The large animal hospital was chaos.
Three technicians had called out sick. Horses, goats and critical cases filled the treatment board. More emergencies were still on the way. At the University of Florida’s large animal hospital, credentialed veterinary technician Andi Davison stood behind the front desk with another manager trying to figure out how they were going to get through the day.
Then she heard herself say it: “To get through days like this, sometimes you have to not care.”
The words hit her immediately.
For Davison, who had built her entire life around caring deeply for animals and the people connected to them, the sentence felt shocking. Wrong, even.
Looking back at that moment, she recognized just how much she didn’t feel like herself.
“I care. I care a lot, and that is why I’m in this field doing what I do,” Davison says now.
That moment became a line in the sand.
Today, Davison helps veterinary professionals across the world renovate workplace culture through positive, psychology-based education, consulting and coaching as part of the Flourish Veterinary Consulting team. But before she began helping others navigate culture, communication and resilience, she had to confront her own relationship with veterinary medicine first.
Like many people in the profession, she never saw it coming.
The Original Horse Girl
Davison laughingly describes herself as a “horse girl” for pretty much her entire life.
Growing up in suburban Michigan, she was the child who wanted to stop and admire every animal she passed. Dogs, cows, horses, barn cats — it did not matter. Her family nicknamed her “Ellie May,” a reference to the animal-loving character from The Beverly Hillbillies, and the name stuck.
Animals were everywhere in her world, including her bedroom. She had so many stuffed animals piled onto her bed that there was barely room left for her to sleep. Even more telling, she rotated them regularly so each one got equal attention.
“I wanted to make sure everybody got loved,” she said, laughing at the memory.
By age 10, she had started riding horses, despite not coming from a horse family. The obsession only grew from there.
But while veterinary medicine always hovered in the background as a possibility, Davison convinced herself early on that becoming a veterinarian probably was not realistic.
Math, she jokes, was never her thing.
Instead, she earned a degree in communication and culture from Indiana University, following another side of herself that loved people, storytelling and conversation just as much as animals.
Even then, though, she had a feeling her future path might be unconventional.
“I knew that whatever I was going to end up doing was something that I didn’t know existed yet, ” Davison shares.
At the time, she had no idea how true that would become.
Finding Her Place in Veterinary Medicine
After college, Davison took a three-month road trip across the United States with a friend, traveling through national parks and trying to figure out what came next.
The trip gave her space to think about the kind of life she actually wanted. More than anything, she realized she wanted work that felt meaningful — work that made her excited to get out of bed in the morning.
Turning back to her love of animals, she took a job as a veterinary assistant at a local companion animal clinic when she returned home.
That was where everything shifted.
Until then, Davison genuinely did not realize veterinary technology existed as a profession.
Like many kids who love animals, she thought veterinary medicine basically meant becoming a veterinarian or nothing at all. But at the clinic, she met two credentialed veterinary technicians who completely changed her understanding of what a career in animal health could look like.
She became fascinated by what they did. The medicine. The patient care. The teamwork. The skill.
Within months, she applied to Michigan State University’s veterinary technology program, now the veterinary nursing program, and never looked back.
“It was ‘Yes, this is it, this is the thing,’” she recalls, still sounding excited years later.
That decision launched a career that would take her through equine medicine, academia, mixed animal practice and eventually veterinary well-being advocacy.
The Dream Version of Practice
Alongside her husband, a veterinarian, Davison spent nearly a decade running a mixed animal ambulatory practice in rural Kentucky. In many ways, it felt like living inside a modern James Herriot story.
The pair worked out of a truck instead of a brick-and-mortar clinic, traveling back roads to treat everything from companion animals to hobby farm cattle and horses. A typical farm call might include a few beef cows, all with names, an old cattle dog sleeping nearby and a daughter’s Quarter Horse that got turned out with the herd.
“We got to do all the things,” Davison says. And she genuinely loved it.
The work suited her personality perfectly. No two days looked the same. One call might involve horses, another small animals, another cattle. She and her husband worked side-by-side as a doctor-technician team, building relationships with clients and becoming deeply woven into their rural community.
But eventually, the same traits that made the work meaningful also made it difficult to escape.
Clients called at all hours. Emergencies interrupted vacations. Boundaries disappeared. Veterinary medicine slowly became something that consumed nearly every corner of life.
“It was very much in control of our lives,” she says.
Over time, the emotional weight started building quietly in the background.
When Burnout Starts to Change You
Like many veterinary professionals, Davison initially believed burnout was something that happened to other people. Even when she heard warnings about exhaustion and compassion fatigue during school, she brushed them aside.
“There’s no way that’s going to happen to me,” she remembers thinking.
But years into practice, she started noticing changes in herself that she could not ignore. The cynicism got louder. Complaining became more common. Emotional exhaustion crept into conversations and interactions. The version of herself she wanted to be started feeling farther away.
“I knew what I wanted to be like, and I knew that this really wasn’t it,” Davison recalls.
What frightened her most was that she still loved veterinary medicine. The idea of leaving it behind felt heartbreaking to her: “Every time I would think about leaving vet med, I would get really emotional and cry in the car because I didn’t want to.”
For a long time, she felt trapped between two impossible choices: continue burning herself out or walk away from a profession that had shaped her identity since childhood.
Then came the conference that changed everything.
A Different Way Forward
While attending a veterinary conference in Florida, Davison heard talks in the professional development track focused on leadership, resilience and psychological safety in veterinary medicine.
At first, she sat cautiously in the back row. Then she kept moving closer.
Session after session, she became more energized by the possibility that veterinary medicine did not have to feel unsustainable. That maybe there were ways to build healthier teams, healthier cultures and healthier careers within the profession itself.
By the end of the day, she was practically living at the front of the room, tracking down the speaker between sessions to ask more questions.
“I totally nerded out,” she says, laughing.
That speaker would eventually become her future boss at Flourish Veterinary Consulting.
Today, Davison’s work looks very different than it once did. She teaches courses, coaches veterinary professionals, speaks at conferences and helps practices build stronger workplace cultures rooted in communication, resilience and psychological safety.
And perhaps most importantly, she has rediscovered joy in her work.
“I love my job. I look forward to whatever cool thing I get to do today, every day,” Davison says.
These days, that life also includes mornings riding horses before work and the flexibility to build a career that supports both her passion for veterinary medicine and her own well-being.
For Davison, the answer was never to stop caring. It was learning how to care sustainably — for animals, for veterinary teams and for herself.
Now, she hopes other veterinary professionals give themselves permission to stay open to possibilities they may not even know exist yet.
“Don’t limit yourself by what you think you know is out there.”
