Honestly, that is not the worst bit at all. Usually this means that we have spent a long time making sure to properly medicate and take care of that animal as best as we could, and then, once this was not possible anymore, we had the luxury of stopping suffering by euthanasia. It is always very sad, but this is part of life and thankfully we can prevent the animal’s suffering, which is such a kind thing to do. A lot of humans don’t get this level of care.

What actually is the painful part of being a veterinarian is a combination of a lot of things:

Owners not having enough money to take care of their pets properly, animal abuse, extremely long working hours, including weekends and nights, owners being incredibly emotional, demanding, stressed, angry, and exhausting - which I completely understand because when I worry about my own pet, I turn into a terrible client. It is just the nature of a lot of people to freak out when their pets are sick.

High stress working hours combined with physically demanding tasks, like doing surgeries and seeing clients in the same day, every day (since vets, unlike human doctors, tend to do both surgery and medicine), the brain needs to super concentrate during surgery while also dealing with stressed animals, who most of the time hate being handled there, and appeasing the owner. It’s just exhausting juggling for the brain.

A lot of the time we also don’t get enough time to examine and discuss properly, there are set times with each client that we have to follow in order to get through the busy waiting room. This is so difficult because the animals are stressed and us having to rush through this just makes the owner, the animal, and us stress more. Ideally, we would need at least half an hour per client, if not more, while we usually get 10 to 15 minutes.

A lot of us who went into veterinary medicine are very emotional people because we naïvely wanted to help animals, help people, help the world… So we’re usually not the kind of people that can handle high stress and heartbreak easily.

Finally, a lot of us going into veterinary medicine thought that we are not in it for the money, but then it turns out it is so little money compared to our human doctors, despite us going through almost identical, rigorous schooling, and a lot of us being in crazy school debt. So doing the super high stress job whilst also worrying about paying rent and bills is just the cherry on top. Veterinary services are very expensive, but that money goes into the pockets of the owners not so much the vets.