Am I Too Old to Have a Dog? Or, What Kind of Dog Should I Get?

You are not necessarily too old to get another dog, but choosing the right one requires an honest assessment of your physical abilities, finances, household, and plans for the dog’s future. I have successfully worked with numerous students in their 80’s, and also seen people in their 50’s that should no longer have a dog… so, read on… (MORE)

Can a Dog Personality Test Predict My Dog’s Behavior?

A dog personality questionnaire can describe reported behavior, but a category alone cannot establish why your dog behaves that way or predict safety in a particular situation.

 

A dog personality test may help organize what you have observed, but its label cannot tell you everything you need to know about your dog. Before relying on a result for training, adoption, or safety, ask what the test measured and whether it has been validated for that particular decision.

 

Two linked studies of the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire, or C-BARQ, illustrate why that distinction matters. They offer an interesting way to summarize behavioral patterns. The evidence becomes less secure when those summaries are treated as explanations of an individual animal or predictions of what that animal will do next.

 

What did the researchers actually measure?

 

The researchers measured owners’ reports of their dogs’ behavior in specified situations, then analyzed patterns within those reports. C-BARQ has a substantial research foundation, beginning with Hsu and Serpell’s development and validation study in 2003. A structured questionnaire can gather observations from everyday life that a short encounter with a dog might miss. That usefulness does not automatically validate every new classification built from its scores.

 

In the 2024 study, Amirhosseini and colleagues used 100 behavioral items to group 7,807 dogs into five clusters. They named the groups Excitable/Hyperattached, Anxious/Fearful, Aloof/Predatory, Reactive/Assertive, and Calm/Agreeable. These names were interpretations of statistical profiles, rather than diagnoses established through separate clinical examinations (Amirhosseini et al., 2024).

 

Does 99 percent accuracy mean the test predicts my dog correctly?

 

The reported 99 percent accuracy describes agreement with the cluster labels generated in the study; it does not establish 99 percent accuracy in predicting future behavior. The researchers first generated categories from questionnaire responses. They then trained classification models to reproduce those categories, reporting their best performance for a decision tree.

 

That is a legitimate computational task. However, agreement with a constructed category does not demonstrate accurate prediction of biting, successful adoption, or suitability for a working role. Those outcomes require separate tests. Cross-validation can assess performance on held-out records for the specified task, but it cannot supply an independent behavioral outcome that was never measured.

 

Did adding breed and age prove the categories were independent of them?

 

Adding demographic variables supported a narrower finding: behavioral items continued to occupy nearly all positions in the reported top-20 feature lists. The follow-up used the same source dataset and added breed, sex, weight, neuter status, age, household information, and owner-assigned roles. Its Table 2 provides the following exact counts (Amirhosseini et al., 2026).

 

Authors’ cluster label	Behavior items in top 20	Role indicator and rank
Excitable/Hyperattached	19 of 20	Pet or none, 19th
Anxious/Fearful	19 of 20	Pet or none, 15th
Aloof/Predatory	19 of 20	Field trials/hunting, 13th
Reactive/Assertive	20 of 20	None in top 20
Calm/Agreeable	19 of 20	Breeding/showing, 18th

 

Breed and the other demographic variables were absent from these lists. Their absence does not establish that they had no associations with behavior or no influence on cluster formation. A cutoff shows which variables entered that ranking window. It does not show the complete distribution of their effects.

 

The authors also report that four role indicators replaced behavioral items in the top-20 lists. Such substitutions show a change in ranked composition. They do not establish why a feature moved, whether the change was statistically reliable, or whether the same dogs remained in the same groups. Comparable group descriptions can coexist with changes in individual membership. A direct comparison of assignments would address that question.

 

Owner-assigned roles are also difficult to interpret causally. Selection into hunting, showing, or other activities, subsequent training, and owners’ opportunities to observe behavior could all contribute. Ranking a role indicator does not, by itself, establish the direction or cause of a role association. The follow-up’s own discussion calls for stronger association and cluster-stability analyses.

 

Could the way the data were processed change the result?

 

Encoding, scaling, and missing information can affect the groups produced by this analysis. The follow-up describes using LabelEncoder for categorical variables, including breed, while its results list separate role-indicator columns. That leaves the exact transformation of those variables insufficiently clear in the supplied methods.

 

The distinction matters because K-means uses numerical distances. Giving breeds arbitrary numbers can create distances that have no biological interpretation. The scikit-learn documentation describes LabelEncoder as a tool for target labels rather than input features. Numerical ranges also matter when ages, weights, category codes, and behavioral ratings enter a distance-based model. The appropriate response is to examine the actual preprocessing and test suitable alternatives, rather than declare that the calculations must be wrong.

 

The analyzed 7,807 records were approximately 11.1 percent of the reported 70,122 source records. About 88.9 percent were excluded following complete-case cleaning. Missingness could be associated with which owners completed particular questions or which situations their dogs experienced. Those are possibilities, not demonstrated explanations. Comparisons of retained and excluded records are needed to judge how far the findings generalize.

 

Do dogs really have consistent personalities?

 

Dogs can show relatively consistent individual differences, but that does not establish that all dogs belong to five discrete personality types. Fratkin and colleagues’ meta-analysis of 31 studies found evidence of temporal consistency, with an overall correlation of approximately 0.43. Consistency varied with factors including age and the interval between assessments (Fratkin et al., 2013).

 

A continuous trait, such as a tendency to respond fearfully, can be relatively consistent without falling into a sharply bounded category. The clustering studies used an elbow criterion to select five groups. That choice summarizes how a particular mathematical fit changes as groups are added. It does not independently establish five natural kinds of dog. Likewise, reusing the original dataset allows a useful sensitivity analysis but provides no independent replication in a new population.

 

Why doesn’t a personality label explain the behavior?

 

A label summarizes a pattern; explaining that pattern requires evidence about the processes producing it. Tinbergen’s foundational ethological framework separates questions about immediate mechanisms, development, function, and evolutionary history. A questionnaire cluster is not a substitute for investigating those questions (Tinbergen, 1963).

 

Learning research adds distinctions that matter in assessment. Classical conditioning concerns learned relations among events, including cues that predict significant experiences (Rescorla, 1988). Instrumental learning concerns relations between actions and outcomes (Balleine and Dickinson, 1998). Bouton’s work shows why changes in context can alter the expression of learned responses, particularly following extinction (Bouton, 2004). These are general research foundations, not proof of what caused any particular dog’s behavior.

 

For example, barking at an approaching stranger might involve learned anticipation, consequences of earlier barking, immediate physical state, or several interacting influences. Calling the dog “Reactive/Assertive” does not distinguish those possibilities. Similarly, prey pursuit, social threat displays, and injurious attacks need separate descriptions of their targets, circumstances, and outcomes. A questionnaire’s aggression score should not be translated automatically into a forecast of violent injury.

 

How should I use a personality result with my own dog?

 

Use the result to identify questions worth investigating, then describe the behavior in the situations where it actually occurs. Replace “my dog is anxious” with observations about what the dog does, who is present, where it begins, and what changes when the situation changes. Record frequency, intensity, recovery, and opportunities to encounter the relevant situation.

 

My first question would be what differs between the conditions where the behavior succeeds and fails. A dog that walks comfortably in one setting but hesitates in another needs an assessment of that difference. A category alone cannot determine whether the problem involves learned expectations, handling, environment, physical discomfort, or some combination. Assessment should determine the training plan.

 

For mild problems without safety concerns, owners can begin with careful observation and manageable practice. Look for easier participation, less escalation, and recovery that permits successful repetition. Completing an exercise while the dog becomes increasingly distressed does not demonstrate that the underlying problem has improved.

 

When does professional assessment make sense?

 

Professional assessment makes sense when behavior is worsening, threatens injury or escape, causes substantial distress, or leaves you unable to find a workable starting point. Sudden changes or signs of physical discomfort also warrant veterinary attention. A “Calm/Agreeable” result cannot clear a dog for unsupervised contact with a child, and a “Reactive/Assertive” result cannot determine an individual dog’s prognosis.

 

An in-home assessment can help compare the relevant conditions, examine handling and environmental variables, and build a plan from the dog’s actual responses. You can learn more about working with me at SamTheDogTrainer.com.

 

Keep the personality description as a provisional summary. Your next step is to identify the specific behavior, the conditions that change it, and the evidence needed for the decision you are trying to make.

 

Glossary

 

C-BARQ: A structured owner questionnaire about dogs’ behavior in specified situations.

Cluster: A group generated by a statistical method from similarities among measured records.

Construct validity: Evidence that a measurement or interpretation represents the concept it claims to represent.

Predictive validity: Evidence that a measure predicts a separately defined outcome for a specified use.

Cross-validation: Evaluation using successive partitions of data for model training and testing.

Feature ranking: An ordering of variables under a particular analysis; the ranking alone does not establish causation.

Complete-case analysis: Analysis restricted to records with no missing values in the required fields.

Classical conditioning: Learning about relations among events, including predictive cues.

Instrumental conditioning: Learning about relations between actions and their consequences.

Extinction: Reduced learned responding when the expected reinforcing event no longer follows; it need not erase earlier learning.

Independent replication: Testing a finding again with independently collected data.

 

Bibliography

Amirhosseini, M. H., Yadav, V., Serpell, J. A., Pettigrew, P., & Kain, P. (2024). An artificial intelligence approach to predicting personality types in dogs. Scientific Reports, 14, 2404. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-52920-9

Amirhosseini, M. H., Serpell, J. A., & Pettigrew, P. (2026). Robust canine personality types from C-BARQ remain predominantly behaviour-defined after demographic feature inclusion. Applied Animal Behaviour Science. [Publication metadata to verify against the publisher record; supplied full-text transcription used for this draft.]

Balleine, B. W., & Dickinson, A. (1998). Goal-directed instrumental action: Contingency and incentive learning and their cortical substrates. Neuropharmacology, 37(4–5), 407–419. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0028-3908(98)00033-1

Bouton, M. E. (2004). Context and behavioral processes in extinction. Learning & Memory, 11(5), 485–494. https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.78804

Fratkin, J. L., Sinn, D. L., Patall, E. A., & Gosling, S. D. (2013). Personality consistency in dogs: A meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 8(1), e54907. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0054907

Hsu, Y., & Serpell, J. A. (2003). Development and validation of a questionnaire for measuring behavior and temperament traits in pet dogs. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 223(9), 1293–1300. https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.2003.223.1293

Rescorla, R. A. (1988). Pavlovian conditioning: It’s not what you think it is. American Psychologist, 43(3), 151–160. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.43.3.151

Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20(4), 410–433. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1963.tb01161.x

scikit-learn developers. (n.d.). LabelEncoder. scikit-learn documentation. https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.preprocessing.LabelEncoder.html (accessed October 9, 2026).

AI was used to assist in the writing of this article

Do 90% of Animal Shelter Workers Really Have Secondary Traumatic Stress?

A 2023 survey found that 90.9% of 243 U.S. animal shelter employees scored in the high range on a secondary traumatic stress screening scale, but that does not mean that 90.9% of shelter workers have a trauma disorder or that secondary trauma explains all the distress associated with shelter work. Animal shelter workers are struggling. There is good reason to take their occupational stress seriously. But the increasingly repeated claim that “more than 90% of animal shelter workers have high levels of secondary traumatic stress” needs some qualification.

 

In a 2023 survey of 243 U.S. shelter employees, 90.9% of respondents scored within the researchers’ designated high range on the Professional Quality of Life Scale, or ProQOL, secondary traumatic stress subscale. That is an important finding. It is not the same as showing that 90.9% of American shelter workers have a trauma disorder, and it does not show that secondary traumatic stress explains everything that is going wrong for shelter employees. If we want to help the people doing this work, I think we must be more precise than that.

 

What did the animal shelter worker study find?

 

The study found substantial indicators of occupational distress among the shelter employees who participated. Peter Wolf, Maureen Gillespie, and Chris Segrin surveyed 243 employees working in U.S. animal shelters during 2023. They used the ProQOL along with the NIH Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System, or PROMIS. The ProQOL results were striking:

 

• 49.4% of respondents scored in the high range for compassion satisfaction.
•  
• 53.5% scored in the high range for burnout.
•  
• 90.9% scored in the high range for secondary traumatic stress.
•  

 

The PROMIS results also indicated average self-reported anger, anxiety, depression, and fatigue above U.S. population reference values. Those findings should not be minimized. But they also have to be stated correctly.

 

The scientifically defensible statement is: In this survey of 243 U.S. shelter employees, 90.9% of respondents scored in the study’s high range on the ProQOL secondary traumatic stress subscale.

 

That is not the same statement as: More than 90% of animal shelter workers have secondary traumatic stress.

 

The first describes the result of a measurement instrument in a particular sample. The second converts that result into a population estimate and can easily be understood as a clinical claim. Those are different operations.

 

Is a high ProQOL secondary traumatic stress score a diagnosis?

 

No. The ProQOL is not a diagnostic test. The ProQOL manual specifically warns against using the instrument to diagnose psychiatric disorders. Its low, moderate, and high classifications are scoring categories used for screening, research, and planning. The manual also explains that its cut scores are based on percentile distributions and recommends using the continuous scores for statistical purposes rather than treating a cut point as though it separates illness from health.

 

That distinction is particularly important here. The word high can sound clinical when it appears in an article or social-media post. A reader may understandably interpret “high secondary traumatic stress” to mean severe traumatic illness. That is not what the scoring category establishes.

 

A screening instrument can tell us that a person’s answers fall within a defined range. It may indicate that something deserves attention or further assessment. It does not, by itself, tell us what caused those answers, whether the person has a psychiatric disorder, how impaired that person is, or whether the same result would appear at another point in time. Measurement is not diagnosis. I use a similar distinction when evaluating animal behavior. Giving a behavior a name does not explain why it occurred. A classification can be useful, but the label should begin the investigation rather than end it.

 

Does questioning the 90% claim minimize the problem?

 

No. The underlying research still points to a serious occupational-health problem. More than half of the respondents in the Wolf study scored in the high burnout range. Measures of anger, anxiety, depression, and fatigue were also elevated compared with population reference values. At the same time, nearly half of respondents scored high in compassion satisfaction. That combination deserves attention.

 

A person can find tremendous meaning in helping animals and still be harmed by the conditions under which the work is being done. Those are not opposites. Someone can love shelter work, care deeply about the animals, feel proud of helping them, and simultaneously be exhausted, angry, grieving, overwhelmed, morally conflicted, or experiencing trauma-related symptoms.

 

The interesting scientific question is not whether shelter work can be difficult. Clearly it can. The harder question is: What exactly is producing the difficulty for a particular worker or group of workers?

 

Are burnout and secondary traumatic stress the same thing?

 

No. Burnout and secondary traumatic stress can occur together, but they describe different problems. Secondary traumatic stress generally refers to trauma-like symptoms associated with indirect exposure to the traumatic experiences of others. That concept certainly can be relevant to shelter work. Employees may encounter animals who have suffered cruelty, starvation, severe neglect, hoarding, fighting, abandonment, serious injury, or other disturbing experiences.

 

But consider a shelter employee working repeated mandatory overtime because several positions remain vacant. The employee is exhausted, irritable, struggling to concentrate, and thinking about quitting. That person may be experiencing substantial occupational strain without the primary problem being secondary trauma. Now consider another employee who repeatedly thinks about a severely injured animal from a cruelty case, experiences distress when encountering reminders of the case, and begins avoiding situations associated with it. Those are different patterns. A third employee may be distressed because management repeatedly makes decisions the employee believes violate humane treatment.

 

And another may be grieving one animal.

 

If we give all four people the same label, we lose information that matters. A 2015 systematic review of occupational stress in animal shelters, veterinary clinics, and biomedical animal facilities identified this problem years ago. Scotney, McLaughlin, and Keates found inconsistent terminology and definitions across the literature, making it harder to identify causes and develop evidence-based interventions. That warning still applies.

 

What does “compassion fatigue” mean?

 

It depends on who is using the term. “Compassion fatigue” has become common language in veterinary medicine, animal welfare, human health care, social services, and other caregiving occupations. The problem is that it has not always meant the same thing.

 

Sometimes it is used almost synonymously with secondary traumatic stress. Sometimes it refers more broadly to emotional exhaustion associated with caregiving. In the ProQOL tradition, compassion fatigue has often been discussed in relation to both burnout and secondary traumatic stress.

 

A 2024 systematic review examined instruments used to measure compassion fatigue among animal-health professionals. The researchers found six different measures or modified measures and concluded that definitions of the construct were vague and that the evidence for the content validity of the reviewed instruments was low.

 

That does not make the experiences imaginary. It means the terminology has outrun the measurement. When someone says an employee has “compassion fatigue,” my next question would be: What specifically are we observing? Without that step, the label can become an explanation for itself.

 

Could some shelter workers be experiencing moral distress instead?

 

Yes. Some of the psychological burden in animal-care work may involve ethical conflict rather than, or in addition to, traumatic exposure.

 

Imagine an employee who believes a particular dog could safely be transferred, rehabilitated, or given more time, but the shelter lacks kennel space, money, staff, placement options, or organizational permission.

 

Or consider someone who must participate in a decision the person believes is wrong but does not have the authority to change. That introduces a different set of variables. The person may not primarily be distressed because an animal previously experienced trauma. The employee may be distressed because he or she believes something morally important should have happened and was unable to make it happen.

 

This is the territory usually described as moral distress. A 2024 systematic review of moral-distress measurement in animal-care workers found that the subject is important but the measurement science remains underdeveloped. Only one measure specifically adapted to animal professionals was identified, and the quality of the supporting measurement evidence was low. That means moral distress should not simply become the next fashionable label either. It is a useful hypothesis when the circumstances fit. It still must be assessed.

 

What is moral injury, and why might it matter in animal shelters?

 

Moral injury concerns lasting harm associated with experiences that violate deeply held moral beliefs or expectations. The concept can involve what a person did, what the person witnessed, what the person could not prevent, or what others in positions of responsibility did or failed to do.

 

Research published in 2026 makes this especially important for animal welfare. Jamie McNally studied 291 U.S. animal-care workers from shelter, rescue, animal control, veterinary, volunteer and foster, and other animal-care settings. In that sample, 83.5% reported at least one potentially morally injurious experience pathway. Witnessing was the most common, followed by being affected by the transgressions of others and direct participation. But the study made an important distinction that is worth preserving.

 

Exposure was not treated as the same thing as moral injury.

 

Among participants reporting a potentially morally injurious event, 18.9% met the study’s threshold for moral injury and another 21.4% met a subclinical moral-distress threshold. That is better reasoning than saying everyone who encountered a morally difficult event was morally injured. The event, the psychological response, and the resulting impairment are separate questions.

 

Is moral injury just another name for burnout or secondary traumatic stress?

 

Apparently not. A second McNally study, published October 1, 2026, directly examined whether moral injury could be distinguished from burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and depression in the same 291-person animal-care sample. Moral injury shared 17% to 39% of its variance with those neighboring constructs. In other words, 61% to 83% of its variance remained distinct. Using ProQOL and depression measures alone correctly classified 66.2% of moral-injury cases. When specific moral-injury measures were included, classification increased to 84.7%.

 

That is an important finding for the shelter field. If an organization assumes that every struggling employee has compassion fatigue, burnout, or secondary traumatic stress, it can miss part of what is happening. And if the problem is misidentified, the intervention may miss the problem too.

 

Before we name the problem, what happened?

 

I would separate several levels before deciding what label best fits.

 

First is exposure. What did the worker actually encounter? Was it a cruelty investigation, a badly injured animal, a hoarding seizure, repeated euthanasia, an animal attack, public hostility, or prolonged exposure to severe suffering?

 

Second are the working conditions. What were the staffing levels? How many hours was the person working? Was overtime mandatory? Were adequate resources available? Did the employee have training for the task? Was supervision available? Did the employee have any control over the work?

 

Third is ethical conflict. Did the person believe something should or should not have happened? Was the employee required to participate in a decision he or she believed was wrong? Did institutional rules, money, capacity, law, safety, or authority prevent the employee from doing what he or she considered appropriate?

 

Fourth is the emotional response. Sadness, anger, grief, guilt, frustration, fear, helplessness, and emotional numbness all deserve attention. They are evidence of how the person is responding. They are not diagnoses by themselves.

 

Fifth are trauma-related symptoms. Intrusive memories, avoidance, hypervigilance, persistent distress associated with reminders, and some forms of sleep disturbance may warrant consideration of a trauma-related process.

 

Sixth is functional impairment. Can the employee sleep adequately, concentrate, make decisions, maintain relationships, work safely, and recover when away from work?

 

Finally, there are clinical conditions. Depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, and other psychiatric conditions require appropriate clinical assessment. They should not be inferred merely because someone works in a shelter and reports distress.

 

These levels can interact, but they should not be collapsed into one another.

 

Why doesn’t a list of symptoms tell us what caused them?

 

Because many of the symptoms commonly listed under shelter-worker stress are nonspecific. Poor sleep can occur with depression, anxiety, shift work, pain, family caregiving, medication effects, environmental disruption, or many other conditions. Fatigue can result from overwork without requiring a trauma explanation. Irritability does not diagnose burnout. Sadness after euthanasia does not automatically indicate psychological pathology. Emotional numbness deserves attention, but the word alone does not tell us its cause. One of the easiest reasoning errors is to work backward: This person works at an animal shelter. This person has trouble sleeping and feels irritable. Therefore this person has shelter-induced secondary traumatic stress.

 

The conclusion does not follow from the observations. The job provides context. The symptoms provide evidence. The mechanism still has to be investigated.

 

Can shelter work produce measurable physiological stress?

 

Yes, but physiological stress is another level of analysis and should not be inferred from a psychological questionnaire. A 2020 pilot study by Andrukonis, Hall, and Protopopova measured heart rate, heart-rate variability, blood pressure, cortisol, and psychological measures in animal shelter employees engaged in caring and killing tasks. The researchers found acute physiological changes associated with some tasks, including changes in heart rate and heart-rate variability. That is useful evidence that aspects of shelter work can have measurable physiological effects. It does not show that shelter workers share one physiological disorder called secondary traumatic stress. An acute bodily response during a difficult task, a chronic occupational condition, a psychological screening score, and a psychiatric diagnosis are four different kinds of claims.

 

We should not move from one to another without evidence.

 

Is employee self-care enough to solve shelter-worker distress?

 

Sometimes individual support is useful, but it cannot correct every organizational problem. Counseling, peer support, exercise, adequate sleep, time away from work, and supportive relationships may all help an individual recover. But if a shelter is chronically understaffed, a mindfulness class does not add staff. If employees are repeatedly required to work excessive hours, a resilience seminar does not shorten the schedule. If workers have no meaningful participation in decisions that carry serious moral consequences, telling them to practice more self-care does not restore decision authority. And if employees repeatedly believe they are being required to act against important professional or ethical values, treating the problem only as their inability to cope can relocate responsibility from the organization to the worker.

 

Research involving animal shelter employees supports the importance of the organizational environment. Satisfaction with employer support has been associated with outcomes including lower burnout, moral injury, perceived stress, and turnover intention. That evidence is correlational, not proof that a particular management program will prevent these outcomes, but it reinforces the need to examine the workplace rather than only the worker. The correct intervention depends upon where the problem is actually occurring.

 

What should animal shelters do with this research?

 

The first step is not to assume that every distressed employee has the same problem.

 

A shelter reviewing employee well-being should ask separate questions about exposure, workload, staffing, scheduling, resources, training, supervision, decision authority, ethical conflicts, social support, symptoms, and functional impairment. Those questions may lead to very different interventions. An exposure problem may call for preparation, rotation, decompression, or reduced unnecessary exposure. A workload problem may require staffing or scheduling changes. A competency problem may require better training. A decision-governance problem may require reconsidering who participates in difficult decisions and what evidence is used. A recurring ethical conflict may require review of policies, resources, institutional priorities, or how contested decisions are discussed. A person experiencing substantial psychological symptoms or impairment may need qualified mental-health assessment.

 

None of those responses should automatically substitute for the others.

 

When does professional assessment make sense?

 

Professional assessment makes more sense when distress is persistent or worsening, sleep or concentration is significantly impaired, work or relationships are deteriorating, safety is affected, trauma-related symptoms are prominent, or the person does not recover after the obvious occupational pressure has been reduced.

 

It also makes sense when nobody can tell which of several plausible problems is driving the distress.

 

A qualified mental-health professional can assess depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other psychiatric conditions. Moral injury and moral distress can also be evaluated as important features of the person’s experience without assuming that either term automatically constitutes a formal psychiatric diagnosis.

 

At the organizational level, the corresponding question is different.

 

The shelter may need to determine whether the employee is reacting primarily to what happened to the animals, what happened at work, what the employee was required to do, what the employee was prevented from doing, or some combination of these.

 

Those distinctions matter because the remedy follows from the problem.

 

What about animal shelter volunteers?

 

Animal shelter volunteers should not be assumed to be protected from these pressures simply because they are unpaid. Jacobs and Reese studied 530 active shelter volunteers in Michigan and found varying levels of compassion fatigue; 61% reported being consistently preoccupied with thoughts about animals in their care. Greater time spent volunteering and working in open-admission shelters or shelters with lower live-release rates were associated with higher compassion-fatigue scores, and the authors concluded that organizational characteristics may be at least as important as individual characteristics in explaining volunteer distress (Jacobs & Reese, 2021). That study measured compassion fatigue broadly, however, so its results should not be converted into a specific prevalence estimate for either burnout or secondary traumatic stress. More recent research involving 143 U.S. animal shelter and rescue workers and volunteers found no significant difference between employees and volunteers in how frequently stressful events occurred or how challenging they were perceived to be. Euthanasia, being unable to save an animal, and exposure to animal abuse were among the most stressful experiences, while burnout and compassion fatigue were the most frequently reported reasons participants said people leave this work (Trevathan-Minnis et al., 2025). The important distinction is that being a volunteer changes the employment relationship, not necessarily the exposure. Volunteers may still form strong attachments, witness suffering and death, confront resource limitations and ethical conflicts, and perform demanding work. Their distress therefore deserves the same careful separation of exposure, workload, burnout, trauma-related symptoms, grief, and moral conflict rather than being assigned a single diagnosis from the fact that they volunteer.

 

What is the real lesson behind the “90% secondary traumatic stress” statistic?

 

The real lesson is not that nearly everyone who works in an animal shelter has the same psychological condition. The 90.9% result points toward a workforce facing substantial occupational strain and deserves serious attention. But a high score on one screening subscale should not be converted into a diagnosis, a national prevalence estimate, or an explanation for every form of shelter-worker suffering.

 

Burnout, secondary traumatic stress, grief, depression, anxiety, moral distress, moral injury, ordinary occupational stress, and normal emotional reactions to difficult events can overlap. They are not interchangeable. If we care about the people doing shelter work, precision is not an academic exercise. It determines what we investigate and what we try to fix.

 

The next question should therefore not simply be, “Does this person have compassion fatigue or secondary traumatic stress?” It should be: What happened, what changed, what is the person experiencing, how is functioning affected, and which part of the situation actually needs to change?That is where useful assessment begins.

 

You can learn more about my work at SamTheDogTrainer.com.

 

Glossary

 

Burnout: A work-related pattern of chronic occupational strain and exhaustion associated with prolonged demands and the conditions under which work is performed. Burnout is not synonymous with traumatic stress.

 

Caseness: A research classification indicating that a participant meets a defined measurement threshold. Caseness should not automatically be treated as identical to a formal psychiatric diagnosis.

 

Compassion fatigue: An inconsistently defined term used for negative psychological consequences associated with caregiving. Depending on the framework, it may refer to secondary traumatic stress, emotional exhaustion, or a combination of burnout and secondary traumatic stress.

 

Compassion satisfaction: Positive fulfillment derived from helping or caring for others. Compassion satisfaction can coexist with substantial occupational distress.

 

Construct: A theoretical concept, such as burnout, depression, secondary traumatic stress, or moral injury, that is inferred from defined observations or measurements rather than directly observed as a physical object.

 

Functional impairment: Difficulty carrying out normal occupational, cognitive, social, or daily activities because of symptoms or a condition.

 

Generalizability: The extent to which findings from a research sample can reasonably be applied to a larger population.

 

Moral distress: Psychological distress associated with serious ethical conflict, particularly when a person believes an action is appropriate but is constrained from taking it. Definitions and measurement approaches vary.

 

Moral injury: Psychological, behavioral, social, or spiritual harm associated with experiences that violate deeply held moral beliefs or expectations. Exposure to a potentially morally injurious event does not mean that moral injury necessarily develops.

 

Occupational stress: Psychological or physiological demand associated with working conditions. It is a broad category rather than a specific diagnosis.

 

Potentially morally injurious event, or pMIE: An experience that may violate deeply held moral beliefs or expectations. Exposure and resulting injury are separate questions.

 

Prevalence: The proportion of a defined population with a condition at a particular time or during a specified period. A percentage found in a voluntary research sample should not automatically be reported as population prevalence.

 

ProQOL: The Professional Quality of Life Scale, an instrument used to measure compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress. It is a screening and research instrument, not a psychiatric diagnostic test.

 

Screening instrument: A tool used to identify elevated symptoms, characteristics, or risk that may warrant additional assessment. Screening and diagnosis are different operations.

 

Secondary traumatic stress, or STS: Trauma-like symptoms associated with indirect exposure to the traumatic experiences of others. STS should be distinguished from burnout, ordinary occupational stress, grief, moral distress, and moral injury.

 

Selection bias: Distortion that can occur when people who participate in a study differ systematically from the wider population the researchers hope to understand.

 

Bibliography

 

Andrukonis, A., Hall, N. J., & Protopopova, A. (2020). The impact of caring and killing on physiological and psychometric measures of stress in animal shelter employees: A pilot study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(24), 9196. doi:10.3390/ijerph17249196.

 

Andrukonis, A., & Protopopova, A. (2020). Occupational health of animal shelter employees by live release rate, shelter type, and euthanasia-related decision. Anthrozoös, 33(1), 119-131. doi:10.1080/08927936.2020.1694316.

 

Baysal, Y., Goy, N., Hartnack, S., & Guseva Canu, I. (2024). Moral distress measurement in animal care workers: A systematic review. BMJ Open, 14, e082235. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2023-082235.

 

Hohman, Z. P., Hall, N. J., & Andrukonis, A. S. (2024). Group identification and employer support predict lower occupational stress in animal shelter employees. Society & Animals, 34(3), 266-288. doi:10.1163/15685306-bja10199.

 

Jacobs, J., & Reese, L. A. (2021). Compassion fatigue among animal shelter volunteers: Examining personal and organizational risk factors. Anthrozoös, 34(6), 803–821. https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2021.1926719. 

 

McNally, J. (2026). Moral injury in animal care workers: Prevalence, pathways, and phenomenology in a cross-sector sample. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, 1820899. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1820899.

 

McNally, J. (2026). Distinguishing moral injury from burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and depression in animal care workers: A condition differentiation analysis. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Advance online publication. doi:10.1037/tra0002308.

 

Noe, M. T. N., Baysal, Y., Masserey, A., Hartnack, S., & Guseva Canu, I. (2024). Measurement of compassion fatigue in animal health care professionals: A systematic review of available instruments and their content validity. Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 11, 1425741. doi:10.3389/fvets.2024.1425741.

 

Scotney, R. L., McLaughlin, D., & Keates, H. L. (2015). A systematic review of the effects of euthanasia and occupational stress in personnel working with animals in animal shelters, veterinary clinics, and biomedical research facilities. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 247(10), 1121-1130. doi:10.2460/javma.247.10.1121.

 

Stamm, B. H. (2010). The Concise ProQOL Manual (2nd ed.). Professional Quality of Life.

 

Trevathan-Minnis, M., Morris, N., & Binder, A. J. (2025). Evaluating perceived stressors and areas of needed support in animal shelter and rescue workers and volunteers. Human-Animal Interactions, 13(1), 0042. https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2025.0042. 

 

Wolf, P. J., Gillespie, M., & Segrin, C. (2024). Measures of well-being in U.S. animal shelter staff during 2023. Journal of Shelter Medicine and Community Animal Health, 3(1). doi:10.56771/jsmcah.v3.81.