We Need to Address Our Approach to Grieving Pet Guardians

Recently, I engaged in a conversation online with several veterinary professionals and a pet guardian. The guardian was venting about a recent experience that was all-too familiar to me. She had to say goodbye to a beloved pet, and was presented with the bill after the procedure.

My response was to apologize to this grieving person that in their most vulnerable moment, they were asked to pay a bill. This should not be the standard policy in a veterinary practice for a scheduled euthanasia. Unless there is a trauma or emergency element and the procedure cannot wait because the pet is suffering, payment should be handled prior so that the guardian can focus solely on being with their pet. I stand by this, and said as much.

Unfortunately, this scenario - which makes an already difficult situation feel more transactional than compassionate - happens too often as policy.

It seemed obvious to me that this client was experiencing frustration, anger, sadness - all normal parts of grief - and this element of her experience had exacerbated those feelings. There were comments made about how "evil" it felt to have to pay for euthanasia, which led to others (veterinary professionals) entering the chat to defend their profession and their people. Because my comment was supportive toward the grieving pet guardian, it wasn't initially received well by those within the field.

I want to talk about what that reaction says about where we are in veterinary medicine right now, and how we can better respond to grieving clients.

Two things can be true at once: 1) Veterinary professionals are often emotionally exhausted, understaffed, and doing the absolute best they can to care for people and their pets. And;

2) Our approach to clients while they're in the thick of pet loss grief is, on the whole, in serious need of an adjustment. Veterinary team members are used to encountering frustration re: payment for services. We've all felt the instinct to go on the defensive when we hear comments about being "money-hungry" or heartless, when we know that couldn't be further from the truth. And it should go without saying that threats or physical violence, both too common in the field, should never be tolerated - grief or not. But I want to challenge those in our profession. When we respond defensively to these kinds of client comments, is it actually helpful? What if instead, we tried to focus on the part of the concern we can actually control, and let the rest go?

Do we really expect every grieving client to have the capacity to give us the benefit of the doubt?

If we want things to remain the same, we can keep approaching these situations in the same way, with defensiveness and an "us vs. them" mentality. If we want a better experience for our clients and veterinary teams, we can remember how much clients truly don't know about what happens behind the scenes. We can try to understand what we could have done better. In this particular instance, I don't believe this pet guardian truly believes veterinary professionals are evil. Once kindness was extended to her, she wasted no time saying so. What she needed was for someone to hear the root of the concern and validate it. And her concern was valid. We expect clients to be patient when we are behind because we're busy with drop-offs and back-to-back appointments, triage and surgeries. We ask them to be understanding when we're short-staffed and aren't able to spend as much time as we'd like explaining diagnostic options and treatment plans, or discharging their pets. We expect them to trust us. This is almost never the fault of anyone working on the floor; we hope clients will give us grace as we do the best we can with the tools we've got.

So why is it unfair for our clients to expect that we would show them the same grace in their most vulnerable moments? Can we really not take a step back and try to put ourselves in their shoes? To determine where we may be able to do better, and set aside the rest? If we want things to stay the same - a system where pet guardians and veterinary professionals are both doing their best but often misunderstanding one another - we can keep responding to the frustrations of grieving clients in the same way.

Or, we could try a different approach. It takes the same amount of time and energy to engage with someone from a perspective of curiosity and support as it does to engage from defensiveness. And long-term, it's a shift that will lead to a less stressful experience for everyone. We can't allow the systemic issues in veterinary medicine - staffing, pricing, workload - to keep us from seeing valid concerns and improving what we offer to pets and their people. Those systemic issues aren't the fault of the team or the client. In grief, this is especially important. Every single controllable part of the euthanasia process matters. I'm making a plea for us to lead with the same grace we expect in return, when it comes to grieving guardians. We really are almost always on the same team. Not viewing upset, grieving clients are our adversaries is as good for our mental health as it is for theirs.

We have to, as the professionals in the dynamic, sometimes look beyond what's being said to what's actually being communicated. In this case, it wasn't actually "you're evil for charging for euthanasia." (I mean, sure, it does feel awful to pay for that service. That's a human response, though rational people know it's a necessity.) The real issue was that this person's grief was interrupted during an incredibly vulnerable moment. When she should have been processing a goodbye from only moments earlier, she was asked to hand over a credit card. We can do better than that.

And if we can learn to approach concerns from grieving clients differently, we will do better than that. That type of engagement shift benefits everyone involved.

Now, if we want to talk real evil in the veterinary field, we can discuss the large-scale shift to privatization by private equity firms and their model of profit over patient care. But that's a blog for another day.