What James Herriot Actually Wrote About His Feline Patients
Most people who come looking for "Cat On The Go" are mixing up titles. James Herriot didn't publish a book with that exact name. What you're probably thinking of is the general body of work he produced about his career as a traveling veterinary surgeon in rural Yorkshire during the 1940s through the 1970s. His books include All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All That and Beer Too, and It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet. Cats feature heavily across all of them, but they aren't given their own dedicated volume. If you want the cat-heavy material, the best starting point is All Creatures Great and Small. The second chapter, "A Triumph of Surgery," is probably the most famous cat story in the entire Herriot canon. It's about a fat pug named Tricki Woo, not a cat, but people always remember it wrong. The actual cat chapters are scattered throughout. In All Things Bright and Beautiful, there's a particularly good section about a queen cat named Mrs. Bembridge who gives birth to nine kittens in a single litter and Herriot has to manage the aftermath of an exhausted mother and a very opinions farmer. I found myself recommending the boxed set editions when people ask where to start. The original Thames Publishing omnibus editions run about £12 to £18 depending on format. The audiobook narrated by Alastair Sim or Nicholas Parsons is also worth tracking down if you prefer listening. The text itself is straightforward prose with zero pretension, which is exactly why it survives as well as it does.
Here's something most introductions to Herriot miss. The veterinary procedures he describes using 1940s-era techniques — ether anesthesia, basic restraint methods, penicillin just coming into widespread use — those details are important. Modern readers tend to skim past them because the medicine looks primitive compared to what we do now. But that's the point. Herriot was documenting a profession that was still largely improvisational. The book isn't just warm nostalgia about village life. It's also a record of a working veterinary practice operating with limited resources, which is why the cat stories in particular feel grounded rather than sentimental. One practical thing that comes up when people try to read these in order. The books are published chronologically by when events occurred, not by when they were written. All Creatures Great and Small covers roughly 1940 to 1944. All Things Bright and Beautiful jumps ahead to the late 1940s. If you read them cover to cover in publication order, the timeline is mostly coherent. But the later collections, especially So Thunder Must Be and Dreams of Strength, pull from various periods and repeat some stories with different framing. Don't bother with those two if you're new. They add length without adding much that you haven't already encountered. The downloadable versions floating around the internet are almost all pirated PDFs of the full text. I'm not going to link any of them. The legitimate routes are Amazon Kindle, Audible, Google Books preview, and your local library via Libby. The public domain status doesn't apply here — Herriot died in 1995, so his work is still under copyright in the UK and EU through at least 2065. US copyright runs differently but these were published by large commercial presses with active enforcement.
There's also a common confusion about the television adaptations. The 1978 Yorkshire Television series with Anthony Howell is the one most people grew up with. The 2018 BBC reboot with Nicholas Ralph is more polished but takes considerably more dramatic license. Neither is necessary to understand the books. The books work standalone. If you're looking for a specific story about a traveling cat or a cat that Herriot treated while making house calls in the Dales, search for "The Queen's Messengers" in All Things Bright and Beautiful. It involves a prize-winning cat and a very difficult delivery. I ran into a copy at a secondhand shop in Harrogate a few years back for £1.50 in slightly rough condition. The spine was cracked but the pages were clean. That's usually the condition you're looking for in these — cracked spines are common because the bindings weren't designed for repeated reading, which is ironic given how often people pick them up.
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