How do I cope when owners can't afford to save their animal?

You can operate on almost any animal, and the hardest weight you carry is not the surgery itself but the decisions shaped by what owners can and cannot afford. Being asked to do your best work inside limits someone else's money sets is a genuine burden. That it weighs on you is not a flaw. It is your conscience doing exactly what it should. Here is a line worth holding onto. You did not create the limit, and you cannot fix every owner's finances. What is truly yours is to give the best care possible within the choices actually available, and to help people make those choices with honesty and without shame. When you have done that, you have met your responsibility, even when the outcome is not what medicine alone could have reached. The cost was theirs to bear, not a failure of yours. When a case is decided by money rather than by what you could do, name it clearly to yourself: this limit was not mine to choose. Do everything you can inside it, treat the owner with kindness, and then set down what was never yours to carry. Holding onto every one of those will crush you, and it will not change a single outcome.