We Redirect Just Like Dogs Do
By Katya Lidsky
Let’s begin smack inside of a familiar scene: The doorbell rings. A dog who was lying quietly on the couch a moment ago is suddenly barking, spinning, and throwing his whole body at the front door. The other family dog, startled by the noise, rushes over and gets too close. A fight erupts between the dogs. It’s loud and it’s fast and it looks to anyone watching like hatred or war or these two dogs can’t be in the same house anymore.
But sometimes, it isn’t any of those things. Sometimes there was simply nowhere for all that pent-up energy to go, and so in this case, it went towards one another. Behaviorists have a name for this: redirected aggression, a kind of displacement that happens when arousal outpaces an animal’s ability to reach whatever set him off or regulate in the face of the trigger. Their nervous system floods, the original target is unavailable, vague, or confusing, and then the charge discharges onto whoever happens to be standing closest. It is not random and it is not a character trait nor is it a moral verdict. It is physics wearing fur, with teeth.
We know this about dogs. We may have built our whole practice around it — we manage triggers, we read body language, we give a dog room to come down when their threshold has been crossed instead of taking their behavior personally or labeling them as “bad.” We don’t ask a snapping, overwhelmed canine what’s wrong with them. We ask what happened to them, or we make sense of where the feeling had to go when it had nowhere to land.
But do we ask ourselves these same questions? Do we extend this lens to each other?
Us humans who work with animals, we keep showing up to intake rooms and kennels, 2 a.m. veterinary emergencies and conflicted households, year after year. And with so much inherent intensity, chaos, and overwhelm in our work, it may be worth it to point out that we redirect just like animals do. Our unprocessed grief and untended to stress doesn’t evaporate. It doesn’t stay in a neat box with a lid on it. Our big, unacknowledged emotions and our pain converts. It lingers stuck, it seeps, it lashes out as anger, hostility, apathy, or an overall negative worldview—but it will express itself over time, coloring everything gray until before we know it, we carry its residue into every human interaction often without knowing we’re carrying anything at all.
The data on this is not soft. Shelter employees experience post-traumatic and secondary post-traumatic stress at roughly five times the rate of professionals in other fields, with annual turnover at nearly a third. Dog trainers repeat a version of the same weight: a 2025 study of behavior consultants handling aggression and obedience cases, found burnout and secondary traumatic stress on par with shelter staff and healthcare workers, despite satisfaction in the work they do. Veterinary professionals report comparable strain — in one survey, 9 percent showed high psychological distress, 31 percent reported depressive episodes, and 17 percent reported suicidal ideation. American animal welfare workers die by suicide at a rate matched only by firefighters and police officers. These numbers are not character flaws. They are indicative of what happens when a nervous system absorbs the suffering of others again and again, ingests another’s fear for a living, and is subsequently never provided anywhere to put it all down.
What else could possibly happen? Emotions go sideways and come out as yelling at a coworker who asked a question, or a flash of contempt for a well-meaning pet parent who’s still learning how to relate to their new rescue dog. Emotion releases itself as crispy cynical edges about the very species we got into this work to help. Sometimes the person we’re mad at isn’t the person who hurt us. Sometimes we aren’t even feeling what we’re actually feeling. The eruption is unaware, upside down, and inside out because energy moves. That is a scientific law, not a personal failure. Somewhere below our own consciousness, those of us who are reading this with the knowledge that we’ve been this person, must intuit that if emotions were to stay lodged in us we would eventually not have anything left to help the next dog. We would have to stop doing the work we love. Left unattended for long and piling up, feelings don’t stay contained to one bad shift or one bad session or one bad situation. The feelings snowball into the tone with which we see the whole world. Cumulative grief can flatten us until it solidifies into what seems like the identity and culture of a person, a team, a system, or a business.
Hardly anybody arrives at working with animals planning to become someone who’s difficult to work with. It happens gradually and quietly, invisible in its increments, inching along in the space between overworked days and the next thing that is already lined up, when there is never enough time built in to feel the consequences, injustices, and mysteries we face all the way through.
There’s a version of this in research on suppression itself. People who chronically suppress hard emotions show elevated cortisol, weaker immune response, and a measurably higher risk of cardiovascular disease. (James Pennebaker collected decades of work to prove that expressive writing cultivates the opposite effect: when people put language to what they are experiencing, their blood pressure actually drops, as if naming the thing we feel lets the body finally stand down.) The truth is feeling doesn’t break us, but holding back feelings can. Feeling won’t kill us; instead, it will strengthen us, embolden us, and heal us. What it will do, if we let it, is cost us less than what we’re already paying to keep it buried.
It’s important to note that your feelings must be explored and danced with based on your own pace. Your way. At your speed, meeting your level of safety, following and honoring what is right for you. That is why having a trauma-informed, certified human to witness you–somebody who you connect with and who attunes to you–can be not only helpful, but essential. Because at the end of the day, your grief isn’t nothing. It’s personal, individual, and real. For me, it’s as important to sit in your grief with you as it is for you to sit with a dog who might be mourning the only life he’s ever known, whether that dog be in a kennel or in a new home that doesn’t smell like family yet. You nearing burnout isn’t nothing. For me, supporting you through over-functioning matters as much as you holding space for a dog who is shut down and quietly fading.
Us animal people, we recognize why an animal under pressure turns and bites. We don’t deem that animal as broken or cast them off. We call her triggered, and we go looking for the source of her pressure — not because the bite doesn’t matter, but because the bite is not the entire story and we know it. We see beyond the symptom and dare to venture into the terrain of the problem. We see a full being before us worthy of consideration. And yet, when a colleague we love slams us down, goes cold, or checks out and makes careless errors, our first instinct is often less curiosity and more judgment, as if hostility or hopelessness appears in a vacuum. As if defeat isn’t its own kind of distress flare, sent up by someone who has run out of ways to ask for support and isn’t taking care of themself.
None of this is an excuse for harm. A bite still has to be addressed. A person who lashes out still owes the people around them repair. But excuses and explanations aren’t the same instrument, and only one of them opens the door. Behavior is communication, with animals and with us. The more we can include useful questions like, What may have happened to this person that they haven’t said out loud? Where might all their feelings be going? The less we will cast people off, blame them, and alienate them when what they really may need is help.
Compounded grief and compassion fatigue in animal-related work are not weaknesses to manage privately and mention to no one. They are a form of suffering that we endure, and they deserve the same patience we hand out freely to every frightened animal who has ever curled into the back corner of a crate and refused to come out. We give dogs time. We give dogs safety and understanding before we ask anything else of them. We don’t rush their nervous system past what it can notice, and we don’t regard dogs as wicked while they’re still figuring out a world they’ve found themselves in.
We know exactly how to do this. We do it every day, with animals who cannot tell us in words what’s going on with them. We constantly give dogs more patience than we give our own selves and one another. We guide dogs back to who they are underneath flinches and snarls, and we do it without a shred of hesitation or expectation because on some cellular level we get that the best version of them exists, and we hold that up like a mirror of hope for them.
Can we do the same for people? The person next to us on a shift, the pet parent considering euthanasia or surrender out of despair or convenience, the boss lecturing you about paperwork when it’s not really about the paperwork. We already know how to redirect an emotional creature with kindness instead of correction. Within that skill, which is already in our hands, is a map we can use to come home to ourselves, too. And when we provide this for ourselves we can offer it to one another.
If we spend our days working with dogs, it’s because for some reason we loved an animal enough to change our lives and include them, revolve around them. That’s the place of connection every one of us can start from — a shared seed, the why to why we’re here — and it’s more than enough to encourage community.
To set down what we no longer need is to practice another way. It’s part of being the kind of people the animals in our care deserve. The kind of people we truly are, the version of ourselves we learn to trust only because it is reflected back to us in a dog’s eyes. It starts inside of us, within ourselves, and from there, it ripples out.
Have we identified where our feelings can go besides into whoever happens to be standing closest? There are circles waiting to catch us. They hold a spot for us to sit in, so our emotions can dissolve gently, so we can relish in feeling seen and heard, so we can savor in a sense of belonging and be met back. It matters. Because to sustain working with animals, the work cannot consume us.
Sources consulted:
Andrukonis et al. on secondary traumatic stress and turnover in animal shelter workers
Association for Animal Welfare Advancement turnover data; “Behind the Leash: Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Occupational Strain in Dog Trainers” (2025)
Survey data on psychological distress and suicidal ideation among veterinary professionals
James W. Pennebaker’s research on expressive writing, emotional suppression, and physiological health
Chida & Steptoe (2009) meta-analysis on emotional suppression and cardiovascular risk.
Katya Lidsky is the Founder of The Thriving Volunteer, an online membership community designed to provide animal shelter and rescue volunteers with support, connection and resources to help them stay in this work. She also offers workshops specifically designed to support shelter staff and animal care teams. Katya is a certified, trauma-informed Breathwork Facilitator and Creative Grief Coach, worked in the animal welfare nonprofit space for over a decade, and is a long time animal shelter volunteer, foster, and advocate. Katya’s book, Be Your Dog’s Best Friend: The Benefits of Mutual Bonding and Relationship Building was published by McFarland (2025) as part of their Dogs In Our World series. Follow her @KatyaLidsky on Instagram.