lifestyle & living
Caitlin Venniker is‘ Unleashed’
From lecture halls at South Africa’ s legendary Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute to midnight farm calls and high-stakes operating tables, Caitlin Venniker has seen it all and lived to write about it.
South African veterinarian and award-winning writer Caitlin Venniker has put pen to paper to capture her journey – from her formative years at Onderstepoort, the country’ s only veterinary training institution, into the heart of private practice, with detours through the United Kingdom and the Middle East.
Her memoir, Unleashed: A Vet’ s Memoir of Heartache, Hairballs and
Hope, is an account of growing up in the profession, juggling owners with high expectations and animals with strong personalities, bluffing confidence, navigating quirky colleagues, wrangling cows with anger issues, and answering midnight emergencies.
Caitlin spoke to us about her writing process and the lessons she’ s learned from a life devoted to animals.
What made you decide it was finally time to tell your story?
Writing the book was less a conscious decision and more an accidental turn of events. I’ ve always loved writing. I did well in some competitions overseas and wasn’ t sure if the next step was to launch into a novel. I decided to join a writing class and, as luck would have it, the fiction class was closed at that time. I joined the non-fiction class just for fun and things grew from there.
What I didn’ t expect was how writing real people has kind of ruined fictional characters for me. Real people are just so funny, unpredictable and‘ alive’. I learnt a lot from writing about them.
52 www. petpals. co. za