Veterinary medicine has dealt with staffing problems for years, but the pandemic made everything worse. After COVID hit, demand for vet appointments went up—for newly adopted pets and for older pets in whom owners observed new health issues after being at home all day. COVID precautions like curbside service also meant offices were operating less efficiently. Everything just took longer.

Meanwhile, vets and vet techs started leaving the field. “All of my friends who were at retirement age—that were in their early 60s—just retired immediately,” Carrie Jurney, a veterinary neurologist in the Bay Area, told me. Staying in the job wasn’t worth the risk of getting COVID. The veterinary field also skews quite female, and mothers without child care quit or switched to more flexible remote work.

Over the course of the pandemic, those who remained saw their jobs get worse. Owners stressed by lockdowns became angrier and more unruly toward veterinary staff. “In the pandemic, people forgot how to be a person,” says Melena McClure, an emergency vet who lives in Austin. And overworked staff no longer had the time to really sit down and explain to distraught owners what was happening to their pet, which didn’t help in these volatile situations. “Yelled at, threatened, I’ve been called every horrible name that there’s ever been written or spoken,” Hulen said. Jurney said she’s fired more clients in the past year and a half than she ever had to do in the previous 20 years of her career. Receptionists bore the brunt of this bad behavior. “We’ve had much higher turnover than we’ve ever had before,” says Gary Block, who runs a veterinary hospital with his wife in Rhode Island. He estimates they lost about 80 percent of their receptionists last year.