How injury, overwork, and a culture of endurance are pushing Canada’s equine vets to the limit.

By Caelan Beard 

With an ongoing equine veterinarian shortage in Canada, there’s a concern that equine vets, already stretched thin, are also being injured at work at alarming rates. 

A new study by John S.P. Tulloch and colleagues at the University of Liverpool, and CVS UK, a major integrated provider of veterinary services in the UK and Australia, has found that veterinarians tend to downplay their injuries and work through them. In Canada, the veterinary industry may face similarly high rates of workplace injuries — and this could be affecting not just their physical well-being, but also their longevity in the profession.

Grin and Bear It

This largest-ever study on veterinary workplace injuries was conducted with 740 veterinary colleagues, broadly representative of the profession, starting in 2022, and published in Preventive Veterinary Medicine in April 2025. It found that among equine, production animal, and mixed veterinary practices, over 90 percent of clinicians had experienced injury during their careers, and just under half of equine clinical staff reported being injured in the last year. 

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The most common injury for equine vets was a kick to the leg or head, usually while they were examining distal limbs. Head injuries also occurred not just from being kicked in the head, but from being kicked hard enough elsewhere on their body that it sent them flying — often into a brick or concrete wall or floor.

Worryingly, the study found that few veterinarians took time off or attended the emergency department when injured. They tended to downplay serious injuries and expressed not wanting to let the rest of their team down by leaving them short-staffed, especially in small practices.

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Veterinary practices are businesses, and many operate as sole proprietorships, where a single veterinarian owns and operates the practice and is personally liable for its debts. Combined with a vet’s deep commitment to their patients, this makes taking time off after injury especially difficult. Photo: iStock/Lacheev  

“We’ve got quotes of individuals that, you know, they’ve broken their foot, and then they’ve just carried on… they’re just going to sort of grin and bear it,” Tulloch said. “You’ve got people working with really quite severe injuries.” 

The study highlights a veterinary culture that doesn’t prioritize health and well-being, with attitudes towards injuries as just part of the job.

“When I’ve spoken to people in the field of occupational health who’ve never been involved with the veterinary industry, and they’ve read some of this research, they are absolutely horrified,” Tulloch said. “They can’t believe the culture and attitudes within the veterinary profession. They’ve described it as like the construction industry in the 1970s.”

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The 2016 Survey of Equine Practitioners by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) and the American Association of Equine Practitioners (AAEP) found that nearly four-fifths of them had been injured at work, and that “equine veterinarians commonly continue to work despite injuries.”

Continuing to work with injury could negatively impact recovery and poses additional risks. “We know from injury research that if you work whilst injured, you increase the likelihood that you’re going to get injured again, but also your colleagues [are] going to get injured,” said Tulloch.

In addition to their recent UK study, Tulloch’s team has just finished an international survey, which aims to understand attitudes around injury at equine hospitals worldwide.

There might be differing results within the variety of equine cultures. “The equestrian world in the UK is potentially very different to North America. We don’t have a tradition of rodeo and western riding sports at all,” he said. Could attitudes among equine veterinarians in North America be even tougher? Possibly. “But my gut feeling is still that it’s going to be quite a hardy attitude generally across the equine veterinary profession.”

Tulloch is also working on a study that looks at injuries among veterinary students. Even early in their careers, students expressed that same hardiness and seemed to view being injured as “almost a rite of passage,” he said.

For some of the students, it’s their dream to go into equine vet medicine, regardless of what the potential risks are, Tulloch explained.

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“I don’t think it’s necessarily going to stop them from wanting to pursue those careers initially,” he said. “But I do wonder from the retention side, whether it does stop people staying in the profession.

“You know, if one in 10 individuals, their most recent injury was a kick to the head, that’s not really a great place to be in,” he said. “If someone gets a severe traumatic brain injury, that could be the end of their career.”

And if vets are getting injured and aren’t wearing any form of personal protective equipment (PPE), “there is the potential that there are going to be fatalities at some point.”

There is always risk involved when working around and under horses, and veterinarians typically do not wear any personal protective equipment. Photo: Pam Mackenzie  

Not Enough Equine Vets

Equine veterinarians have been raising the alarm on the critical shortage of equine vets in Canada for years, with the demand for veterinary services growing and veterinary clinics increasingly at capacity.

Horse owners are experiencing long wait times, with some areas — particularly rural and remote communities — entirely without the service of a vet. Meanwhile, equine vets often put in long hours in a profession that can be dangerous and physically demanding; in Canada, the suicide rate among veterinarians is almost three times higher than the Canadian average.

A Veterinary Workforce Research Study, conducted by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association in 2020, called for long-term strategies to grow both the Canadian veterinarian and veterinary technician populations.

The percentage of vet grads from AVMA-accredited universities going into equine practice is 1.3 percent, and research from the AAEP shows that 50 percent of new grads will leave equine practice in their first five years.

Dr. Mike Pownall, an equine veterinarian and co-owner of McKee-Pownall Equine Services in Campbellville, Ontario, says the equine vet industry has “a horrible attraction problem, and we have a horrible retention problem.”

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The factors for that, Pownall says, include an intensive workload and lower salaries compared to companion animal practice. But “there are a lot of good practices that really offer, you know, work-life balance, reasonable hours, good pay,” he added.

Pownall acknowledges that equine vets and technicians do get hurt. “A lot of us will talk about broken toes, broken legs… I’ve worked through cracked toes.” Still, he’d rather be kicked by a horse than bitten by a cat, he says. “The cat will cause a lot more problems.”

Keeping People Safe

In the UK, Tulloch’s study has prompted the CVS Equine vet group to mandate PPE for equine teams. That includes requiring veterinarians and vet techs to wear a hard hat whenever they’re working with a horse, pony, or donkey.

Wearing protective headgear at work is not commonplace for vets in Canada — but it’s not unheard of.

One of the vets at Pownall’s practice was hit in the head by a horse and ended up off for two months with a concussion. Now, when that vet is at work and in a position where he’s worried about getting hit in the head, he wears a helmet. “We encourage him doing it,” Pownall says. Yet there can be a lingering stigma within the horse community around doing things outside of the norm. “It’s kind of like when hockey first started mandating face masks and helmets, and the old hires were like, ‘I don’t need it. I’m fine.’”

While Pownall believes the vet community will inevitably accept changes for safety’s sake, he expects the shift to be gradual. “We as a community need to be not judgmental [but] accepting when somebody decides that their health is more important than what people think of them.”

In the recently published study, Tulloch and his fellow researchers asked vets who had been injured whether they’d change their behaviour if they were placed in a similar situation again. Two-thirds said they would go into it in the same way. “They didn’t feel that there was effectively any way that they could have avoided that injury from happening,” Tulloch said. But that’s not true: “Wider injury prevention research would suggest that almost all injuries are preventable… there’s maybe scope for trying to get the veterinary community to sort of reassess how they [evaluate] risk.”

There are a lot of things that vets can do, says Pownall. At his practice, they have vet assistants with the vets every day, so there’s a trained person handling horses during vet work. Veterinarians should also “not be afraid and not be shy about sedating a horse to protect yourself and sedating it properly so you can work on the horse.”

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Whether you’re a solo practitioner or part of a team can also make a difference.

Dr. Daniel McMaster is one of the founding members of the Ontario Association of Equine Practitioners, and a recently retired equine veterinarian of 46 years. He started his career working solo for 15 years; being a solo practitioner is “very difficult,” he says. “They do burn out.”

He was almost going to throw in the towel with his practice, McMaster says. Instead, he started a facility where vets worked for him and handled the work on the road, while he stayed in the office and saw the horses they channelled through. “That extended my career.”

However, not everyone has that option, McMaster says. The startup cost is significant — today, it’s well over $250,000 to set up your equipment, without even counting the physical facility space — and then you must hope people come to you. “Fortunately, they did for many years.”

In his own experience, acute injuries at work were “very seldom.”

He’s only had one injury over the years, and though he’s witnessed other veterinarians get kicked or struck at, he says none were serious.

“Most young veterinarians [who] came through that I was involved with had farm background and rural background, so they were pretty savvy around horses,” he says. “I grew up around horses, so watching their body language and being familiar with their moves… you knew that they were dangerous and that they could hurt you badly.”

He thinks that admission criteria to vet school should have less weight on academic qualifications and more on the practical side. “There’s probably many, many people that come from a city background that have made excellent equine veterinarians… but from what I can see, the ones that have lasted as long as I have, 40 years to 50 years, they have come from a background that was steeped in livestock, in the industry.”

Today, more equine practitioners seem to be forming groups, with central, shared facilities. There’s no simple solution to the equine vet shortage, McMaster says, but getting back to rural backgrounds and having young vets forming allegiances with a couple of other vets to help improve their work-life balance “would probably go a long way.” 

After all, when you’re working around animals, there will always be unpredictability, Pownall says. “I don’t think we can ever control that unpredictability… but we can minimize and mitigate the risks associated with it.”

To those who care for our horses: It’s a dangerous job. Take care of yourself. We want you to be around for a while. 

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Main Photo: Shutterstock/Chelle129