Canada’s veterinarians are not OK

Everyone knows by now about health-care worker burnout. Nurses fleeing the profession. Doctors retiring early. And the absence of so many of both leaving more crucial work for their increasingly strained colleagues, and the system as a whole. What you may not know, is that things are much the same for vets and vet technicians across the country—and it’s taking a massive toll on the animal caregivers who remain.

Lyndsay Armstrong wrote about veterinarian burnout for the Canadian Press, she says part of the issue may be the changing nature of the relationship between people and their pets. “The way that people have become quite obsessed with their animals, I think that the clients are now putting a bit more pressure on the vets, being a bit more harsh with them when they call,” says Armstrong, “we think of our pets like family, and we want them to be treated like family.”

Canadians adopted an additional 500,000 pets during the pandemic, and right now there are fewer vets to care for them than there were in 2019. And the ones who are trying to keep Canadians’ pandemic pets healthy are seriously struggling. So how do we fix the shortfall?

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