What vets and veterinary students need to know about injury, risk and their legal rights.
There is a phrase that comes up time and again in veterinary circles: “it’s just part of the job.” It is often said lightly, sometimes with pride, and usually after someone has been bitten, kicked, crushed, or otherwise injured. The study by Tamzin Furtado, Lois Kennedy, Gina Pinchbeck and John S. P. Tulloch, ‘Grinning and bearing it’ A survey study exploring animal related injuries in UK and Irish veterinary students, puts hard data behind that culture, and what it reveals should give the profession pause.
The figures are stark. Of 533 survey responses analysed, 47.5% of veterinary students reported being injured by an animal during their degree. 35.5% had been injured within the previous 12 months. Of those injured, 71.1% reported one to three injuries, 18.2% reported four to five injuries, and 3.6% reported ten or more. The overwhelming majority of those injuries did not happen in the controlled environment of a university, but out on placement, on farms, in practices and in yards, where standards vary and supervision is inconsistent. 82.0% of the most recent injuries and 87.8% of the most severe injuries occurred on extra-mural studies, known as EMS placements. Almost none took time off, even where injuries were significant. Very few reported what had happened.
Although the study focuses on veterinary students, the point is not limited to students. The injuries described happened during ordinary veterinary work: restraining animals, assisting with procedures, handling cattle, working around horses, dealing with dogs and cats, and relying on others to pass on risk. These are not student only risks. They are profession wide risks. The student data shows the culture at the point of training, before those habits are carried into practice.
What emerges is not a picture of bad luck among students. It is a picture of a profession in which injury is frequent, predictable, and perhaps most importantly, normalised from the start.
The law does not see it that way.
When risk becomes routine, it becomes foreseeable
One of the central questions in any personal injury claim is whether the harm was foreseeable. In other words, should the person or organisation responsible have anticipated the risk and taken steps to prevent it?
Those findings answer that question in a way that is difficult to ignore. When 47.5% of students report being injured during their degree, and when those injuries follow consistent patterns, dogs biting during restraint, horses kicking during examination, cattle crushing during handling, it becomes difficult for anyone to say that these events are rare or unexpected. The setting may be training, but the risks are the risks of veterinary practice.
They are not.
They are known risks of the work. And where risks are known, the law expects them to be managed.
What you should be able to expect at work
Whether you are a qualified vet, a nurse, or a student on placement, you are entitled to expect that reasonable steps are taken to keep you safe. This is not an abstract principle. It has very practical consequences.
A safe workplace in veterinary practice should not mean eliminating all risks. That is impossible. It does mean risk is identified, assessed, and controlled.
Proper risk assessments are the starting point. Not generic documents that sit in a folder, but real, species specific and situation specific consideration of what could go wrong. A nervous dog being restrained for an injection presents a different risk to a sedated one. A horse undergoing a distal limb examination presents a different risk to one standing quietly in a stable. A cow being handled in an open yard is not the same as one secured in a proper crush.
From there, it follows that there must be adequate systems in place. Enough people to restrain an animal safely. The right equipment available and used, including muzzles, crushes, stocks, cat bags, and protective gear where appropriate. Clear authority for anyone involved, particularly juniors and students, to stop a procedure if it becomes unsafe.
Supervision is critical. Students were often injured when no one else was present. This included 22.7% of recent cattle injuries, 24.5% of recent horse injuries, 31.9% of recent cat injuries, and 21.4% of recent dog injuries. Those figures are not simply unfortunate. They raise obvious questions about whether the system in place was safe. The same question arises whenever a vet, nurse, or assistant is left to manage a known risk without enough support.
Culture is another problem. Perhaps the most striking finding is not the injury rate itself, but the reluctance to report it. Only 16.8% of students informed their veterinary school about their most recent injury. For the most severe injuries, that fell to 12.8%. Students described not wanting to make a fuss, not wanting to appear incompetent, and worrying about the impact on their placements or future careers. Those pressures do not vanish on qualification. They often become concerned about colleagues, employers, clients, reputation, and future work.
From a legal perspective, that culture does not protect an employer or a placement provider. If anything, it does the opposite. It explains why incident records may be sparse despite a high level of underlying risk. It shows that the absence of formal reports does not mean the absence of danger.
You do not have to accept injury as part of the job
There is a persistent belief within the profession that being injured is simply something you sign up for. That belief is understandable, given how common these incidents are. But it is not what the law says.
You are not expected to work in unsafe conditions. You are not expected to continue after being injured. You are not expected to stay silent about what has happened. And you are certainly not expected to accept avoidable risk simply because you work with animals.
If something goes wrong, the next question is not, “Well, what did you expect?” It is, “What should have been done differently?”
Who may be responsible when something goes wrong ?
In many cases, responsibility will not sit with just one person.
An employer, such as a veterinary practice, may be responsible if it has failed to provide a safe system of work. That might include inadequate staffing, poor supervision, lack of training, or failure to provide appropriate equipment.
If the injury occurs on placement, the host practice or farm may also be responsible. They control the environment, the animals, and the way the work is carried out on site. The fact that you are “only a student” does not reduce their obligations. It increases them.
Animal owners may also bear responsibility. If an owner fails to warn that a dog has bitten before, allows it to roam uncontrolled, or creates a situation in which a visiting vet is exposed to unnecessary risk, that can give rise to a claim.
There is also a less obvious, but increasingly important, point. Under the Animals Act 1971, responsibility is not limited to the person who owns the animal. It can extend to anyone who has control or possession of it at the time.
In a veterinary setting, that can include the practice itself. When an animal is brought into a clinic, restrained by staff, taken into a treatment room, or kept in kennels, the practice may be considered to have taken possession of that animal. In those circumstances, it may be treated as a “keeper” in law, with responsibility for what the animal does.
The correct defendant depends on who controlled the work, who controlled the animal, what was known about the risk, and what should have been done before the incident.
The point is important because the Animals Act can impose liability even where no one has been negligent. It recognises that animals can behave in certain ways, particularly when frightened, in pain, or being handled, and places responsibility on those in control of them when that behaviour causes injury.
In our experience of dealing with numerous claims on behalf of vets, one theme comes up again and again. The central failing is often not the animal’s behaviour itself, but communication. Information is either not recorded, not documented properly, or not passed on to the person who needs it. A vet is asked to examine or treat an animal without being told that there have been previous incidents, near misses, handling problems, warning signs, or a need for specific precautions such as muzzling. By the time the vet is injured, the risk was already known to someone. It just had not reached the person placed in danger.
The impact of injury: more than skin deep
It is easy to focus on the physical injury: the bite, the fracture, the scar. But the evidence shows that the consequences often run deeper.
A further study by John Tulloch, Gemma Ahearne, Jasmine Moxey Butler and James McNally, Using civil claim enquiry data to understand the context and impact of dog related injuries in England and Wales between 2017 and 2024, is particularly important here. John Tulloch was also involved in the veterinary student study. I was one of the authors of this later paper, which analysed 816 dog related incidents drawn from civil claim enquiry data.
The psychological injury data is striking. In that study, 90.3% of bite claimants reported psychological injuries. 15.1% of bite claimants received a clinical psychiatric diagnosis. Across the injured people analysed, 6.5% were diagnosed with a specific phobia and 4.1% with post-traumatic stress disorder. Many more reported symptoms without a formal diagnosis, including phobic symptoms, anxiety, disturbed sleep, nightmares, avoidance, panic attacks, depression, and intrusive thoughts.
In a veterinary context, those effects can be profound. A fear of dogs, horses, or cattle is not a minor inconvenience. It can strike at the heart of a person’s professional identity. It can limit the type of work they feel able to do, reduce confidence, and in some cases force a change in career direction entirely.
The student injury study reflects this, too. Some students reported increased anxiety or fear around the species involved. In the most severe dog injury group, 28.6% reported increased anxiety or fear. Among students with cattle and horse injuries, some said they no longer wanted to work with those species. Others described a lasting loss of confidence. These are not abstract harms. They have real consequences for the way a person lives and works.
How the law approaches compensation
When someone is injured in these circumstances, compensation is intended to reflect the full impact of what has happened.
Compensation includes the obvious, namely pain, suffering, and the physical consequences of the injury, but it goes further.
Psychological injury is recognised. Conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and phobias are not treated as secondary or trivial. They are often central to the claim, particularly where they affect a person’s confidence, sleep, ability to work, willingness to be around animals, or capacity to return to the same type of work.
Loss of earnings is also a key component. The civil claims data shows that 59.5% of bite claimants who were working at the time were absent from work. 54.3% of bite claimants reported lost earnings. In some cases, the impact is long term.
There are also more nuanced aspects of compensation that are particularly relevant in veterinary cases.
One is what is known as a Smith v Manchester award. In simple terms, this reflects the fact that even if you are still working, your injury may have made you more vulnerable in the job market. If you were to lose your current role, you might find it harder to secure similar employment because, for example, you’re restricted in the type of work you can do. Your current employer may adapt to that, but a future employer considering you against a similar uninjured candidate might not. The law recognises that disadvantage and can compensate for it.
Another is the loss of congenial employment. This applies where you can still work, but the nature of your work has changed in a way that diminishes your enjoyment of it. If you entered the profession with a passion for equine or farm work, and an injury forces you into a different area, that loss of fulfilment is something the law can take into account.
The reality behind the reluctance to claim
Despite all of this, many vets and students do not pursue claims. The reasons are understandable. There is concern about relationships with employers, about the reaction of colleagues, and about the impact on future opportunities. There is often a sense of loyalty to the practice or a reluctance to pursue a client.
The student injury data also shows a deeply ingrained culture of minimising injury, of seeing it as something to be endured rather than addressed. 99.0% of students took no time off their studies after their most recent injury, and 98.4% took no time off after their most severe injury. If people are taught to carry on while injured, it should not surprise anyone when qualified vets do the same.
But none of those factors change the underlying position.
If you have been injured because reasonable steps were not taken to protect you, you have the right to seek redress. That is not about being difficult or disloyal. It is about recognising that safety standards matter, not just for you, but for those who come after you.
A claim is not simply about money. It is often the only formal process available to the injured person that forces proper scrutiny of what happened. It can require disclosure of risk assessments, training records, incident reports, staffing arrangements, restraint protocols, and equipment decisions. If the answer is that no one had properly considered the risk, or that an unsafe system had been allowed to continue, then that matters beyond the individual case.
For students and junior members of staff, bringing a claim may feel especially uncomfortable. They may worry about being labelled difficult, damaging a placement relationship, or harming future prospects. But vulnerability is part of the reason legal protection exists. A junior person is often the least able to challenge unsafe practice in the moment. If they are then injured, the answer cannot be that they should have spoken up sooner or tolerated the consequences.
A properly brought claim can also help change behaviour. It identifies what went wrong and what should have been done differently. It can expose poor supervision, inadequate restraint, unsuitable equipment, unsafe premises, or an owner’s failure to warn. Those findings can lead to safer systems for the next student, nurse, vet, or visiting professional. Silence rarely produces that change.
A profession at a crossroads
The veterinary profession prides itself on care, skill, and professionalism. But the evidence now available shows a disconnect between those values and the way occupational injury is often treated.
The idea that injury is simply part of the job is not sustainable clinically, culturally, or legally.
The law already reflects that. The question is whether the profession will follow.
An employee should have the confidence, when faced with a situation they are uncomfortable with, to walk away. To say, “this is not safe”. To say, “I cannot do this now without help”. To say, “I need proper protective equipment before I carry on”. They should be able to do that knowing they will have the support of their employer, and that they will not be labelled weak, cowardly or difficult for making a decision that could have life changing consequences.
Because at its core, this is not just about compensation. It is about accountability, safer systems and recognising that preventable harm should not be normalised. Those entering and working within the profession deserve better than to simply “grin and bear it.”
