How to Hire a Kennel Attendant for Your Veterinary Practice

This looks like the easiest hire in your practice — no license to check, no exam score to read, no board to call. That's exactly what makes it easy to hire badly. The federal entry bar for this occupation is a high school diploma, "None" for prior work experience, and short-term on-the-job training — which means your practice, not a school or a credentialing body, is doing all of the actual training.

The complication most job posts miss is that this title sits inside an aggregate government occupation. BLS counts kennel attendants under Animal Caretakers (SOC 39-2021), and by BLS's own employment-by-industry breakdown, only about 10% of everyone counted in that occupation works in "professional, scientific and technical services" — the category veterinary clinics fall under. Roughly 40% work in other personal services (boarding and grooming businesses), 25% are self-employed, 9% work retail (pet stores), and 5% work in arts, entertainment and recreation (zoos, aquariums, stables).

Read that plainly: you are not mainly competing with other veterinary practices for this hire. You're competing with the boarding kennel down the street, the pet store, and self-employed pet sitters — none of whom need a candidate who's comfortable around sick, injured or recovering animals, or willing to flag something to a medical team instead of just noting it in a log.

Screen for that difference directly, since there's no credential to screen for instead. Ask what they'd do with a boarding patient that stops eating overnight, and ask directly about the schedule — BLS notes evening, weekend and holiday work, including overnight coverage, is standard across this occupation, not an exception. See what a kennel attendant actually does day to day before you write the posting.

There is nothing to verify. No state licenses this title, no exam exists for it, and unlike the closely related veterinary assistant role, there isn't even an optional industry credential — NAVTA's Approved Veterinary Assistant program is built for veterinary assistants specifically, not kennel or ward attendants. If you're used to a licensure step for a technician hire, this part of your process simply has no counterpart here.

What replaces it is recognizing that the entire training and safety burden sits with your practice, because nobody outside it will provide it. Restraint technique, bite and scratch avoidance, and body mechanics for lifting animals and supplies are not things a candidate arrives already knowing — BLS itself describes this work as involving physical tasks like moving and cleaning cages and lifting bags of food, and states plainly that animal caretakers have one of the highest rates of injuries and illnesses of all occupations.

On a reference check, ask less about tenure and more about judgment under an overnight shift: how did they handle it the last time an animal's condition changed on their watch with no one else around? A kennel or ward attendant is frequently the first person to notice a hospitalized patient decline overnight, and what you're really checking is whether they escalate or wait.

One more thing worth watching in the other direction: don't let this hire informally pick up the label "tech" or "vet tech" as they help out in the treatment area, however casually. In states that protect the abbreviations RVT, LVT and CVT, applying them to an uncredentialed staff member carries real exposure. What uncredentialed staff may lawfully do is worth reading before titles start drifting.

BLS puts the national median for Animal Caretakers at $35,360, with the middle half earning between $29,820 and $40,050. The bottom tenth earn $27,250 or less, the top tenth $50,060 or more (OEWS, May 2025, SOC 39-2021).

Read that figure with the same caveat that shapes who you're recruiting against. It's a national aggregate blending the same industries named above: roughly 40% boarding and grooming, 25% self-employed, 10% clinic-type settings, 9% retail, 5% zoos and stables. The employers actually bidding for this candidate pool in your market are overwhelmingly not other veterinary practices — check what the boarding kennels, shelters and pet retailers near you are paying, because that's your real comparison set, not just this national figure.

For a useful adjacent anchor: the related but separate veterinary assistant occupation sits at a median of $38,150 (SOC 31-9096, itself a combined "Veterinary Assistants and Laboratory Animal Caretakers" occupation, not a clinic-assistant-only figure) — a modest step up, and a different federal occupation rather than a raise within this one, worth knowing if you intend to grow this hire into assistant work later.

Don't expect an off-the-shelf training-investment benefit to exist for this population, either. Banfield's own careers page names continuing-education funding "up to $4,000/year," but scopes that explicitly to veterinarians — the page names no parallel dollar benefit for technicians, assistants, or kennel and support staff. That's a real, citable absence rather than proof this population gets nothing, but it means a tuition or CE perk for this role, if you offer one, will likely be something you build rather than something you can point to as industry-standard.

Say what setting this actually is. A clinic ward/kennel role supporting hospitalized and boarding patients is a different job from pure boarding, and a candidate coming from a boarding-only background may not expect the clinical adjacency — sick, injured or recovering animals, not just healthy boarders on a stay.

Publish the schedule honestly. BLS notes evening, weekend and holiday work is standard for this occupation, and overnight coverage is common. A posting that hides this gets a resignation in week two, not a better hire.

Name the physical demands in the posting itself, in plain language. Moving and cleaning cages, lifting bags of food and supplies, exercising and restraining animals that may be scared, injured or aggressive. BLS's own words: this occupation has "one of the highest rates of injuries and illnesses of all occupations." Candidates who read this and apply anyway are self-selecting in a way that helps you.

Publish an hourly rate. This candidate is comparing your rate against boarding kennels and pet retail, not against a technician's wage — a posting without a number is easy to skip in favor of one that has one.

If there's a real path forward, say so and mean it. There's no formal credentialing bridge from kennel work into technician licensure — the handful of states with a verified on-the-job-training route to technician credentialing (Montana, Wisconsin, Alaska and Utah; Texas explicitly rejects the idea, and California runs its own separate statutory Alternate Route rather than an OJT pathway) run through hours logged under a supervising veterinarian, not through a kennel-attendant title specifically. But a practice that visibly promotes people out of this role into assistant work, and says so in the posting, has a real edge over a boarding kennel that has nowhere for someone to go.

Cover restraint, bite and scratch avoidance, and body mechanics explicitly on day one — don't let it be something a new hire picks up by watching. The exposure is real: BLS's own injury data for the veterinary services industry recorded 10.6 nonfatal injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time workers in 2023, against 2.4 for all private industry — roughly 4.4 times the rate, per a BLS release published December 2025. Most of those cases (71%) were classified as "other recordable" rather than days-away-from-work, but that's a reason to train for it deliberately, not a reason to treat it as rare.

Plan for retention risk explicitly rather than assume it sorts itself out. AAHA's "Stay, Please" research, drawn from over 14,000 veterinary-workforce respondents, defines a persona it calls "Open to Options" — built around staff with transferable skills and no completed licensing or education investment tying them to the field — as twice as likely to leave veterinary medicine entirely as the study's other two personas. AAHA names uncredentialed technicians, veterinary assistants and CSRs in that persona, not kennel attendants specifically, but the defining traits it uses — no credential, transferable skills, real earning potential elsewhere — describe this role as accurately as any title AAHA does name.

What the same research found actually keeps people, versus what keeps people who are already leaving from leaving, diverges in a way worth planning around. Fair compensation ranks only fourth among reasons people give for staying, but is the single largest reason — by a wide margin — among people who already planned to leave. In practice: pay alone won't retain someone who's already decided this is just a job, but for someone still deciding, feeling appreciated and knowing where the role could lead carries real weight.

Check in at 30, 60 and 90 days on two specific things rather than general settling-in: whether the schedule matches what was promised, and whether they know what doing this job well could lead to — assistant work, or nothing, stated honestly either way.