Since starting Jobs With Animals, one of the most common questions and comments we receive is some version of: how do I gain experience of working with animals, when I can’t get a role to gain experience in the first place?
It’s a conundrum facing early or second career jobseekers everywhere, at a time when the animal sector is particularly competitive, with entry-level roles attracting a huge number of applications.
Almost everyone asking has a genuine love of animals and a wish to build a career around that. The dilemma for many isn’t looking for an easy way in. It’s that breaking into this sector responsibly can be genuinely difficult.
The imperfect stepping stone
So what if the only way to gain experience involves working in a corner of the industry you don’t entirely agree with? A stable hand at a racing stable. A keeper role at an unaccredited zoo. An ecologist or ornithologist working for a property developer. These are real, paid roles for people looking to pay the rent while starting their journey with animals. Some people suggest volunteering as an alternative way in, and it’s a valuable route for those who can afford it, but it isn’t an option for everyone. Plenty of people simply need an income while they build experience. The alternative is often an entry-level role with no animal contact, and the risk of missing out on the early, hands-on experience that acts as a stepping stone to a future career in the sector.
A significant employer of animal lovers
Take greyhound racing as an example. It’s an industry in decline, with the Scottish Parliament passing legislation to ban the sport in May 2026, and Wales passing legislation to phase it out between 2027 and 2030. Despite that decline, for the time being it’s still a significant employer of people who care about animals. According to the GBGB’s own figures, more than 5,000 people still work across the sport, including a large number of vets and kennel hands.
Jobs With Animals’ ethics policy excludes these roles from those we promote, but that doesn’t mean many of those kennel hands aren’t deeply committed to the welfare of the dogs they work with. It’s an accessible, hands-on job, and for plenty of people it will be their first real experience of working with animals, whatever they go on to do afterwards.
That’s the deeper question worth thinking about. If you took a welfare-focused job inside an industry like this, what would you actually be able to see or change? And if the honest answer is “not much,” is it still the right role to take?
The foot in the door argument
The most common justification for taking an ethically uncomfortable role is that a compassionate, welfare-minded person in that job is better than an indifferent one. Someone who genuinely cares about the animals, watching closely, flagging concerns, nudging standards up from the inside, is doing more good than leaving the role to someone who doesn’t.
There’s something to this. Regulated industries do respond to internal pressure, and plenty of genuine welfare improvements across many sectors have come from people who chose to work within a system rather than protest from outside it.
Professor Temple Grandin’s animal welfare work is probably the clearest large-scale example of this. She spent decades working inside the meat industry, redesigning livestock handling systems that now process roughly half of the cattle in North America. Looking back on that work, she’s been characteristically honest about its limits as well as its impact: “Things are not perfect, but I can tell you, compared to the bad old days, there’s been light-years of improvement.” That’s a useful model of what changing things from within can actually achieve.
But there are limits to this argument. One compassionate keeper, trainer, or kennel hand rarely has the power to change how things are really done. There’s also a real risk of what’s sometimes called moral licensing, using your own good intentions to justify staying in a role or industry longer than you otherwise would, telling yourself you’re “one of the good ones.” Good intentions inside a system don’t automatically translate into good outcomes. Grandin’s influence took decades to build, and most people starting in a first entry-level role won’t have that same standing. Her example shows what’s possible over a career, not necessarily what’s achievable for somebody at the start of their career, in the first year of a job.
Everyone’s starting point is different
Not everyone starts from the same ethical position, even in an industry where the majority of people care deeply about animals.
Some people love animals but see them as having a fixed place within a wider system alongside humans, whether that’s as working animals, food, sport, or research subjects. They’re comfortable working in roles that reflect that, provided welfare standards are genuinely high. Others believe that animals are every bit as important as humans. They wouldn’t consider a role that puts an animal’s life in service of what a person needs or wants, however well that animal is treated. Most people sit somewhere between the two rather than firmly on one side, but where you land matters a lot. Someone closer to the second view might reasonably conclude that even a well-run, licensed zoo, or training dogs for a life of structured work as an assistance dog, asks something of an animal they’re not comfortable with.
None of this is about which view is correct. It’s about knowing your own view well enough to make a decision you can actually live with, rather than discovering three months into a role that it conflicts with something you believe more deeply than you’d realised.
Check the employer, not just the sector
That’s also why it’s worth taking a proper look at a prospective employer’s own policies and public stance before accepting a role, not just the sector they sit in. Zoos, assistance dog charities, or research institutions can differ enormously in their actual practices, transparency, and welfare commitments, even within the same broad category. What one organisation considers standard practice, another may consider unacceptable. Asking direct questions at an interview, reading an organisation’s published policies and charitable objectives, or checking accreditation where it exists, is a practical way to see whether a specific employer’s stance actually matches your own. It’s a better test than judging the sector as a whole.
How a charity is set up and funded matters too
Some animal welfare charities are funded by the very industries they’re cleaning up after.
A racehorse aftercare or rehoming charity is a good example. The work itself is unambiguous welfare work, taking in horses no longer wanted by racing and finding them a safer future. But racing bodies, racecourses, or breeding operations fund some of these charities too, and a few go further still, running training courses that actively prepare young people for careers within racing itself, not just aftercare roles once a horse’s racing days are over.
None of that makes the welfare work any less real, or the charity any less worth working for. But it pays to take a proper look at who funds an organisation and what else it does, alongside the role itself, before deciding whether it lines up with your own view.
Questions worth asking yourself
The only person who can tell you whether a role is right for you is you. But a few honest questions can help clarify your own thinking before you commit to a job:
Does this role give you real influence, or just a job title? A frontline position with no input into policy or practice is a different proposition to a role where you’d actually shape how animals are treated day to day.
What’s your actual goal, and is there a realistic path to it? “I want the hands-on experience to move into rescue work within two years” is a plan. “I’ll try to change things from within” without a clearer sense of what that looks like is often a rationalisation.
Would you be comfortable being transparent about it? If you’d feel the need to hide or downplay the role on your CV or to people in the wider welfare sector, that discomfort is telling you something.
Are you building transferable skills, or normalising something you’d rather change? Animal handling, health monitoring, and welfare assessment skills are valuable wherever you learn them. But there’s a difference between gaining that experience and gradually adjusting your own sense of what’s acceptable simply because you’re immersed in it.
What would you tell a friend in your position? It’s a simple test, but a useful one. Advice we give others is often more honest than the story we tell ourselves.
Individual choice isn’t the same as a platform’s endorsement
It’s easy to mix these two things up, so it’s worth being clear about the difference. Our own ethics policy at Jobs With Animals is about which employers we’re willing to actively promote and recommend to our audience. That’s a different decision to the one an individual jobseeker faces about their own career.
When an organisation lists and promotes a job, it’s really saying “we think this is worth recommending.” But a person taking that same job is often weighing up something much more personal, their own experience, whether they need the income, where they want their career to go, and how much difference they think they could actually make. An outside policy can’t see or judge any of that.
Where our own tools draw the line
Our own Animal Career Finder is a good example of where that line sits. It’s built to match people to roles based on their interests, skills, and values, but it deliberately omits roles that don’t align with our ethical framework. The tool won’t suggest a kennel hand role at a greyhound track, or a keeper role at an unaccredited zoo, and you won’t find those specific roles listed on our job board either. It doesn’t mean those roles are never a reasonable path into this sector for the right person, only that recommending them isn’t something we’re set up to do responsibly as a platform. Working out whether a role like that is right for you is a more personal decision than a tool, however good, can make on your behalf.
That’s part of why this remains hard to draw a clean line around, for us as a platform, and for anyone building a career in this sector. The honest answer is usually not yes or no, but it depends on the role, the industry, and what you’re actually able to do once you’re in it.
There’s no clean answer, and that’s fine
If you’re wrestling with a decision like this, that discomfort is probably a good sign. The people who think hardest about these trade-offs tend to be exactly the people animal welfare needs more of, whichever choice they eventually make.
What matters most is being honest with yourself about why you’re taking a role, what you’re actually hoping to achieve by taking it, and being willing to walk away if it turns out you were wrong about your own ability to make a difference.
Learn more
Is it ever OK to take a harmful job in order to do more good? An in-depth analysis from the excellent 80,000 Hours, tackling the same dilemma at a broader, more general level than this piece has room for.