Professional Workshops

Animal health-care professionals experience a great deal of grief, stress, and trauma in their work. Veterinarians are said to experience death at a higher rate than human doctors do simply because the life span of animals is generally shorter. In some animal shelters hundreds of animals are often euthanized each day due to over population. Animal control workers and humane officers, like adult and child protective service workers, must witness neglected and abused animals on a daily basis. All of this can create high levels of compassion fatigue among animal-care professionals.

Counsellors who specialize in the needs of animal health-care professionals offer help with the precursors and after effects of compassion fatigue. Teaching skills in grief accommodation and providing supportive group or individual counselling is important for animal health-care workers. Many veterinarians, for instance, feel guilty or at fault when they lose patients. Those involved in providing euthanasia for their animal patients also struggle with feelings of guilt and grief because of the responsibilities of their jobs.

Stressful and traumatic experiences are high in veterinary and animal shelter environments. Moreover, the over population of endless unwanted animals becomes very stressful for animal shelter and rescue group workers. Therefore teaching stress management skills is extremely important for Counsellors to offer in caring for people who care for animals.

People who love and want to work with animals as their professional role often feel more affinity to animals than they do to people. This, in addition to chronic compassion fatigue, can contribute to high conflict and low conflict management skills in these settings.

Therefore, the role of the Counsellor as mediator and support facilitator is extremely important in caring for people in these unique roles.

If you are an animal related professional experiencing compassion fatigue, stress, grief, traumas, and or conflict, please feel free to call Creative Climate Counselling Group for a consultation.

We Provide individual counselling, Workshops and Support Groups for Animal Shelters, Humane Societies and Veterinarian health teams in the Lower Mainland.