Pet health vs. vet health
The alarming rate of veterinarian burnout is a reminder that consumers, not just employers, contribute to poor working conditions
I have a new essay out with Vox, “What It Would Take to Make Us Love Our Jobs Again,” which I invite you to read. If you like it, please share it widely. The argument is a bit of a departure for me. Usually, I emphasize the negative aspects of work: the way it burns us out and ruins our souls for inadequate reward. Here, I’m taking a closer look at the positives: the way a good job can not only help us provide for ourselves and others but also organize our time, put us in contact with friends and strangers, and give us an arena for ethical action.
Work is a social arrangement. It mediates countless relationships, both casual and intimate. Go to the tailor often enough, and you’ll become part of each other’s lives, sharing jokes and complaints about the weather or, where I live, the Dallas Cowboys. I still miss the regulars at the restaurant where I worked many years ago. Even at a workplace with high employee turnover, Fry has made friendships that have lasted for two decades. Or as Coates put it, “We all have our work wives.” Sometimes, a coworker becomes your actual wife. One of mine did.
I now wish I had said a word or two about the sushi-bar regulars, Joe and Lisa, that I was thinking of. He was a stolid presence with a dry sense of humor. She was a sunflower, pure delight to be around. They were there every Friday for years, and sometimes Tuesday or Wednesday, too. They came in on the early side, before things got busy, so the sushi chefs and bartender had a chance to talk with them. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was their friend, but they were a part of my world, and vice versa.
I’m grateful to Laurel Coates and Joey Fry, two employees of a California grocery store, for sharing their stories and explaining what they like about their jobs. They did a lot to shape my argument in this piece.
More news: The London-based writer Madeleine Crean interviewed me recently for the careers site Welcome to the Jungle. It was wonderful to talk with her. Photographer Sarah Wall took some nice accompanying pictures of me at home.
The Australian writer Justine Toh drew from The End of Burnout (and, more important, Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture) in an op-ed titled “Religious or Not, Easter Proves We Need More ‘Holy Days’” in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper. I spoke with Justine for the Life & Faith podcast a few weeks earlier.
I am once again offering an asynchronous, online class in spiritual nonfiction, starting May 23. Details are here. Note that spiritual nonfiction encompasses writing about other people’s spirituality as well as one’s own; you need not be religious or spiritual yourself to take the class. Feel free to reply to this email with questions.
There have been some interesting and disturbing reports about veterinarian burnout lately. I hesitate to address the link between vet burnout and demand for pet health care. No one wants to hear that pet ownership might be — in the parlance of our times — problematic. But I often think of the advice Meghan Daum (a committed dog lover) gives to writers: “Nobody will love you if somebody doesn’t hate you.” So here I go, risking your hate in the hope of winning your love.
An article by the CBC’s Lyndsay Duncombe on verterinarian burnout in Canada is one of the best stories I’ve read recently that uses the idea of burnout. While it doesn’t get into the science of burnout, it does illustrate two important aspects of how burnout works.
First, it focuses on how burnout appears in the gap between someone’s ideals for work and the reality of their job. That can include overwork — one of the vets Dumcombe featured left a practice that had her working 12-hour days — but it also might mean having incredibly high, noble ideals for your work but then doing something you never really signed up for:
Veterinary medicine is unique in that highly motivated, compassionate professionals go through intense and competitive training to care for animals, but end up spending a lot of their time dealing with owners who may not be able to — or want to — pay for services.
"A lot of the veterinarians that come out of vet school … become quite disillusioned quite quickly," said [Dr. Rocky] Lis. That's because they might not realize that "there would be a component of having these discussions [with clients] every day, saying, 'This is how much veterinary medicine costs.'"
This is especially true in Canada, he says, where universal health care means people don't understand the costs associated with medicine, even though animal care is considerably cheaper.
The mental-health crisis in veterinary medicine is deeply troubling. As KQED reported in March, vets die by suicide at more than twice the rate of the general population.
People love veterinarians, rating them more highly than physicians (who are also generally well-thought-of) on a range of characteristics, including “sensitive,” “sympathetic,” and “approachable.”
People also love their pets. The problem is that love for pets can conflict with love for vets when overall demand for verinary medicine increases. The pet population can increase a lot faster than the vet population, creating shortfalls in veterinary service providers. The econ 101 solution to that problem is to raise prices, but doing so would likely cause its own set of problems. As it stands, according to a report by the Philadelphia Inquirer,
“I get cursed at at least once a week,” said an emergency veterinarian in Philadelphia who requested anonymity for fear of jeopardizing her job. People also have threatened and yelled at her, she said, slammed doors in her face, and walked out on $2,000 bills. “It’s definitely gotten much worse.”
And that brings up the second point the CBC’s Duncombe makes very well: Each of us is not just a potential sufferer of burnout but a potential contributor to the burnout of people whose labor we depend on. In our behavior as customers, clients, students, passengers, and patients — even when that behavior is entirely reasonable — we place demands on others. At some point, those demands may become too much.
Just to be clear: I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about other pet owners. They’re the problem.
One individual solution to the burnout crisis, from the vets’ side, is to give up on ordinary practice and become a locum vet, essentially a traveling vet for hire. You get more autonomy and better pay in exchange for a willingness to travel. As with travel nursing, though, it is not a sustainable solution to the supply-vs.-demand problem. (In the long run, it will increase prices.) And in fact, by taking a vet out of circulation in her home community, it only makes the basic problem worse, increasing the likelihood that other vets will burn out.
There is no good short-term solution to this crisis. In the long term, more vets will need to be trained. Even that isn’t so easy, as the CBC article makes clear; it’s hard to expand veterinary medicine programs without making the students bear the entire (astronomical) cost. Ultimately, that cost would get passed on to pet owners themselves, making pet health even more of a luxury item. I don’t have a pet, but that seems far from ideal.
The long-term solution might also require a cultural shift: different norms about how much care people are willing to get for Rover and Fido. The economist Teresa Ghilarducci was recently slammed from all directions for suggesting that people forego expensive veterinary treatments as a way to cope with inflation. Given the current strain on veterinarians, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which Ghilarducci’s view becomes standard.
At least until the robot veterinarians arrive to save us.
I have been posting this newsletter twice a month for a while in order to promote The End of Burnout. I’m not burning out writing it, but I am finding it hard to keep up that schedule. So it’s possible you won’t hear from me again until mid-May. If you miss me, feel free to look through the newsletter archive.
Thank you for reading.