What the Trainer Carries Home

Nobody talks about what the trainer carries home.

I still think about Dutch.

She was a Rottweiler from a long line of working, protection-bred dogs, sold to a family as a pet. Her needs were far more than that home could give her, and over time she became unpredictable in the house.

Eventually she went for the kids.

It was right when my illness was getting worse, so taking her myself wasn't an option. She didn't get the ending I wanted for her, and that stays with me.

A lot of the dogs we work with are frightened, aggressive, or have had a rough start. You get to know them and understand why they do what they do. You see the good days and the bad ones, and sometimes you see the things you can't fix. That takes a toll.

What this actually is

There's a name for this, and it's worth knowing, because naming something makes it easier to talk about.

Secondary traumatic stress is what happens when you're repeatedly exposed to someone else's trauma, even though it didn't happen to you directly. The term comes from trauma researcher Charles Figley, who described it as "the cost of caring" — the emotional toll that builds up in people who spend their working lives close to suffering they didn't cause and often can't fix.

It was first studied in therapists and counsellors working with trauma survivors. Since then it's been found in nurses, paramedics, social workers, and — relevant to this post — in people who work with animals.

What the research actually tells us

The 2025 study I mentioned above, by Alexandra Malone, looked specifically at dog trainers and behaviour consultants. It found moderate levels of burnout and secondary traumatic stress across the group — alongside moderate-to-high compassion satisfaction, meaning most trainers also found real reward and meaning in the work. Those two things sit side by side. It isn't one or the other.

A separate 2025 study looked at assistance animal trainers in Australia — people training guide dogs and service dogs rather than working with aggression cases, but facing a similar emotional load from working closely with both animals and vulnerable people. It found the same pattern: genuine compassion fatigue alongside genuine compassion satisfaction, often in the same person, sometimes in the same week.

Neither study is huge, and neither claims dog training is uniquely brutal compared to other caring professions. What they do show is that this isn't just "part of the job" in some vague, unexamined way. It's a measurable occupational pattern, and it's only recently started getting proper research attention.

The part that's harder to talk about

Dutch's story involves something I haven't said outright yet: she needed to be put to sleep, and I wasn't the one who could be there for it.

There's research on this specific kind of strain too, usually studied in shelter workers and veterinary staff rather than trainers, but the mechanism is the same. It's sometimes called the "caring-killing paradox" — the particular weight of caring for an animal and then being involved, directly or indirectly, in its death. Studies going back to the mid-2000s have found this is associated with increased general stress, lower job satisfaction, and genuine psychological strain, separate from the stress of the job generally.

One of the earlier studies in this area found that longer time in the role was linked to lower stress symptoms — though the researchers themselves describe this cautiously, as something closer to "stress inoculation" from repeated exposure, rather than people finding better ways to cope. They also found that satisfaction with social support mattered: people who felt genuinely supported reported less stress than those who didn't.

I'm not sure which explanation fits me. Maybe some of both.

Why I'm writing this

I'm not writing this for sympathy. I'm writing it because trainers don't talk about this enough, and I think that silence does nobody any favours.

If you're a trainer or behaviourist reading this and recognising yourself in it — you're not weak, and you're not doing it wrong. The research is fairly consistent on this point: the trainers who care enough to feel the weight of this work are often the same ones doing it well.

And if you're a dog owner reading this — it might just help to know that the person helping you with your dog is carrying more than just professional knowledge into that session. We're not neutral. We're not supposed to be.

You do the job because you care about the dogs. And sometimes you care enough that you take a bit of it home with you.

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Sources referenced in this article:

• Figley, C.R. (Ed.) (1995). Compassion Fatigue: Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder in Those Who Treat the Traumatized. Brunner/Mazel.

• Malone, A. (2025). Behind the Leash: Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Occupational Strain in Dog Trainers. Behavioral Sciences, 15(6), 798.

• Verrall, J., Rohlf, V., & Howell, T.J. (2025). Factors Associated with Compassion Fatigue in Assistance Animal Trainers in Australia—A Qualitative Investigation. Animals, 15(3), 337.

• Reeve, C.L., Rogelberg, S.G., Spitzmüller, C., DiGiacomo, N. (2005). The Caring-Killing Paradox: Euthanasia-Related Strain Among Animal-Shelter Workers. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 35(1), 119–143.

• Rohlf, V., & Bennett, P. (2005). Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress in Persons Who Euthanize Nonhuman Animals in Surgeries, Animal Shelters, and Laboratories. Society & Animals, 13(3), 201–220.