Question: what was the most difficult thing you had to do at work?

Melissa Upjohn answered on 9 Jul 2025:

As a vet, one of the most important roles we can play is to enable an animal which is suffering and for which we can’t provide treatment to have a pain free way of dying. The hardest situation I’ve ever had to deal with was when I was working on a project in Ethiopia and we came across a horse suffering from a disease called Epizootic Lymphangitis. This disease causes the horse to get gradually more ill, to the point where it’s not possible for the horse to continue working for the owner and eventually (over the course of weeks or months) the disease will be fatal for the horse. At that time there was no way of doing humane euthanasia for a horse in Ethiopia (in the way that is possible in the UK) because the necessary drugs were not available and there was no safe way to dispose of the body afterwards so we were unable to do this – I was desperately sad for the horse, seeing it suffer and knowing that I was unable to use my training to give the horse a pain free, calm and speedy death. Thankfully, since then, the charity I was working for in Ethiopia has worked with the Ethiopian government, pharmaceutical companies and local vets and communities to make it possible to do humane euthanasia for horses in this kind of situation.