All Creatures Great and Small

After treating a cow for milk fever, James finds that the cow refuses to get up. All remedies are tried, until James hears creaking from the hips, and diagnoses a broken pelvis. He recommends calling the butcher immediately. The farmer disagrees and tries an old remedy of putting a fresh sheepskin on the cow’s back. The cow then rises. Siegfried reminds James that a cow that has just calved has loose pelvic ligaments, which would cause the bones to creak. James realizes his mistake. A year into practice, James has much more experience, but he isn’t infallible.

Mrs. Pumphrey acquires a pig, whom she names Nugent. James becomes Uncle Herriot to him as well. James is then sent to help Angus Grier. Grier guesses what James will need to do in each case, and James dutifully listens to him. But Grier is consistently wrong. When the practice gets a call from a lady about a dog with a bone in its throat, James ignores Grier’s advice and brings long forceps. But when he arrives, the dog is fine, and James falls back on Grier’s suggestion of a tonic for pharyngitis. It’s only later that another client makes the situation make sense—Grier has been having an affair with the woman and the dog was only an excuse for a meeting. She was shocked to see the wrong vet turn up on her doorstep.

A poor Yorkshire farmer named has a cow with summer mastitis. The disease responds poorly to treatment, and there isn’t much James can do, even though he wants to help Terry and his family. He tells Terry to strip the teat out as often as he can to move the infection, but he doesn’t have much hope. But when he returns the next day, the infection is entirely gone. Terry has been stripping the teat all night. Despite his sleepless night, he still gets up and goes to work.

Still trying to impress his boss, James obediently listens to Siegfried’s advice about using fewer expensive supplies. But when Siegfried sees him use only small lengths of gut to stitch a wound, he calls him a penny-pinching Scot, then proceeds to extravagantly stitch the wound himself.

Mr. Worley owns a pub, but his greatest love is his pigs. He calls James one night as his pig Marigold has just had a litter but isn’t letting down her milk. James is able to fix it easily and then discovers that after hours the pub has a different—rougher—set of patrons. They dupe him into buying them a round, and he leaves quickly. That night the pub is raided, and the after-hours patrons are arrested. Mr. Worley is fined £15, but James doubts he will mind since his pig is doing well.

Tristan is chauffeuring James while he has an infected hand, and after a visit, they stop on a hillside to enjoy the sunshine. But the car slips into neutral and rolls backward down the hill. It completely flattens a shed and breaks a rear taillight. Tristan had recently totaled a different car, so this is more bad luck for him. Because of the totaled car, Siegfried bought a new Rover. One day, when Tristan driving the Rover, he approaches a milk truck on a two-lane road. A car trying to overtake it doesn’t fall back in time and sideswipes the Rover, ripping both doors off the left side. Siegfried is apoplectic, but Tristan remains philosophical despite having three recent accidents with three cars, remarking that things rarely end as badly as one might anticipate.

At Heston Grange, James meets Helen Alderson. She walks him up to treat a calf with a broken leg and they talk easily and bond over how much they love Yorkshire.

James has scheduled a day of tuberculin testing too tightly. At the first farm, he seems to be on schedule until he realizes the last few cows are out in a field. Attempts to herd them into the barn fail over and over. The heifers even break the dog’s spirit and run him off. Only the neighbor, Sam, by skillfully imitating a fly, is able to drive them into the barn for testing. Now James is running behind. The Hugills at the next farm agree with everything that he says, even when he says he’s a fool for scheduling the tests so close together. At Bell’s farm, he gets trapped in a stall with a cow who tries to kick him all over his body. He ends up crawling through a hole in the barn wall to escape. Finally, at the last appointment of the night, he is so exhausted that he feels every udder without thinking, including a very oddly shaped one—which turns out to be the bull!

An elderly woman, Miss Stubbs, lives with her aging animals—the only source of pleasure in her life. She is physically weak and confined to bed, and when her dog Ben dies, she is certain that she will be next. Although she believes there is a better world on the other side, and she will be reunited with her family, she is afraid she will not be reunited with her animals because some people say that animals don’t have souls. James assures her that they do, and although he is not certain about his religious beliefs, he does know that wherever she is going, her animals are going too.

To get closer to Helen Alderson, James joins the music society but still fails to ask her out. The vicar subtly suggests they wash the tea things together, and finally, James manages to invite Helen on a date.

An article in the paper inspires James and Siegfried to wonder whether farmers love their animals. When James goes to see Mr. Skipton, one of the most prosperous farmers in the area with thousands of animals, he is asked to fix the teeth of Skipton’s retired horses. They haven’t done any work for 12 years and Skipton visits them every day. It seems that even a farmer with thousands of animals still can love them.

James has noticed that big men are the most likely to pass out at the sight of blood. He relates multiple incidents of a large confident man falling right over as soon as he starts his work. He discovers a quick way to wake someone up though—by shorting him on change.

The Sidlows are a vet’s nemesis. They believe vets are useless, and so treat their animals with quack remedies until it’s too late for the vet to help. This time James hopes he can help, as their bull just has a potato caught in his throat. But when he gets there he discovers they’ve tried to fix it themselves and ruptured the bull’s gullet. All he can do is make sure they call the butcher right away.

When James is called to the racetrack to stitch up a horse’s knee, he does such good work that a stable hand gives him a betting tip. On his way to place the bet, he stops by the Sidlow’s to look at a cow. There, he loses his thermometer inside the cow’s rectum and by the time he gets it out again, the race has been run and the £50 he could have won are lost.