Survey Finds Widespread ‘Moral Distress’ Among Veterinarians

The authors of a new study on veterinarians and mental health say vet school should include more training on how to cope with the moral distress vets face when asked by pet owners to do things that are against their medical judgement

Anya Semenoff / Denver Post via Getty Images

Sign up for the CommonHealth newsletter to receive a weekly digest of WBUR’s best health, medicine and science coverage.

In some ways, it can be harder to be a doctor of animals than a doctor of humans.

“We are in the really unenviable, and really difficult, position of caring for patients maybe for their entire lives, developing our own relationships with those animals — and then being asked to kill them,” says Dr. Lisa Moses, a veterinarian at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-Angell Animal Medical Center and a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School.