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What haunts America’s animal shelter workers

“It’s draining, heartbreaking, and maddening.”

For nearly a decade, Lauren served as the animal control manager for a county in North Georgia. It was a round-the-clock, always-on kind of job, in which she and her employees responded to animal cruelty and neglect cases, dog attacks, and animal escapes.

Saving animals was, and still is, Lauren’s passion in life. But some weeks, the cruelty and the stress of the job got to be too much. It came to a head in early 2024 when she showed up to a man’s house and found 27 hound dogs outside exposed to the freezing cold.

I’ve written a lot about the problems with pet ownership in America: animal cruelty and neglect, puppy mills, inadequate veterinary care, animal boredom, prolonged captivity, and more. But one thing I hadn’t explored was the toll that America’s pet overpopulation crisis has on its frontline human workers: animal shelter staff.

They experience frequent trauma through their work responding to animal cruelty and neglect cases, performing euthanasia, and other countless stressors. To understand the issue, I pored through research dating back to the 1980s and spoke with many people who’ve worked in the field.

I was floored when I heard their stories. And given how large of a role pets play in the US, I was surprised at how little attention the issue has received so far.

“It was one of the coldest nights, unseasonably, for the state of Georgia,” Lauren told me, and “these dogs are out there with no shelter.” The man was breeding the hounds to be used as hunting dogs, and her department had already told him to get them shelter, but he hadn’t complied. That left Lauren and her colleagues with two choices: let the dogs freeze to death or bring them into the county animal shelter, where they’d remain indefinitely during a cruelty investigation and court proceedings. They took the dogs.

But the shelter was already full, so she and her colleagues had to make a tough call; they euthanized dozens of animals there that day in order to make space for the 27 hounds.

“The shelter worker’s the one that’s got to stand over that body and decide, ‘Is today that animal’s day?’” Lauren said.

“And, I’m sorry, but some of that never leaves you; you carry it the rest of your life,” she said. (Lauren is a pseudonym. She requested anonymity to speak openly on sensitive issues because she’s still involved in Georgia’s animal welfare community.)

The case against pet ownership

Just days later, she responded to a situation in which two dogs had attacked people and were then shot by the police — one dog died, while the other was rushed to a veterinarian’s office. Around this time, the county shelter was also dealing with a severe disease outbreak, and one of her employees got injured while trying to catch a loose animal.

“How am I supposed to mentally and emotionally deal with all of that at one time?” she told me. Lauren quit a few months later, she said, because the compassion fatigue — the deep emotional and physical exhaustion that can result from intense caregiving — had become too much to handle.

This wasn’t Lauren’s first bout of compassion fatigue. She had worked at an animal shelter in the 1990s where, two to three times a week, she’d have to go into a room and euthanize dogs for hours at a time.

Animal control and shelter workers, who often work hand-in-hand and share many of the same burdens, “get the trauma heaped on them daily that lasts most people a lifetime, and nobody inside or outside talks about it — it’s the dirty secret of [animal] sheltering,” Lauren told me.

Across the US, animal control officers and shelter staff are overworked and underpaid. Turnover is incredibly high, as many of them become burnt out from bearing the immense emotional and physical burden of the job. Collectively, these workers euthanize an average of over 1,600 dogs and cats each day, while responding to countless cruelty and neglect cases; rounding up millions of strays; routinely putting themselves in harm’s way; and dealing with indifferent, difficult, and even hostile pet owners.

They are the frontline workers of America’s long-running and ever-evolving pet overpopulation crisis, currently fueled by a decline in spay and neuter rates, the rising costs of veterinary care, and a chronic lack of government funding.

Then, there are the American consumers, many of whom prefer to buy dogs........

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