Can you become a vet without doing surgery?

A close up image of metal surgical instruments on a table

Becoming a vet is a popular career choice, but is it possible to work as a vet if you don’t enjoy surgery?

To answer this question, we’ll look at your career options as a vet, and then ask this question to the veterinary community- jump to the survey results here.

For most clinical veterinary roles, surgery is a really important part of the job. You might use your medical skills to diagnose what is wrong with an animal, but often you will need to use your surgical skills to fix it! And having a good understanding of surgery, including the risks, prognosis and recovery, will be vital in guiding owners through their treatment options.

So the majority of vets working in the traditional role of a veterinary clinic will perform surgery- often one or two days each week will be allocated as a surgical day for each vet.

However, who says you have to work in a traditional clinic?

The truth is that there are many different types of veterinary careers. Some involve a lot of surgery, and some don’t involve any at all.

Which Vet Jobs Can You do to avoid surgery

There are a lot of roles emerging for vets may not involve performing operations, for example:

Veterinary Research, for universities or private companies
Veterinary Practice Management
Medicine specialist (most surgeries can be handed over to specialist surgeons)
Veterinary Writer
Industry roles, like developing medications, vetting animals or inspecting meat

You might even be able to work in general practice and avoid operating. That is, as long as your colleagues are happy to take on your share of surgeries for you!

So it is possible to work as a vet who doesn’t do surgery if you choose a career paths when you graduate.

You could also consider not becoming a vet, but working in a different role in a vet clinic that doesn’t involve surgery, like veterinary nursing, animal care assistant, veterinary behaviourist or physiotherapist.

But one thing you must also consider is surgery during your years of vet training at University…

Surgery in Vet School

A green surgical glove is pulled onto a hand in front of a white tiled wall

Even though its possible to work in a veterinary role without surgery, graduating from veterinary school is a different story.

All vet students must perform a certain amount of anatomical study, dissection and surgery to graduate as a vet in most countries. How much surgery you do, and whether you have to operate on live animals, will depend on the individual course. But its fair to say its very unlikely to be avoided completely.

There is an important reason for this. Vets must have an excellent understanding of animal anatomy before they can learn how to treat animals. The only way to truly understand how the body works is to see the anatomy in real animals. This may mean dissecting bodies, or performing simple surgeries on animals while learning.

So keep in mind that you will need to be prepared to perform some surgery in vet school to graduate. And if the reason you don’t want to do surgery is that you don’t like blood or feel squeamish, read my post on overcoming squeamishness as a vet student here).

The Survey

I surveyed the veterinary instagram community to ask:

“Can you become a vet if you don’t want to do any surgery?”

84% of respondents said “Yes”

Here’s some quotes from the vets who responded:

“There’s more to vetmed than surgeries and consults. For example, you can do research”

“Many paths don’t require surgery! You should still need to learn it in vet school though”

“I stopped operating when I was pregnant, and my colleagues picked up the extra surgical days. It helped me realise that consulting was my passion so now I barely do any surgery at all”