April Primus has nightmares that her pets -- five cats, four dogs, a horse and a pony -- are being killed by lethal injection.
Usually these come during periods of peak stress at her workplace, the Loudoun County Animal Shelter: late spring and early summer, when cat breeding season delivers feral kittens by the boxful and she spends hours euthanizing them and then thinking about their souls.
"I still remember my first episode with a kitten," said Primus, 35, a field technician. "It takes its toll."
Like Primus, many shelter workers adore animals but must bear the emotional brunt of animal overpopulation while putting up with a public that often derides their work and treats animals callously. The job can be so traumatic, shelter directors and psychologists say, that workers are often afflicted with nightmares, depression, suicidal thoughts and fears of going to hell.
"Shelter people are at as high a risk or higher as other first responders, like doctors, because of the fact that they deal with crises constantly, but they get so little respect and acknowledgments from the public," said Carol Brothers, a Crownsville clinical psychologist. She leads "compassion fatigue" workshops at animal shelters and founded the nonprofit Support Services for Animal Care Professionals.
In recent years, such workshops have multiplied as shelter directors pay more attention to the patterns of trauma that researchers have documented, said Randy Lockwood, a vice president and psychologist with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Loudoun shelter held a workshop last month.
Shelter officials say they work hard on limited budgets to find animals homes, and they view euthanasia as a consequence of an animal surplus, not a solution. Most shelter workers who last -- attrition rates are high -- say the joy of caring for animals and placing them in loving homes outweighs the negativity.
But battling animal overpopulation is a Sisyphean quest. The Humane Society of the United States estimates that shelters euthanize 3 million to 4 million animals each year.
Even at places that contribute a fraction to the toll, such as the Loudoun shelter, the work can be heartbreaking, workers say. The shelter euthanized 1,360 dogs and cats in the most recent fiscal year, about 47 percent of all the dogs and cats it took in.
Amy Seymour, 27, a dispatcher and desk clerk at the shelter, said workers learn not to bond with animals that do not stand a chance: the brood of dehydrated and worm-bloated kittens she found deposited at the front gate one morning; the sweet-as-can-be pit bulls, a breed that Loudoun, like many jurisdictions, forbids shelters from making available for adoption.
Smaller shelters such as Loudoun's rarely euthanize for space; many animals killed are ill, feral or deemed too vicious for adoption. Others have been confined so long that they become aggressive or self-destructive. But larger shelters often cannot keep up with the volume. Life-or-death decisions can come down to hue: Too many black dogs can mean some have to go, and workers must make the wrenching choices.
Euthanasia, experts say, is just one stressor. Shelter workers say it can be harder to deal with people who treat animals as disposable, offering a litany of excuses -- about moving or about the cat not matching the carpet -- when surrendering them.
