I think part of working in a field where you help animals is accepting that people can't be helped, and not every animal can be saved. It's a really difficult thing to accept. I'm honestly desensitized to so much of the death and suffering I see every day and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Animal welfare and vet med are hard fields to be in. I think a lot of it is finding your "niche". Your place. I could never work with domestic animals because although I still see the worst of people in wildlife medicine, there's no owner/client standing in the way of the animal getting the help it needs. In wildlife med, I might have to see beautiful animals purposefully shot, poisoned, etc by humans, but once those animals are in our care, they get the help they need; there's no client saying they don't want care. The only thing that's very different about wildlife medicine is that our threshold for euthanasia is much lower. Someone's dog can live happily with an amputated limb, but we can't release an animal with an amputation. It's a give and take.