The Age Of Supervet
Country Life UK|September 05, 2018

TV’s new favourite vet on why animals deserve better and how he wants to change attitudes.

Jack Watkins
The Age Of Supervet
I APPROACH Fitzpatrick referrals, the headquarters of Noel Fitzpatrick, or Supervet, as he’s known to his growing following, along a golden greensand track of the classic Surrey Hills variety, dusty in the heat of summer. Venerable trees on the hedge banks offer welcome shade. a sensible person would have taken the taxi from Godalming station, but I’m glad I didn’t, the unconventional route setting me up for a meeting with an unconventional man.

The professor, an orthopaedicneuro veterinary surgeon, has made a name for embracing technology and innovative techniques in the treatment of animal diseases and injuries that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. He founded The Humanimal Trust to further his belief in the concept of ‘one medicine and the cross-pollination of ideas between veterinary and human medicine’.

With a new series of The Supervet, his Channel 4 documentary, starting this month, plus a first book out soon, he’s embarking on a nationwide theatre tour with a show entitled Welcome to My World. That, too, will embrace hi-tech, with promised delights such as a ‘Bionic Bunker’, which, he explains, ‘will allow youngsters in the audience a chance to feel they are physically beside me as I perform an operation’.

‘Children are way more intelligent than we think,’ he continues, telling me about a nine-year-old girl who wrote to him, grilling him about some obscure procedure that, frankly, I couldn’t even spell.

This story is from the September 05, 2018 edition of Country Life UK.

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This story is from the September 05, 2018 edition of Country Life UK.

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