Communicating your work to friends and family takes honesty, diplomacy, and empathy

It’s a Friday night and you’re out at a bar with old friends from high school. These people were there when you threw up before tryouts for the play senior year. They were there when you and your first boyfriend had a huge fight in the middle of math class. They know about your problems with your parents. And even though they now have husbands, wives, kids, and lives of their own, in some ways, they still know you better than anyone.

There’s someone else at the bar you wouldn’t mind getting to know, too: a totally cute guy hanging out with his friends, just like you’re hanging out with yours. You get to talking with him, and it’s not long before he asks you that dreaded question: “So, what do you do?”

As you search for an answer, a thousand thoughts run through your head: sometimes it seems like you do everything, from helping people find the right lap cat to teaching kids about proper dog care to cleaning up animals who come in dirty, matted, and scared. And that’s just the simple, happy stuff. You’ve also seen animals who’ve suffered terrible pain and neglect at the hands of cruel or ignorant people. That dog who came in with maggots curling into the wound on his neck from an ingrown collar comes to mind. And there’s the euthanasia, of course. There’s always the euthanasia, which, even when it’s necessary and done well—the only way your shelter will allow it to be done—still hurts, still haunts, still causes more than the occasional twinge of grief and guilt.

You could say anything, and you almost do. Just as you’re preparing to open up—to take this stranger at face value and let him see a little bit of the joy and pain you get out of this complicated and rewarding and sad and amazing job—Neil, one of your old buddies and a longtime wisecracker, blows a little froth off the top of his beer, leans down the bar and says in his best indoor shout, “Oh, I can’t wait to hear this one! Wait, no, buddy: Let me tell you what this little cutie you’re hitting on does for a living. She kills dogs.”

Or maybe you’ve experienced Turkey Trauma: The whole family’s gathered around the table. You’ve got your mom and your stepdad and your stepbrother and your aunt and your two little cousins and your great uncle Ernie (his sciatic nerve is acting up but otherwise he’s just fine, thank you, my boy). Holiday dinners are always loaded with the potential for drama, between your stepdad’s occasional overindulgence in wine and your aunt’s food allergies, but this year it’s a little more complicated: You stopped eating meat six months ago, and so you’re doing the side dishes thing (even though that turkey smells so, so good!).

But it’s going well: Thanksgiving’s all about side dishes anyway, with all the sweet potatoes and bean casserole and corn bread, and you’ve even brought a homemade cranberry-pecan tart. You’re feeling warm, secure—the way your family can make you feel when everyone’s being kind. Your aunt asks you about the dish you brought; she’s eaten two helpings so you know she’s not just being nice.

She mentions her allergy to peanuts and asks why you decided to give up meat. You think, OK, she brought it up, I guess I can talk about it without seeming pushy or preachy, and so—in a calm, friendly voice—you tell her your reasons: your health, the impact of factory farming on the environment, the inhumane way many food animals are raised and slaughtered.

She listens, nods, seems to absorb what you’re saying, but when you finish talking, she rolls her eyes and says—at the exact moment the rest of the table experiences one of those momentary lulls in conversation—“Right, the poor animals. Don’t carrots have feelings, too? That is so stupid! Animals eat each other in the wild all the time!”

The Job That Follows You Home

Something like this has probably happened to you. Maybe it wasn’t so dramatic. But for many animal people, the list of painful and frustrating social situations goes on: the friend who tells you excitedly about how she’s going to breed her poodle, the parent who keeps asking when you’re going to stop wasting your talents and get a real job, the acquaintance who suggests you’re silly to be helping animals when so many humans are poor/hungry/sick. And, of course, all those people who tell you they love animals too much to do what you do.

You know the best answer to that one: You love animals too much to not do it. But unless you’re a saint, the best answer gently spoken isn’t always the one that comes flying to your lips. No, sometimes what you want to say is, “Well, they’re sure a lot easier to love than people, aren’t they?”

Of course, you don’t say that. Not usually, anyway. Not out loud.

But the negative or ignorant comments linger even when you’ve heard them so often you think you’re beyond being hurt by them. The cumulative effect can be painful, like ripping a bandage off a scrape again and again, until it seems like the wound will never heal up. You live with it; you carry it around carefully and are prepared to defend it at the slightest provocation— because it seems like whenever you relax and forget about it, one of your nearest and dearest opens that sucker up and throws a little salt into it.

It’s the people you most depend on and whose feelings you most want to protect—your parents, your siblings, your friends, your partner, your children—who are most able to hurt you. You want them to understand your work because it’s an important part of your life, and if they don’t understand it, it feels like they don’t understand you.

And since so much of your job is about education, gaining empathy from those closest to you can seem critically important. As John Snyder points out, “If I can’t get my own family to understand what I do, how will the general public ever understand it?”

Now the senior director of Companion Animals at The HSUS, Snyder didn’t start out with a fancy title at a national organization. He began his career in animal protection as an animal control supervisor in Alachua County, Florida— or, as the kids who used to tease his children in school put it, as a “dogcatcher.”

“Kids can be cruel, and my kids would get teased about it—‘Oh, your dad’s the dogcatcher. Your dad’s the guy who stole our dog and killed it.’”

Once when a neighbor’s dog got picked up by some of Snyder’s animal control staff, it didn’t matter that he himself hadn’t reported the dog or called his fellow officers: The neighbor told his children they weren’t allowed to play with Snyder’s kids anymore.

As a result of the teasing, Snyder’s kids started trying to hide what he did. When other children would ask, they’d say their father worked for the county. If pressed, they’d say he worked for the public safety department. And if asked what he did, they’d say he was a supervisor— anything to avoid admitting that their father worked for animal control.

“I felt bad because my kids were embarrassed about what I did,” says Snyder.

Clashing with Mainstream Culture

We live in a strange society, one in which companion animals are more babied and coddled than perhaps anywhere else on earth—and yet millions are homeless and neglected. We purport to be a culture of animal lovers, yet the abuses in our factory farms continue on a mind-numbing scale, even as other modernized nations are legislating some measure of humanity back into their food production. We are a nation that claims to value public service, and yet we often reward those who do it with little more than lip service.

When the work is done for animals, the people doing it—whether they’re involved with shelters, animal control, fostering groups, feral cat initiatives, or farm animal sanctuaries— are frequently underpaid, overworked, stigmatized, disrespected, or viewed by the public as part of a radical fringe. Providing a voice for the voiceless—often at minimum wage—is not a job many parents envision for their children.

Gene Bauston, the head of Farm Animal Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, was probably destined for this profession from birth. As a young child, he brought home frogs from the park; in high school he flirted with vegetarianism before committing to it seriously years later. But despite those early signs, his family was still baffled when he first started doing rescue work, he says. As far as they were concerned, the treatment of farm animals was low on the list of societal problems.

“I was always encouraged to go into business and to do what most U.S. citizens do, which is try to make a lucrative living,” says Bauston. “I was encouraged to become an engineer and this kind of stuff, but it was just not something I was driven to do. … We grow up in this country being encouraged to pursue certain goals, one of the primary ones being to make money and make a lot of it.”

What other profession is like animal protection? Animal care work is frequently compared to other high-stress, high-emotion occupations like nursing, policing, and emergency response; certainly those jobs are difficult and emotional. Other jobs may suffer from stigmas and misunderstandings—funeral directors and proctologists, for example, have to deal with their own set of forehead-slapping questions as ridiculous as those that get posed to shelter folks.

But it’s hard to come up with a job outside of animal protection work that carries all these burdens: emotional, physical, and psychological stresses in exchange for little pay and even less respect.

“We’re learning that people in animal care are as vulnerable or even more vulnerable to stress-related disorders [as firefighters and police],” says Carol Brothers, a psychologist and shelter volunteer who leads workshops for shelter professionals through her company, Support Services for Animal Care Professionals. “There are a lot of factors—they don’t get the same kind of recognition from the public, they’re isolated, and then there’s [the difficulty of] what they see on an everyday basis.”

Shouldering the Burden—and the Blame

Shelter workers who’ve been in the field for years still wrestle with their feelings about euthanasia. Many have the same hope Megan Clark did when she took her first shelter job and found out she’d be euthanizing animals. “It was hard to imagine. I had taken a fair number of biology classes in college and I was thinking, I’ve dissected animals, I’ve seen the medical side, I understand in my head why it’s necessary,” says Clark, now the director of education for the Humane League of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania. “You know, I just had to think that it would come to make sense.”

For many, it does come to make a kind of logical, numerical sense: They understand why it’s done and why it is, for now, still necessary.

But most in the field agree that, on an emotional and psychological and where-is-the-justice-in-theworld level, it never does and never will. And that’s what causes some shelter workers to have nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of guilt and shame about the work they do.

Many come to terms with the stress and learn to live with the seeming contradictions. Some have a single-minded commitment to animals that lets them tune out their demons. Others find that support from colleagues helps them ignore the petty societal voices that criticize or trivialize their work.

Having taken on the burden of caring for the animals our society abandons, mistreats, or ignores, humane workers are often abandoned, mistreated, and ignored by a society that would be perfectly content to forget that its own sins— of carelessness, ignorance, cruelty, and neglect—have created the homeless animal problem in the first place.

Those working within the animal protection field often suffer the treatment reserved for the mythical “sin-eater,” described long ago in the context of animal shelter work by euthanasia-stress management expert Bill Hurt Smith. A sin-eater is characterized in some religious traditions as an animal or person who takes on the guilt of another individual or an entire society. In rituals related to the concept of the sin-eater, the symbolic object receives the burden of guilt before being thrown away, killed, or ostracized—a collective back-turning on the very object or individual acting as a savior.

In one ritual related to the tradition, the family of someone who had died would hire a sin-eater to save the dead person from what he had done wrong. A piece of bread was passed over the deceased’s body to the hired sin-eater. The superstition held that when the sin-eater ate the bread, the sins the dead person had committed in life were lifted and he could pass safely into the afterlife. Part of the tradition included a warning: A sin-eater who ate the bread with a grudge in his heart was unable to cast off the sins he had consumed. A sin-eater attempting to save a sinner he was angry at was, thereby, cursed.

Most of these old traditions have fallen from us; we no longer practice or believe in them in the literal way that our ancestors did. But they retain elements of psychological truth—and in the case of shelter folks, the “sin-eaters” in our society’s complex relationship with companion animals, anger towards the people who make their jobs necessary can become a curse.

It’s hard not to be enraged by a seemingly careless public, especially when you don’t have anyone to turn to for understanding and support. Being rejected by those closest to you can create a terrible sense of isolation and resentment. Every year, many dedicated animal lovers quit the field because they cannot handle the stress. Those who keep doing the work often do so almost desperately, as though it’s a joyless addiction. They become depressed, bitter, and increasingly lonely.

Finding Safe Ground

But there are better options. You don’t have to give up the work to feel happier and more connected to your loved ones. You don’t have to feel like a stranger in your own life. Sometimes you just have to come up with new ways of looking at that life, a process that will help you learn to speak about it to the people who matter most.

“What we say to the public about euthanasia is true,” says Brothers. “And that truth can be another piece of coping with it: knowing the truth about not being able to take care of them all and not all of them [being] adoptable.

“But you also need a safe place to go home to, to say how much it breaks your heart.”

When you get to that honest place with friends and family, it can be a huge source of emotional relief. “It’s completely different when you’re talking to a family member,” says Clark. “When you’re talking to the public, you always have your public persona. You have the official, canned talk and you have to be careful about what you say and be supportive of whatever agency you’re working for. … I would never tell a member of the public about the internal debate over euthanizing a specific animal.”

But with her family, Clark has reached a place where she’s able to share her daily sorrows and frustrations and describe the debates she has with staff and with herself. It’s helpful to her not just emotionally and personally but professionally: Hearing family members’ perspectives on various issues helps Clark keep in touch with the beliefs and desires of the public.

Everyone in the field can use more support like this, says Brothers. But you have to be willing to open up, both to your own needs and to the feelings others express to you.

“What people in animal care need to be willing to take on is their own vulnerability,” Brothers says. “They need to have exceptional means of taking care of themselves, and they need to be around safe people and have people to play and share with.”

Those “safe people” should include partners, spouses, friends, and family. Too often, though, the very people that animal professionals would like to open up to are the ones who seem most dangerous. Caring for someone means you care what they think. You’re invested in their beliefs and opinions. Criticism from a trusted person can feel a bit like betrayal.

The next time you find yourself in one of those emotionally dangerous conversations about your work or your convictions, give yourself a moment to consider why it feels so threatening: You and the person sitting next to you care for each other. If you can remember that reason and keep your voice and your attitude open and friendly, your sense of commitment and peace will come through more clearly.

Talking to friends and family brings out a whole complicated set of emotions. You want to be accepted and understood; you are afraid you will be rejected and judged. It may help to realize that on some level, the other party—whether they admit it, whether they’re even conscious of it—probably shares your fears. Your decision to serve animals and people, they often worry, will lead you to judge them for having made a different choice.

It’s a particularly hard fear for a parent to confront, says Bauston. Over the years, Bauston’s parents have grown to understand his work and his battle against factory farming. But it wasn’t always so easy for them to comprehend, says Bauston. Most people in animal protection have gone against the grain of mainstream society. And, as he points out, “There’s an implied rejection of their way of living which is an implied rejection of [their] values, which is not an easy thing for a parent to accept sometimes.”

When a person takes a radically different path than his parents did, tension is usually inevitable. But that tension is liable to be exacerbated if either treats the choice as a personal criticism—something Bauston says he’s been careful not to do. In this way, he says, the approach he’s taken with his friends and family has been much like the one he tries to take with the public: friendly, informative, kind.

“There’s more time when you’re talking with family, but the approach is the same,” he says. “It’s not about being judgmental or putting anybody down.” Patience is vital; much as you might like to perform a Vulcan mind-meld with another person, that technology isn’t yet available on Planet Earth.

“When you’re so committed to a cause, it’s really hard to understand why any other rational person wouldn’t have the same kind of commitment,” says Leslie Irvine, a sociologist and longtime shelter volunteer in Boulder, Colorado.

But it’s important to try. After all, wasn’t there a time when you knew nothing about animal protection yourself? Very few people were born into it; many even grew up in families that let their cats roam, kept their dogs outside, and bought their puppies from pet stores. Remembering how little you knew before you entered the field will help you understand the intentions of those asking questions or making uninformed decisions.

Making the (Non-) Judgment Call

Think about it: There are plenty of jobs out there that make good sense to the people doing them but that you’d never choose for yourself. Do you understand all of your friends’ and family members’ careers or the complex internal collision of psychology, personal history, interests, and necessity that have led them to their fields?

You probably don’t. Even from the inside, very few people could fully explain all the circumstances that led them to do what they do. No matter how carefully we examine our lives and motivations, there are some things that remain hidden from us. Sometimes we don’t know why we did something until years after the fact. Expecting others to understand our web of motivations, in all of their passionate and virtuous and selfish and altruistic and pragmatic complexity, may be setting them up to fail.

When it comes to food choices, people in the animal protection movement fall all over the spectrum. Some love their burgers and see pet overpopulation as an issue completely unrelated to meat consumption. Some are comfortable with hunting but less so with factory farming. Some don’t eat anything with a face but still love their ice cream.

Wherever you stand, these days it’s unlikely for anyone to stay in the animal protection field without eventually having a debate— even if it’s only an internal one—about animals as food sources. It’s an issue that tends to feel deeply personal, and rightly so: We put food into and pass it out of our own bodies. Of the relationships we have with other people, only our parents, children, and lovers can claim anywhere near the intimate physical space that we share with our food.

Some are comfortable talking openly about the issue to family and friends; others would be far happier to discuss the intimate details of their sex lives than get mired in a discussion of the pros and cons of soy milk. Suffice it to say, if you’ve successfully negotiated a calm, friendly discussion about food with someone who eats differently than you do, you’ve got a gift that will serve you well in all personal and professional interactions. You don’t need to be reading this article; in fact, if you ever leave animal protection, you could probably work for the UN.

If we participate in modern society, very little of what we do, buy, or consume is completely pure. Eating meat hurts animals, certainly, but so does driving a polluting car down roads that encroach on wildlife habitats. Wearing fur and leather hurts animals, but so does wearing synthetics that are made of toxic chemical byproducts which degrade the environment. And even when the impact on animals is lessened, a product may have an adverse effect on some other exploited group. This is not to say that we shouldn’t do all we can to reduce our environmental footprint and avoid using products manufactured through exploitation of the weak and disenfranchised. But reminding ourselves that few people can claim to be pure helps us understand other points of view.

Discussing food always involves weighing our own ethics against those of others. That’s why it feels so personal and uncomfortable, and why a discussion of food sometimes results in either/or decisions: your beliefs about food and your desire to air them versus your respect for other people and your desire to protect and honor their feelings and beliefs.

Herbivores and omnivores alike can be hypersensitive about their food. Meat-eaters: Talk to a Vocal Veggie, and you’ll often get more preaching than you would from Jimmy Swaggart; once a new vegetarian has heard the gospel about how their diet can help prevent cancer, obesity, and cruelty, they often want to go out and spread the word. Veggies: Talk to a Bellicose Burger Lover, and you’ll often get sarcastic remarks about tofu-eating lions, lectures about how the shape of human canine teeth proves people were meant to eat meat, or inflated concerns that you’ll drop dead any day from lack of protein.

The outcome of these tête-à-têtes often depends on pre-existing relationship dynamics. If the relationship is mature enough and the other party is secure enough, you may be able to express your beliefs, relate some facts, and have an open, friendly talk about why you eat what you do. You may even make some tiny inroads—and even if you don’t, you can still feel good about having expressed yourself honestly.

Getting Them Involved

Whether it’s food choices or the more mainstream issues that shelter folks deal with, you should try to be happy with baby steps, Irvine says. Those people who come around to our side usually have to be brought there gently.

“You have to pick your battles,” she says. “You might not change [someone’s] mind today about adopting a shelter animal, but maybe next year or next week you can change their mind if you stay civil with them. Or maybe you can’t convince them to get a shelter animal, but you can tell them about rescue groups or about what makes for a good responsible breeder rather than getting a dog from the paper. But if you alienate them, you’ve knocked out all that possibility.”

As a sociologist, Irvine has plenty of good communication strategies to help her cope with some of the misconceptions people have about animal work. But even she gets frustrated— as when her relatives recently bought a Lab puppy from a breeder. It was hard not to feel slighted by that decision, she says.

“And these particular family members are really committed to other causes,” Irvine says. “So I said, ‘It would be like if I came out and said I was going to support this cause you’re really opposed to.’”

Sometimes the best way to communicate with family isn’t talking at all. Talking can feel like lecturing—to both the speaker and the audience. As writing teachers repeatedly tell students learning to craft compelling stories, Show, don’t tell.

When possible, invite friends and family to your workplace, and let your actions and the animals do the talking. A day at the shelter is worth a thousand words.

Bring your kids and your partner in, suggests Brothers, and show them the more kid-friendly work you do. Older kids may be able to handle the more emotional stuff. Let them see that, contrary to what they may hear from their friends, there is real joy in the work. You may be doing difficult things, but you’re also creating happy endings.

Actual participation in an animal rescue helped a family member better understand what Megan Hanrahan does in her job as the lone ACO and animal inspector for the town of Hull, Massachusetts. Hanrahan was driving with her mother-in-law one day when she spotted an injured raccoon by the side of the road.

“I told her that he was hurt and that he needed help,” Hanrahan recalls. “She demanded I get back in the car and I told her, ‘No, if you don’t want to stay, then leave. I’ll find another way back.’”

Hanrahan’s irritated passenger stayed while Hanrahan flagged down a highway department truck. The highway employees were excited about assisting Hanrahan in her efforts to load the raccoon into the car, and the ACO’s mother-in-law started to catch a little of the excitement as they drove the animal to a wildlife rehab center.

“After that incident, she now says I’m crazy, but after being part of the rescue, she has a better understanding of why I do what I do,” Hanrahan says. “Sometimes, if you can somehow involve your friends and family in ‘the cause,’ they will tend to understand better.”

As a behavior counselor at the Stafford Animal Shelter in Livingston, Montana, Tiffani Zimmerman saw her own shelter work and animalfriendly lifestyle make an impact she’d never expected.

Zimmerman’s family had always had pets, she says, but they weren’t a huge priority. “My brother fed our dog food that came in a 40-pound bright yellow bag that said in big black letters ‘DOG FOOD’ on the side. I think it cost about $8.99,” Zimmerman says wryly. “I think they got him neutered when he was around ten. My mom has a cat she loves dearly but it never goes to the vet. They love animals but they don’t go to the extremes that some people do.”

It’s a far cry from Zimmerman’s approach to animal care. “My dog’s going to have $900 surgery next Tuesday,” she says. “They probably wouldn’t do that.”

But a while ago, Zimmerman received a visit from her brother, who is now grown up and who “always had his dogs down in the basement. They never came up in the house because he didn’t want their nails to scratch the floor, and hair all over.”

The poor guy never knew what hit him during the six weeks he hung out with Zimmerman. His dogs slept in the guest room with him, and he saw that his sister’s cats actually jumped onto the countertops to eat their food.

“He just saw the way I lived,” she says. “And I work at the shelter and he came out and saw that. Now, he will only ever get an animal at a shelter, he takes his newest dog to get vaccinated, he believes in spay/neuter. He used to tie his dog out in the yard, but now he calls me and tells me—tells me—that his friends’ dogs are mean because they’re tied up in the yard all the time and not socialized,” Zimmerman says delightedly.

“It’s just amazing, what I’ve seen in my brother, and it seems like he respects me so much more, and I feel like I’ve reached someone in the world.”

Practicing Selective Venting

If you’re in this for the long haul, time and patience are on your side, especially when taking a gentle, nonjudgmental approach that involves leading by example. When Clark started working at the shelter, her husband and mother-inlaw and others in her family had a hard time imagining that she would last in a job that involved performing euthanasia.

“I think it’s still hard for [my mother-in-law] to understand,” says Clark. “People have trouble reconciling you being a nice, sensitive person and euthanizing. ... But after a while, they saw that I was really doing it and that I was still functioning and seemed to have a good grasp on reality and wasn’t rocking back and forth in a fetal position all day—which I think is really what they thought would happen.”

Clark’s learned who she can talk to about what. Some people have a low tolerance for gross stuff; she leaves stories of maggots and sickness out of her conversations with them. Some people have a hard time hearing about animals suffering or about euthanasia. “You learn to compartmentalize who you talk to,” she says. “Maybe I can’t tell them about that stuff, but I can tell them about the old dog we found a home for last week.”

It’s not just a matter of what, but of how much, she says. She’s able to talk about almost anything with her husband; he’s extremely supportive and will let her vent when she needs to. But she has learned to respect her captive audience by setting him free when he needs it. “He’ll get to a point where he says, ‘You know, I just can’t handle any more shelter stories right now,’ ” she says. “It’s hard for him sometimes, because he likes to try to fix things, and he can’t fix it.”

Finding the balance where both parties can be honest about their needs is the trick, says Brothers. You can tell your partner that you’ve had a hard day and would like to talk about it, but ask them how much they’re willing to hear or if they can hear it a little later. You can also ask your partner to check with you from time to time and see how things are. In such ways, honest space between people gets negotiated and both have room for their feelings.

“It’s good to have that kind of open communication, rather than shelter people feeling like they’ve had walls thrown up and have been kind of rejected,” Brothers says.

For Clark’s part, she’s able to understand her friends’ and family’s needs in part because of her own history: Her mother was a social worker who experienced similar problems of needing to talk and yet needing to withhold information for the sake of the people involved and for the sake of her own family’s sanity.

“She worked with abused kids. And I think about talking to her about work, particularly when we were young. She just couldn’t tell us,” says Clark. “She couldn’t say the horrific things that she would see, because we were kids. But she had developed a way of coping, and now that we’re older, she’ll tell me things. And I know I have a limit for how much I can hear of her stories, so I know other people have limits for how much they can hear of mine.”

Deciding What You’ve Got to Lose

While you can’t always expect complete understanding from others, you should always be able to expect civility and respect. It would be a wonderful world if we all treated each other as we want to be treated, but there are some people out there who never learned that lesson.

Call them the bad apples, the poison pills, the obnoxious jerks; call them toxic or passive-aggressive or just flat-out aggressive. Give them the time of day; give them your time and care; give them your honest and best self—and if they don’t respond, give yourself a break.

Many of the people who seem to enjoy—or at least to have made a habit of—insulting and hurting other people are suffering a great deal themselves. Whether their rude tendencies derive from unresolved childhood issues, psychological or chemical problems, or some form of victimization, no matter how much sympathy you feel, at some point you have to set limits and let them know which behaviors are unacceptable.

If someone insists on making fun of your beliefs or deriding what you do, you need to confront that person about it—not by getting into an angry, sarcastic back-and-forth but by being frank about how their behavior makes you feel, says Brothers.

“Like with anyone we really care about who gets hostile or abusive with us, I think it’s really important to be able to say, ‘That really hurts my feelings,’ or ‘When you say that kind of thing, it really makes me feel bad,’ ” says Brothers. “We have to have some ways to communicate to a person that it’s not OK. It’s very appropriate to set some boundaries with a person and remind them that you really love your work and you really love animals, and that when they say this, it makes you feel that they don’t respect you and want to hurt you, and that’s very hard on the relationship.”

And if that kind of honesty doesn’t have the desired effect, you probably need to decide how much care you want to give a person who never seems to respond. “If there are people who are going to continue to be negative, I would say you ought to limit your time with those people,” says Leiann Harker, PsyD, who’s conducted stress workshops for shelter workers in Orange County, California. “Caring for yourself isn’t selfish; it’s self-preservation.”

Overall, communicating and relating to others about your work will be easier if you keep in mind what Shakespeare said, says Harker: “To thine own self be true.”

“If this is what makes you happier and fulfilled, if that is what’s important to you as a person, then you have to realize, too, that there are people who aren’t going to agree,” she says. “Not everyone is going to understand, so don’t expect it.”

If you’ve had the same hurtful, angry conversation repeatedly—whether about feral cats, euthanasia, dog-breeding, meat-eating, or any other contentious issue—then you have to ask yourself some important questions: Should I continue raising the topic and deal with the tension it brings up between us? Or is this a subject I can avoid when I’m dealing with this particular individual?

There’s no set answer to those questions. Maybe the next time it comes up you can say, “We’ve discussed this many times, and I’ve told you what I believe, and you’ve told me what you believe. We don’t seem to be making any headway in changing each other’s opinions, so I think we should just agree to disagree. Let’s talk about something else. For example, we both feel that the mullet is a hairstyle that should never have happened. How can we work together to stop mullets from happening in the future?”

Lighten the mood or at least provide a new subject. Let your friend know you’d prefer to move on, and hope he takes the hint.

Alternatively, you can bring it up again or allow him to continue to engage you on the subject. If you choose to do this, you may eventually lose or at least distance yourself from a friend. That may be okay with you; as we grow and evolve, our relationships shift and change. Some of them deepen, but some of them end.

If you’re educated and aware, you understand the choices you’re making in life. And if you want those choices respected, you should be prepared to extend the same respect and neutrality towards the choices of others—and recognize that, as much as you may disagree with them, those choices do not reflect upon you. But commitment to a belief can be lonely, and your will to speak your truth may be deeper and more important to you than the relationship in question. Just make sure you can live with the potential consequences before you insist to a friend or family member that your choices are the only possible correct ones.

Over the years that Bauston has been involved in animal protection, his group of close friends has changed. “You kind of hang out with people who you see things similarly with,” he says. “I don’t think I’d say I’ve lost friendships, but I do tend to spend more time with people who are more like-minded.”

Clark has had a similar experience. “I’ve never had a situation where I’ve thought, ‘Oh, this is someone I just can’t be friends with because they don’t understand my work,’ ” she says. “Most of the time I think that I’m the one who chose this difficult field, and I understand how hard it is for me and for the people who work here to come to an understanding of what we do.”

Take Down the Defenses

If you can get to a point where you not only say but truly believe that your work is your choice, that you do it well and ethically and kindly, and that no one else has the right to make you feel bad about it, then you’ll feel less of a need to defend yourself from the comments of people who are trying to push your buttons—or who simply don’t know any better. You’ll know that their issues don’t need to affect your feelings about yourself or the job. You won’t be constantly trying to protect your wound, because it will begin to disappear.

“Try not to be as defensive. It’s more personally healing,” advises Brothers. “When we take it all on and take it personally, it’s so devastating and painful. The more the field can do to help people in animal care detach and feel safer and have some skills to be able to respond, the more resilient they will be.”

Getting to that place will help you respond with more acceptance and appreciation when a family member expresses real concern for your stress levels and mood. When you’re on the defensive, any comment that you seem worried/tired/depressed can feel like an accusation and can elicit the urge to snap back and shut down.

But if you feel more comfortable with your work and with your friends’ and family members’ perceptions of it, you’ll be more able to recognize the moments when their worries for you are legitimate and when you may need help. Like other high-stress jobs, animal care work can become an addiction, says Brothers, and when friends and family tell us they’re seeing a problem, we need to be able to hear that and examine our lives without feeling attacked.

Keep in mind, too, that problems aren’t necessarily coming from the specifics of your work. “Some of this dysfunctional relating comes out of dysfunctional relationships and has little to do with the fact that they work in a shelter,” says Brothers. Working too much, not spending enough time with family and friends, feeling guilty or angry or ignored, having a hard time expressing your fears and needs—all of these are common problems in relationships between regular people who’ve never even set foot in an animal shelter.

Even though the work is inherently emotional and stressful, the painful feelings you experience in relationships can often be caused by problems that go back further, run deeper, and are more universal and inherent to all human interactions; your communication and intimacy issues may spring from the simple stress of being alive as a human being. Relationships cause stress and pain for everyone, but there are ways to get at those issues, whether it’s by taking a parenting class, going to couples’ therapy, or investigating anger management therapy.

Being less defensive can help us respond to the people who have valuable, external perceptions about our lives and behaviors; we can open ourselves to those new perspectives that will help us grow, both personally and professionally.

“We need people who are nurturing and supportive in a kind way,” says Harker, “but we also need people who are willing to help us look at something that we need to work on.”

In a perfect world, a world where we all express ourselves with kindness and honesty, when we experience conflict with intimate friends about the jobs we do and the beliefs we hold, we would be able to say something like this: “This is what I believe and this is what I do. I do it because it is meaningful to me and because I think it’s important work. These are the things I like about my job. These are the things I don’t like. I would like you to understand my work, and I would like you to support it. But if you can’t support it, I hope that you can still support me and recognize that even though we have different opinions and don’t understand everything about each other’s choices, we can still care about each other.”

That’s the ideal, of course, but good luck trying to say all that without feeling like a giant Velveeta cheeseball.

Still, you can say as much in smaller, less dramatic ways, as John Snyder has done. Even while being trampled underfoot for years at Alachua County Animal Services, he continued doing his job quietly, ethically, and well.

He dealt honestly and legally with the friends who asked him to get their dogs out of the shelter for free. He learned to rely on the company of his colleagues, who, he says, have become his closest friends—and not just because they understand and support what he does, but because “you can never get a break from talking about your work when you’re with people who don’t do it,” he jokes. “It’s like the party where there’s a doctor and people keep asking him about the ache in their elbow—I’ve been at parties where people just ask me dog questions. People who do this job know you want a break.”

He earned the respect of county commissioners and other departments, not to mention his staff; the animal control facility in the county is now named after Snyder. He helped get the funding to get it built; it was the first building in the county to be named after an employee.

Now at The HSUS, he has a substitute set of kids in many of the young, idealistic HSUS staffers who see him as the wise and funny mentor they need as they grapple with the complex and contradictory realities of animal protection work. Not only that, but his own real kids—all grown up now, several with families of their own—call and tell him about what they do to train and spoil their pets.

“I get the sense they look to me for approval about that stuff now,” he says.

Honesty and openness can go a long way to making your life and relationships easier and more enjoyable. They are the best coping strategies we have for life and for work. And we should look for the signs that the techniques are working, Brothers says, because they don’t always make themselves known. Her consulting partner recently witnessed a scene that told her someone had been doing a good job communicating their work to their family.

It was at a grocery store, where a mother and little girl had parked themselves next to a box and a sign that read “FREE PUPPIES.”

“And this other child came running over, and my partner was thinking, ‘This kid is going to be like, Oh, I want a puppy!’ ” Brothers recalls.

“And instead, the other child said to the mother, ‘Don’t you know that you shouldn’t be having all these puppies? You should be spaying and neutering!’ ”

It was a heartening experience, she says, “and the reason it happened is because of people in this field. And we need to hear that: As many dead ends as we run into in trying to share about this work, there are so many openings.”

Carrie Allan is the associate editor of Animal Sheltering—or, as her father insists on calling it, Dog Pound News.