In animal welfare, mental health can't be a side conversation
Every May, Mental Health Awareness Month arrives right in the middle of what is, for most people in animal welfare, one of the busiest stretches of the year. The snow melts, the trees bloom, and right on cue it’s raining kittens and puppies — and with them come the calls, the events, the weekends that become dedicated to the cause.
The calendar says spring. Animal welfare says hold on.
I've been in this field for 30 years, and for most of that time, mental health was something we acknowledged the way you acknowledge a check-engine light — noted, set aside, kept driving. (And honestly, that’s me being generous. Sometimes, it was more like a slow, mysterious leak in a tire that you ignore until you quite literally can’t move any farther.) The work was too urgent, the animals needed us, and there was always something more pressing than stopping to ask how we were actually doing. Now, that's not a criticism of this field so much as a confession about myself.
Because here's what I know about the people who choose animal welfare: They don't half-ass things. When you care this much, you show up all the way every day. That also means the hard days hit differently. You go from an adoption — a dog finally leaving with a family, your whole team elated — and turn right around to something that breaks your heart, with no transition time between the two. Those moments live right next to each other, and you carry both of them whether you mean to or not.
Mental Health Awareness Month exists, I think, to create a pause — a designated moment to ask questions we don't make time for (but should) the other 11 months of the year. Questions like: What am I actually carrying right now? What have I been telling myself I'll deal with later? How long have I been running on something other than OK?
I ask myself those questions differently now than I used to. For a long time, I wore the relentlessness of this work like it meant something about how much I cared. If I was exhausted, at least I was exhausted for the right reasons. That thinking is so embedded in animal welfare, and nonprofit as a whole really, that it barely registers as a belief anymore; it can sometimes just feel like a piece of the culture. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The cost of this work is real, and pretending otherwise doesn't protect anyone; it just means people absorb the weight alone and quietly until something gives. Compassion fatigue is real, moral stress from the decisions we make is real, and the emotional whiplash of this job is real. None of it waits for a convenient moment to surface, and most of the people carrying it are the last ones to name it.
Ramon Villatoro, our Dogtown director at the Sanctuary, told me recently that his teenage son said to him: "Dad, I love that you're home for the holidays now." Ramon has spent 15 years in this field and knows its unique demands, and he's made a deliberate choice to model something different for his team — not because the work matters less but because he understands that showing up fully at home is part of showing up fully here. He encourages his staff to take the long drive through the canyon at the end of the day to let the beauty of the Sanctuary hold them for a moment before they head home.
At our Los Angeles pet adoption center, the team has built a culture of genuine recognition — a Kudos Corner where people call out each other's good work in real time, not as a performance but because it matters to be seen. They share adoption photos and updates, so staff can actually witness the outcomes of what they do every day. And they celebrate birthdays and holidays with the kind of lighthearted silliness that doesn't minimize the gravity of the work so much as balance it.
And in New York, the team holds monthly staff meetings and weekly huddles to share updates and highlight wins, hosts an annual celebration of everything the team has accomplished together, and recognizes staff each month through peer nominations — their version of making sure nobody is doing this work invisibly.
None of that requires a big budget or a particular set of resources — it just requires knowing your people, listening when they tell you what's hard, and finding ways to connect them back to why they chose this work in the first place, especially on the days when that reason feels furthest away. That's as true for a two-person rescue team as it is for a large urban shelter.
I've watched this field change profoundly over 30 years, and what I keep coming back to is that the people who moved it forward weren't the ones who burned brightest and disappeared. They were the ones who figured out how to stay and who had someone, or something, that helped them do that.
So if this month prompts anything, I hope it's an honest look at what you're carrying — and whether the people around you know it and whether you know it about them. Thirty years in, I'm still figuring out how to do that well. Maybe that's the point of having a month like this: not because the conversation ends when May does but because sometimes we need a reason to start it.
-Julie
