Star of Channel 5's the Yorkshire Vet shares his festive animal tales

A baby snake doesn’t quite have the same cute factor as a puppy or a kitten. And some of the language doesn’t help. Cold blooded. Reptilian. They come with certain negative connotations.

And it’s true that reptiles aren’t as expressive as dogs and cats, which give a lot back, often more that they take, particularly Golden Retrievers.

You do not get that overt affection with reptiles, but you do notice their personalities the more time you spend with them. Lois, Rambo, and Norbert all had their own personalities.

Some of my early work with exotics is of a more domestic nature.

One of my favourite memories is of Sammy the tortoise. Sammy, a female tortoise, was around 50 years old and her owner, Mrs Lovelady, had her since she was a little girl. Obviously, after all that time, there was a strong bond between them, and Mrs Lovelady thought the world of Sammy.

Every year she would carefully tuck her into her hibernation box, bid her goodnight, and then welcome her back in the spring when she woke up. They’d been doing the same routine for decades.

But one summer Sammy got ill. She had been off her food for a few weeks and one day Mrs Lovelady found her immobile and barely conscious.

She brought her into the surgery where I investigated and diagnosed a mouth infection. Sammy was put on a life-saving programme initially to rehydrate her and medicate her to get her mouth healed, then feed her up and get her fit enough to hibernate which involved a diet of nutrient and mineral rich food.

To hibernate, animals need enough reserves of fat. If they are too thin the pre-hibernation process goes wrong and they can wake up and become very ill. It was touch and go that Sammy would reach the required weight before the winter came. I monitored her weight and health at regular check-ups, but as autumn started to get colder, I made a decision.

“I don’t think we should hibernate Sammy this year,” I said to Mrs Lovelady. “She’s still recovering. It’s just not good for her.”

Mrs Lovelady agreed and instead I created a full winter plan for her, advising on food, temperature and the right environment that would see her safely through the winter.

I got on with work for the next few months and assumed everything had worked out well, because I didn’t hear from Mrs Lovelady or Sammy. Christmas came and went and a few days after, when I returned to work, there was an envelope waiting for me. Inside was a Christmas card and tucked inside that was a photo. I read the card.

“Happy first Christmas awake, from Sammy,” it said. Then I looked at the photo. It was Sammy, on Christmas Day, wearing a Christmas hat and standing under a Christmas tree. I laughed out loud. Of course, I thought, every year Sammy had hibernated through the season. This would have been the first Christmas she’d ever seen.

It was such a lovely thought to send me the photo and it started a habit of collecting the thank you messages and cards customers send me.

Vet work can be hard and often we have to make calls for the sake of the patient that we know will break the owner’s heart.

It can be incredibly hard and sometimes you doubt yourself and even your choice of vocation.

I’ve always found these messages to be a source of comfort and a confirmation in times of doubt that what I do is worth it.

Tortoises are also full of character, it’s just that the character comes out in a slowed-down manner.

Mum and dad have five of them, which they got after I moved out.

I like to think they were worried about empty nest syndrome so got the tortoises to replace me, but the truth is it was just a coincidence that I moved out and the tortoises moved in.

It’s quite a sad story really.

Tortoises are a lifelong commitment and, depending on how old you are when you get them, will most likely outlive you. They become intergenerational pets, handed down from parents to children.

My parents’ family of tortoises previously belonged to a chap called Trevor.

The older tortoises were Rosie and George. They were caught wild as hatchlings, most likely sometime in the sixties, and taken to a pet shop in Nottingham where Trevor bought them. He kept them for over 30 years and bred them.

They had three offspring, Meg, Pip and Jo. They all lived together with Trevor until he started to develop Alzheimer’s disease and was unable to look after them.

In the wild, tortoises are generally solitary and live alone. Females can store sperm inside their bodies for two years because encounters with males are so few and far between.

But this family of five tortoises only knew each other and had established bonds so close that to separate them would have been unthinkable. So, mum and dad agreed to rehome them all together, and Dad began ‘project shell shack’.

He started by converting my old Futon bed into tortoise tables, which are enclosed open-topped pens. The project ended with the complete conversion of the summer house into a tortoise approximation of The Ritz.

It had heat lamps, astroturf and enrichment equipment.

Dad even bought a fridge with five drawers which is in the garage and is where the tortoises go to hibernate. Each one had its own drawer with a name tag on it. Dad also walled off the entire garden so they couldn’t get out. It’s now like Jurassic Park.

When the tortoises arrived, my parents at first had trouble telling them apart, especially the ‘children’ as they were all similar sizes.

To solve the problem, mum colour-coded their shells using dabs of different coloured nail varnish and a key chart on the wall.

But as the months went by, mum, who had always wanted tortoises since she was little, started to see their personalities develop and started to recognise which was which.

George thought he was the boss, but Rosie always put him in his place. Meg was the quiet one, Jo was the boisterous one. They had their own hierarchy and they all fitted into a family group.

They are as much a part of the family as any dog or cat would be and even more so because they will probably one day become my pets, and then my daughter’s.

You can’t live side by side for so long with another living thing, no matter what species, and not develop bonds.

Mirfield-born Matt Jackson-Smith graduated with his veterinary degree from the University of Glasgow, the same university where Alf Wight graduated, in 2014, the same year when The Yorkshire Vet started filming. His grandmother used to watch the series regularly and was the first to introduce him to it.

My Life as a Yorkshire Vet by Matt Jackson-Smith is available now from all good bookshops, rrp £20, published by Mirror Books.

The Yorkshire Vet is on My5