September is Suicide Prevention Month. Within animal welfare, much of the conversation about suicide has understandably focused on veterinary professionals. There is good reason for that. Elevated suicide risk within veterinary medicine has been researched, documented and increasingly recognised. But veterinary professionals are not the whole animal welfare sector.
People working in rescue, shelters, sanctuaries, fostering and independent animal welfare can spend years dealing with cruelty, neglect, abandonment, death and extraordinarily difficult decisions. We know that people in animal rescue have died by suicide. I know people who have. What we do not know is how many.
We do not have anything approaching the same understanding of suicide among rescue workers that has been developed for veterinary professionals. Research has identified psychological pressures within animal welfare work, including burnout, secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue, but we do not have a reliable picture of how many people working in rescue are experiencing suicidal distress or how many have taken their own lives.
We cannot know what caused another person’s suicide, and we should never try to reduce something so complex to a single event. But we do know something about the environment in which rescue workers operate. We know about exhaustion, repeated exposure to suffering and death, financial pressure, impossible decisions and the responsibility of caring for animals nobody else will take. What I think we have been much less willing to talk about is the additional pressure that can come from other people.
I can speak about that from experience. I have witnessed animal suffering that most people will fortunately never encounter. Some of the cases that have crossed my desk have involved abuse at an almost incomprehensible level. I have dealt with animals who were sexually abused and died from their injuries. I have seen severe cruelty, neglect, injury and death. I have seen the distress, the pain and the terror. I have seen things that haunt me. Things I can never unsee.
Yet the times when I have personally been pushed closest to the edge have not been because of the animals. They have been because of people.
That is uncomfortable to say publicly, but during Suicide Prevention Month I think our sector needs to be prepared to say uncomfortable things. An already exhausted and traumatised person does not have an unlimited capacity to absorb more pressure, yet sometimes we behave as though they should.
Criticism in animal rescue can be vicious. Social media has created an environment in which decisions can be picked apart by hundreds of people who know very little about the circumstances in which they were made. Motives are questioned, reputations are attacked and allegations are repeated by strangers until something that began as one person’s suspicion starts to look like established fact. For years, people working in rescue have effectively been told to accept it. Don’t engage. Ignore them. Grow a thicker skin. Concentrate on the animals.
I no longer believe that is good enough. It places the responsibility on the person receiving the behaviour rather than asking whether the behaviour itself is acceptable.
There is another form of pressure that I think many people running animal welfare organisations will recognise. People outside an organisation sometimes believe strongly that it should be doing something differently. There is nothing wrong with that. Feedback is necessary in any healthy organisation. It can expose weaknesses, challenge assumptions and make us reconsider what we are doing. At Dog Desk Animal Action we listen to feedback. Recommendations can be discussed and, where appropriate, taken to our board. Sometimes they result in change and sometimes they do not.
Listening to somebody is not the same as agreeing with them. There may be financial, legal, welfare, operational or governance considerations that somebody outside the organisation cannot see. A board has to weigh those things together and make a decision for which its members ultimately carry responsibility. Taking somebody’s recommendation seriously does not mean that they are entitled to have it adopted.
Most people understand that. Occasionally somebody does not. What began as feedback becomes a grievance. The person talks to others, small groups form and people begin reinforcing one another’s interpretation of events. What started as disagreement can develop into gossip, repeated allegations and relentless attacks on the organisation or the individuals running it. At that point we are no longer talking about constructive feedback.
People are entitled to recommend. They are entitled to disagree with a decision and they are entitled to stop supporting an organisation if they no longer agree with its direction. They are not entitled to punish the people running it because they did not get the decision they wanted.
I have seen what vicious online behaviour can do within my own organisation. We lost an excellent social media manager after she became the target of people she did not know. The final straw followed two simple photographic edits. She removed a fence from one photograph so that people could see a dog more clearly and removed an object from another to improve the image. A group of people on Bluesky decided those edits represented something they did not. Completely false accusations followed and it did not remain a disagreement about photographs. People pursued her across the internet. That incident was the last straw. She had enough. We lost somebody who was very good at her job because of the behaviour of other people.
More recently, Dog Desk Animal Action itself was publicly accused on Bluesky of being a scam organisation. This time I responded differently. I instructed a specialist lawyer. And I will continue to do so.
That was not an attempt to prevent scrutiny. Scrutiny is fundamental to our own work. We scrutinise governments, municipalities, shelters, organisations, legislation and decisions affecting animals. We ask difficult questions and sometimes publish uncomfortable findings. But we have a framework for doing it & we are answerable for everything we say & do. We establish what the evidence supports, distinguish allegation from established fact, seek primary sources wherever possible and consider context. Where specialist knowledge is required, we seek it. When we cannot substantiate something, we say so.
That isn’t about being polite. It is about being accurate.
Animal rescue needs scrutiny. Organisations caring for animals and raising money from the public must be accountable. Genuine scams should be exposed and poor welfare should be challenged. But those doing the scrutinising have responsibilities too. Someone without veterinary knowledge can misunderstand a veterinary decision. Someone unfamiliar with animal welfare in another country can misunderstand its laws or systems. Someone looking at a photograph, invoice or fundraising appeal may see something they do not understand and decide that the explanation must be dishonesty. Not understanding something is not evidence of a scam.
Once a serious allegation is released onto social media, its consequences can be difficult to control. Screenshots travel, other people repeat it and strangers join in. The allegation can become detached from whatever evidence originally existed. Meanwhile, behind the account being discussed is a human being who may already be exhausted, traumatised, worried about the next veterinary bill, responsible for animals nobody else will take and carrying things about which the people attacking them know absolutely nothing.
Then another pressure is added. And another. And another. Without measure or education.
This is where I believe the conversation about suicide prevention in animal rescue needs to change. We cannot say that a particular argument, allegation or online attack caused somebody’s suicide. Suicide is far too complex for that. But neither should we pretend that cumulative pressure does not matter simply because we cannot identify which pressure was the final one.
Our response too often concentrates on the person experiencing distress. Become more resilient. Take a break. Step away from social media. Practise self-care. Ask for help. Those things may have their place, but prevention must also mean asking what we can do about the pressures themselves.
We don’t need less scrutiny. We need better scrutiny. We need informed and educated criticism. We need people who understand the subject they are commenting upon, who check before accusing and who can distinguish disagreement from wrongdoing. We need people willing to correct misinformation as readily as they circulated it.
We also need to understand much more about suicide and suicidal distress among rescue workers themselves, and this is something Dog Desk Animal Action intends to begin looking at more closely in 2027.
There is a clear reason for us to do so. Our formal objects specifically provide for research, data collection, documentation and reporting to improve understanding of animal welfare issues and support transparency, accountability and informed decision-making. They also allow us to provide education, guidance and advisory support that strengthens capacity and improves outcomes for animals and communities.
The people doing animal welfare work are part of that capacity. When an experienced rescue worker leaves because they can no longer tolerate the pressure, knowledge and experience leave with them. When an organisation loses a good employee or volunteer, its ability to help animals is diminished. If people working in our sector are experiencing suicidal distress or dying by suicide, understanding what is happening to them is not something separate from animal welfare. It affects the ability of the sector to deliver it.
In 2027, we intend to start looking at what evidence exists around suicide and suicidal distress among people working in rescue, where the gaps in that evidence lie and what pressures within and around the sector need greater attention. We already know that some rescue workers have died by suicide. What we don’t know is how many. For a sector that knows its people can be exposed to trauma, exhaustion, financial pressure, enormous responsibility and public hostility, that is a significant gap in our knowledge.
Researching it, however, does not mean that we need to wait until 2027 to address behaviour we can already see.
There is a point at which criticism stops being criticism. When somebody becomes fixated on a public-facing member of an organisation, repeatedly targets that individual, follows them from platform to platform, monitors their activity, continually resurrects allegations, encourages others to join in or refuses to disengage regardless of the answers they have been given, we should stop dismissing that behaviour as simply part of being visible online.
A public-facing role is not consent to being relentlessly pursued.
Nor should the solution always be to make the person being targeted disappear. Close your account. Block them. Don’t respond. Ignore it. That deals with the target. It does nothing to address the behaviour of the person who has chosen to make somebody a continuing focus of their attention.
Organisations have responsibilities here too. Staff, volunteers, trustees and directors should not be left to manage sustained targeting alone. Organisations should document what is happening, preserve evidence and protect their people. Where there are false allegations, threats, harassment or behaviour that may have legal significance, professional advice should be sought rather than expecting somebody simply to endure it.
The wider sector has responsibilities as well. We do not have to provide an audience for somebody else’s fixation. We do not have to join groups devoted to discussing another rescue worker. We do not have to repeat allegations we have not verified or encourage somebody who is escalating a personal grievance. We should not wait until the person on the receiving end breaks before deciding that perhaps things went too far.
Making a recommendation does not create an entitlement to have it adopted. Calling yourself an investigator or scam hunter does not remove the obligation to get your facts right. Having a social-media account does not remove responsibility for your own conduct.
Accountability works both ways.
Dog Desk Animal Action will continue to scrutinise organisations, authorities and governments because that is part of our work. In doing so, we accept responsibilities of our own: to establish evidence, understand what we are examining, distinguish fact from allegation and correct ourselves when necessary. Anyone scrutinising us, or anybody else in this sector, should expect to meet the same basic standard.
For too long, people working in animal rescue have been expected to sit back, ignore it and take it. That needs to end. Protecting rescue workers does not mean protecting them from legitimate criticism. It means refusing to normalise intimidation, relentless targeting, personal fixation, unsubstantiated allegations and behaviour that follows somebody beyond reasonable scrutiny.
We know people in animal rescue have died by suicide. We know others are struggling. We know some of the pressures that can accumulate around people who are already exhausted and traumatised. What we do not know is the scale of the problem, how those pressures interact or what our sector could do differently to reduce them.
In 2027, Dog Desk Animal Action intends to start finding out.
Because suicide prevention cannot only be about helping somebody once they have reached the edge. It must also mean protecting the people doing this work, holding people accountable for behaviour that causes avoidable harm and becoming much less willing to accept the idea that being relentlessly attacked is simply part of working in animal rescue.