The Animals Came in One by One - Buster Lloyd-Jones

W. L. Lloyd-Jones is thought of by thousands of animal lovers in Britain and elsewhere as perhaps the most skillful veterinary surgeon ever to have practiced his art. He is known to them all as Buster. Illness incapacitated him a few years ago, and so he has now had time to tell the story of his life — modestly, humorously, without affectation.

It makes enthralling reading, whether Buster is feeding lion cubs from a baby bottle, trying to persuade Sir Winston Churchill not to stuff his poodle with chocolates, curing J. V. Rank’s wolfhounds and Great Danes of streptococcal infection, wiring a tortoise’s jaws after a collision with a lawn mower, or mending a porcupine’s nose while trying to keep a safe distance from its quills.

He has treated the pets of the great and the humble — and the eccentric. (He remarks that the Englishman’s reputation for being dotty about animals is fully justified, and tells enough anecdotes to prove it.)

He has given a home to cats and dogs, rabbits, goats, parrots, monkeys, snakes. During World War II, when pets by the thousands had to be abandoned by evacuated families, he bought a ten-acre estate where he housed nearly two hundred dogs and proportionate numbers of every other known variety of pet.

Today, confined to a wheelchair, he still lives in Brighton. From his home he watches the dogs of Brighton and, he says, feels like Mr. Chips, knowing that many of them — or their parents or grandparents — were his patients.