite himself. He ran a hand along its neck and flank to the tumour, grasped the growth, and stretched the skin at its base. As he brought the syringe to the skin, the stallion laid back its ears and gave a warning whicker. Herriot thrust the needle in. The kick came too quickly for him to see: the hoof struck the inside of his right thigh and spun him to the ground. At first he felt numbness; when he tried to move, pain shot through his leg.

The injury was serious but not a fracture. A massive haematoma formed at the point of impact, and the whole leg later showed colours ranging from orange to black. Herriot could not drive, so he asked Mr. Wilkinson to put the stallion back in its box and call Siegfried Farnon to collect him. Yet alongside the pain came an unexpected response: Herriot felt at peace with himself for the first time in weeks, calm and in charge of the situation. The immediate reality of the injury had displaced the long, repetitive anticipation that had preceded it.

A Change in the Measure of Fear

A fortnight later, while Herriot was still hobbling, he and Siegfried Farnon returned with a small army of helpers. They roped the stallion, chloroformed it, and removed the tumour. Herriot retained a cavity in his thigh muscle as a physical reminder of the day. The job was completed, but the more consequential result was a change in his response to horse work: he concluded that fear was worse than reality, and horses troubled him less thereafter.

The change is limited but decisive. Herriot does not claim to have become a horseman or to have acquired the instinctive mastery he believed he lacked. Instead, the feared task passes from imagined repetition into an actual encounter, with injury and eventual completion. His account sets the mind’s twenty imagined operations against one real operation, and the lasting mark in his thigh against the lessening of his apprehension. The episode reveals how professional competence can coexist with fear, and how facing a danger may reduce its power without erasing its cost.