Supervet Noel Fitzpatrick: new book is a tale of one man and his dog

Noel Fitzpatrick with his late dog Keira. Picture: Ray Burmiston

Professor Noel Fitzpatrick has been at the forefront of ground-breaking veterinary surgery for decades now, pioneering neuro-orthopaedic surgeries for animals and promoting an idea he terms ‘One Medicine with his Humanimal Trust’ (more about that to follow). 

As well as working all hours at his veterinary hospital in Surrey, he has found the time to write memoirs and children’s books, make several series of the TV show Supervet, and tour venues up and down Ireland and the UK talking about himself and his work.

His origin story — a lonely boy growing up on an Irish farm inspired to become a vet after his failure to save a newborn lamb one frosty night — is well-documented. 

As is his visionary work in putting injured companion animals — dogs, cats etc — back together like reverse Humpty Dumptys, using the kind of tech you’d associate with NASA. 

Yet he says that all anyone ever asks him is (a) is he married? (b) Is he vegetarian? And (c) is he the inspiration for Britney’s 2003 hit ‘Toxic’?

To which the answers are (a) no, (b) pescatarian, and (c) eye roll. “I will neither confirm nor deny — you’d have to ask the lady who wrote the song,” he says (he used to go out with songwriter Cathy Denis 20 years ago). 

“She also wrote Kylie’s ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’, and ‘Measure of a Man’. Are they about me too? You could have an international scoop!”

He segues straight into a story about appearing on the Late Late Show a few years ago when he stopped his taxi to rescue a swan who’d crash-landed on a wet road outside the RTÉ studios. 

As he carried the swan to safety, it crapped inside his jacket, just before he went on air.

“So the main media stories about me are Britney’s ‘Toxic’ and swan shite,” he says. “Well done, world!”

For someone who has had three hours’ sleep (he was in surgery until 5.30am, a few hours before we speak) the Supervet is remarkably ebullient. 

Famous for working 18-hour days and sleeping at his Surrey clinic after working all night on emergency cases, he insists he’s never done a day’s work in his life, and that his work is a blessing.

“I’ve been blessed by the universe with these gifts,” he says. “I’m like an artist painting at 4am, except unlike the artist, I just keep painting.” 

He says how Leonardo da Vinci was both a scientist and an artist simultaneously, and didn’t differentiate between the two disciplines. “Neither do I,” he says.

He’s speaking to me about his new book, not a memoir this time, but an illustrated prose poem, Keira & Me: A Tale Of Two Best Friends And How They Saved Each Other. 

It’s a tribute to his dog who died in 2021 aged 13, and he says that although “Mammy always said that pride takes a fall”, the book is “the best thing I’ve ever done in my life”.

“I genuinely believe the world desperately needs this book now. I want to spread light, love and hope in a time of war.” 

Noel Fitzpatrick's new book, Keira & me

He asks me what I think about the book, and tells me I am the very first person outside his immediate circle and his publishers to see it. (He said the same thing to a Guardian journalist a few years ago about another of his books — as an intimacy device, it’s disarming).

I tell him I think the book is beautifully illustrated and clearly heartfelt, but left me a little concerned for his mental health. 

There are lots of mentions of darkness, loneliness, not being good enough, and how he is saved by a sparky little dog whom he calls his best friend ever, “my little girl”. 

The book is full of imaginary conversations between himself and the dog: “The day’s worries bled into nightmares. Darkness eating me from inside out... I questioned why I existed at all. I’m in pain, Keira.” 

And the dog responds: “I can feel your heart, like it’s my own. Let me try to take your pain away as you did mine. Maybe we can dream bigger than ever before.” 

He writes how “Christmas morning 2022, I woke up crying. Keira was dead. Mammy was dead... I wanted to drift away.” 

He says he felt his dog’s presence at that moment — “I surrendered once again to her love and let her in” — and that’s when he got the idea for the book. Crikey. I wonder if he is okay. If he’s had bereavement counselling?

“The point of this book is that life is full of ups and downs, but the unique quality of an animal companion is unconditional love,” he says. 

“I’m not into facade. I wanted to show an honest expression of sadness. We live in a world of half-truths. And I empathise with sentient beings.”

He describes how, on what turned out to be the last day of his dog’s life, she was rooting about in his office and sniffed out a candle, sent to him as a gift from a posh hotel, the Ballyfin Demesne, in Co Laois. 

This hotel was formerly Ballyfin College, the boarding school where as a day student, Fitzpatrick was badly bullied as a boy and has very unhappy memories. 

He attaches significance to the dog finding this candle, given its origin, and buried it with her. He says we all come from stardust, and that’s where his dog would return.

“She was my best friend ever,” he says. “Keira and I had a connectedness on a human level. I never use the term ‘ownership’ — I say ‘family.’” His current domestic companions are two Maine Coon cats.

This is all terribly whimsical and endearing, or not, depending on where you’re at. What is in no doubt is Fitzpatrick’s deep love for and connection to animals, and his dedication to advancing not just their health outcomes, but fusing the health care of humans and animals for the greater good of all.

This is where the Humanimal Trust, which he founded in 2014, comes in. He explains how in the past, human and animal bodies were dissected side by side, with no distinction made between human and veterinary medicine.

Then, around 200 years ago, medicine began to split off — so that to test the efficacy of drugs for the treatment of human illness and injury, physicians began introducing disease into otherwise healthy animals. 

(Animal rights advocates have for years been campaigning against the horrors of laboratory testing on animals, from monkeys to mice, beagles to guinea pigs.)

Anyway, what Fitzpatrick advocates is studying naturally occurring disease in animals and using that data to help advance human medicine, rather than artificially inducing disease in healthy animals. 

“A cat with bone cancer is not that different from a human with bone cancer,” he says.

In other words, if we could merge the two disciplines — human medicine and animal medicine — so that we have what he calls One Medicine, we could eliminate the savage cruelty of vivisection and lab testing on animals, while simultaneously advancing our medical knowledge for human outcomes.

He calls for closer collaboration and shared learning, for the benefit of both humans and animals, so that one day animal testing will be obsolete. 

This is, as any animal lover will attest — apart from the world going plant-based — the holy grail.

• Noel Fitzpatrick’s book Keira & Me, published by Orion Publishing, is out now.