Introduction
Most people are protected from suicide by a natural fear of death and pain. This is not a failing; it is one of the most fundamental psychological safeguards human beings possess. For veterinary professionals, however, this safeguard may be quietly eroded across a career spent administering controlled, compassionate death.
This article examines what the research tells us about the relationship between repeated professional exposure to euthanasia and the psychological shift in how veterinary professionals relate to their own mortality. The findings are important, somewhat uncomfortable, and too rarely discussed openly within the profession.
Acquired Capability: The Theoretical Framework
In 2005, psychologist Thomas Joiner proposed what has become one of the most influential frameworks in suicide research. His interpersonal theory (Joiner, 2005) identifies three components necessary for a person to move from suicidal thinking to suicidal action: thwarted belonging, perceived burdensomeness, and what Joiner terms “acquired capability.”
Acquired capability refers to a reduced fear of pain and death, built through habituation to experiences that most people find frightening or distressing. It is not the same as wanting to die. It is the gradual erosion of the psychological barrier that separates thinking about suicide from acting upon it.
For most people, acquired capability develops through personal trauma, repeated self-harm, or prolonged exposure to violence. In veterinary medicine, a distinct pathway exists that is almost entirely professional in origin. Veterinary professionals routinely administer death in a calm, controlled, clinical context, understood by all parties as an act of compassion. Over time and at sufficient frequency, this professional normalisation of death may have consequences that extend beyond the consulting room.
Fearlessness About Death: What the Evidence Shows
Witte, Correia and Angarano (2013) were among the first to test this framework in a veterinary context. They found that veterinary students with greater experience of performing euthanasia showed significantly higher fearlessness about death, one of the core components of acquired capability. The more euthanasias a student had performed, the less fear of death they reported. This was not a finding about intention or mental health difficulty. It was about the measurable psychological effect of normalised, repeated proximity to dying.
Glaesmer and colleagues (2021) extended this inquiry to practising German veterinarians. Their study found a significant association between lower euthanasia distress and higher fearlessness about death. Veterinarians who had become emotionally accustomed to euthanasia over time showed greater fearlessness about death overall. The authors noted that this fearlessness did not differ significantly between veterinarians as a whole and the general population; the effect appears most concentrated among those who have habituated most strongly to the procedure.
Taken together, these studies suggest that euthanasia experience does not create a uniform psychological shift across all practitioners. Rather, it creates a vulnerability in a subgroup of professionals, those whose repeated, frequent exposure has led to measurable habituation, and who may no longer perceive death with the instinctive wariness that protects most people.
Frequency Matters: The NORVET Study
The question of frequency is central to understanding how this risk pathway develops. Dalum, Tyssen, Moum and colleagues (2024), in the NORVET study (a nationwide cross-sectional survey of Norwegian veterinarians), found that performing euthanasia five or more times per week was significantly associated with serious suicidal thoughts. This association held after accounting for other occupational and psychological risk factors, pointing to the volume of euthanasia itself as a meaningful and independent variable.
This suggests something closer to a dose-related relationship. It is not simply the fact of performing euthanasia that carries risk; it is the accumulation over time and the density of exposure within a given period. For veterinarians working in high-throughput environments, this finding deserves particular attention.
Tran, Crane and Phillips (2014) similarly found that performing euthanasia carried a distinct and independent association with both depression and suicidal ideation in veterinarians, separate from the effects of general occupational stress or burnout. Euthanasia was not merely a proxy for broader distress. It carried its own independent psychological weight.
Does Professional Acceptance Shape Personal Attitudes Toward Death?
Perhaps the most searching question in this area is whether veterinary professionals, through their professional experience of euthanasia as a valid and compassionate clinical act, come to view voluntary death differently for themselves.
Bartram and Baldwin (2010) noted in their structured review that “the veterinary profession’s role in providing animal euthanasia and so facilitating a ‘good death’, may normalise suicide, with death perceived as a rational solution to intractable problems.” This is one of several mechanisms proposed to account for the elevated suicide risk in the profession. The concern here is not that veterinary professionals make a conscious equivalence between clinical euthanasia and human suicide. The concern is more subtle: repeated professional exposure to a framed, medicalised and normalised form of death may, gradually and without intention, erode the psychological barriers that protect against suicidal behaviour.
The NORVET study (Dalum et al., 2024) offers useful evidence on this point. It found that 55% of surveyed veterinarians agreed that euthanasia should be permitted for humans with a fatal disease and a short life expectancy. Critically, however, the frequency with which a veterinarian performed animal euthanasia was not significantly associated with more permissive attitudes toward human assisted dying. The relationship between euthanasia frequency and suicidal ideation appears to operate through psychological and emotional habituation, rather than through any deliberate philosophical alignment between the two.
The risk does not appear to arise from veterinary professionals consciously framing suicide as a good death they deserve. The more likely mechanism is that repeated, normalised exposure to controlled dying gradually reduces the instinctive resistance to the idea of one’s own death, a resistance that in most people serves as a powerful and often invisible protective factor.
When Multiple Risks Converge
No single factor fully explains the elevated suicide rate among veterinary professionals. Rymaszewska et al. (2026) performed a national cross-sectional study of 783 Polish veterinarians to examine intersecting risk factors, finding that the combination of chronic moral stress and professional proximity to lethal pharmacological agents creates a distinctly elevated risk profile. Acquired capability, when it develops alongside unaddressed psychological burden and easy access to means, becomes genuinely dangerous.
Familiarity with death is not, in isolation, inherently pathological. Within the specific conditions of veterinary work, where moral burden, occupational stress, professional isolation and access to lethal means can coexist over many years, that familiarity becomes a risk factor worth taking seriously.
A Note of Caution
Glass (2025) has rightly cautioned against “taken-for-granted truths” in veterinary suicide research: narratives that become accepted and repeated without sufficient empirical support. The field is still developing robust, standardised measurement tools. Some studies have found no significant desensitisation effect at the profession-wide level. Causal claims in this area remain premature, and the evidence should be engaged with carefully rather than used to pathologise an entire professional group.
What the evidence does justify, with increasing confidence, is targeted awareness, open professional conversation, and institutional support for those who may be navigating this risk without recognising it.
Conclusion
Familiarity with death is an unavoidable feature of veterinary work. For most professionals, it is managed, processed and carried without catastrophic consequence. For some, particularly those performing euthanasia at high frequency or those doing so while carrying other unaddressed burdens, the cumulative psychological effect may be significant.
The research asks us to take seriously not only the emotional aftermath of individual euthanasias, but the quieter and slower process by which repeated professional proximity to death may shift the psychological landscape in ways that increase vulnerability. It is cause for conversation, for awareness, and for the kind of professional support structures that allow these conversations to happen safely.
References
Bartram, D.J. and Baldwin, D.S. (2010) ‘Veterinary surgeons and suicide: a structured review of possible influences on increased risk’, Veterinary Record, 166(13), pp. 388–397.
Dalum, H.S., Tyssen, R., Moum, T. et al. (2024) ‘Euthanasia of animals: association with veterinarians’ suicidal thoughts and attitudes towards assisted dying in humans. A nationwide cross-sectional survey (the NORVET study)’, BMC Psychiatry, 24, p. 2. doi: 10.1186/s12888–023–05402–7.
Glaesmer, H., Bahramsoltani, M., Schwerdtfeger, K. and Spangenberg, L. (2021) ‘Euthanasia distress and fearlessness about death in German veterinarians’, Crisis, 42(1), pp. 71–77. doi: 10.1027/0227–5910/a000689.
Glass, J. (2025) ‘Moving away from “taken-for-granted truths” in veterinary suicide research’, Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory Blog. Available at: https://suicideresearch.info/2025/01/31/moving-away-from-taken-for-granted-truths-in-veterinary-suicide-research/ (Accessed: 12 July 2026).
Joiner, T.E. (2005) Why People Die by Suicide. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rymaszewska, J., Fila-Pawłowska, K., Szcześniak, D., Hildebrand, W., Pawłowska, E. and Magdziarz, M. (2026) ‘Is access to euthanasia drugs and moral stress linked to suicide rates in veterinarians? A cross-sectional national survey and network analysis’, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1795845.
Tran, L., Crane, M.F. and Phillips, J.K. (2014) ‘The distinct role of performing euthanasia on depression and suicide in veterinarians’, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 19(2), pp. 123–132. doi: 10.1037/a0035837.
Witte, T.K., Correia, C.J. and Angarano, D. (2013) ‘Experience with euthanasia is associated with fearlessness about death in veterinary students’, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 43(2), pp. 125–138. doi: 10.1111/sltb.12000.
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