Monsieur Le Vet: My Life with Animals in Rural France

Sylvain Balteau works as a village vet in the Pyrenees. Equally at home with a sick hamster as with a pregnant Charolais cow, he is permanently on call, immersed in the dramas of his patients and their owners.

Since 2007 he has kept diary, revealing the hidden side of a vet's life and the richness of his surroundings: a piglet that has become a disadvantaged person's only reason for living; a cat that arrives on Christmas Eve to be destroyed and leaves the next day in full health; the mare dying peacefully under a tree; the farmer's wife on the verge of a heart attack who insists that the vet see her sick cow first . . .

Through his work with their animals, Sylvain gains a privileged insight into the people who live with them. In this profound and unsentimental book, he discovers that, in order to love animals, you can't help but love people as well.