Compassion Fatigue Is No Joke
Changing our approach to animal rescue can save both animals and humans
Compassion can be painful.
The more compassionate you are, the more likely you are to be affected by compassion fatigue, also known as emotional exhaustion, vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress or secondary victimization.
This often misunderstood and trivialized affliction is also referred to as secondary-traumatic stress disorder (STSD) and is actually a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. It affects caretakers of all kinds but this article focuses on the animal rescue aspect.
While I don’t speak for every single person in animal rescue, I do know, from personal experience as well as accounts from many of my fellow rescuers and advocates, that the profession as a whole is extremely stressful already.
And those who work in Socially Conscious Shelters tend to fare a lot worse.
HSPs (Highly Sensitive People) and empaths can— through their natural ability to identify with and feel the pain of others (and quite literally take it on) — be more susceptible to this kind of torment. At the same time, they are very likely to be drawn to the role of caregiver, and many end up in some kind of animal-related profession.
The visible and the invisible
Animal rescue attracts highly caring and sensitive people to its lower-paying and volunteer ranks.
Some CEO, director, and management positions tend to be a lot less hands-on in large facilities and as such, they are focused on overall numbers and paperwork. They are in effect insulated from the daily horrors experienced by the animals and those who care for them. And they are not required to be animal people or even compassionate humans at all. In fact, the less you feel, the more profitable your operation tends to be.
We see this trend in every large business out there, but we tend to overlook animal rescue as a “business”, don’t we?
