By Nicolas Marty and Kevin Vezirian
In 2023, Science reported that as many as nine in ten laboratory animal personnel will experience compassion fatigue at some point in their careers. For a workplace problem of that magnitude, occupational health offers a standard instrument: the hierarchy of controls, which ranks responses to a hazard from most to least effective — eliminate it, substitute it, engineer around it, manage it administratively, and, last and least, ask the worker to cope better. Milford et al. apply that hierarchy to the animal laboratory in a recent article, and it is the best thing in a good paper.
However, the authors describe the empathy-based strain of laboratory personnel by invoking compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress, concepts developed in the 1990s for therapists worn down by exposure to the trauma of others. Neither was built for those who inflict the harm themselves. Psychologists have a name for this migration: concept creep, the extension of a harm-related concept to situations it was never meant to cover, at the cost of the precision that made it useful. Both locate distress in the worker’s depletable emotional resources, which is why the interventions that follow are addressed to the worker — mindfulness, resilience, self-care, compassion satisfaction. All of these sit at the bottom of the very hierarchy the authors endorse.
They are, in fact, explicit that personal coping strategies belong at the bottom, being “the least effective in eliminating hazards” — a striking thing to state in a field currently investing heavily in resilience training. From there they work upward, through administrative measures, engineering controls and substitution. At the top, where elimination belongs, they write: “The most comprehensive approach to address the aforementioned psychosocial hazards and ethical conflicts would be to phase out animal experimentation, thereby addressing the root causes of harm.” The sentence stands in plain sight, and these are ethicists writing for a medical ethics journal. But what interests us is the distance between the top of their hierarchy and the substance of their recommendations. In the paper as it is, this distance reads as unremarkable — in a way it would not, we suspect, if the hazard were asbestos.
Part of the answer, we believe, lies in the vocabulary, which is the subject of our response to their article.
To be fair, the mismatch does not escape them. They acknowledge that the trauma involved “is not always wholly secondary”. They gesture toward moral injury. And they mention perpetration-induced traumatic stress, a framework developed for those whose distress follows from having killed. Yet all of it is then filed under empathy-based strain, and the distinction closes over.
Moral injury does not close over so readily. It names the damage done by acting against one’s own moral commitments, making the requirement, rather than the worker, the thing that must change. Say that laboratory animal personnel suffer moral injury, and the next question is what they are required to do and who requires it. Say that they suffer compassion fatigue, and the next question is what support they are offered. Only one of these leads near the top of the hierarchy.
We believe that this is not a problem of Milford et al.’s making. Compassion fatigue reached animal research through professional organisations, industry publications and conference programmes, largely outside rigorous psychological work, and it arrived with its individual-centered remedies attached. The 3Rs Collaborative informs laboratory staff that compassion fatigue “can include elements of perpetration-induced traumatic stress (distress related to causing trauma to others), secondary traumatic stress (distress related to viewing the trauma of others), and burnout”, and then recommends sleep, nutrition, deep breathing and yoga.
Milford et al. certainly inherited that vocabulary in good faith, and their hierarchy is better than the words they used to fill it in.
Our response argues the vocabulary, and points at something the hierarchy of controls cannot supply on its own: that the ethics of this work be opened to discussion inside and outside the laboratory, rather than delegated to oversight committees alone, and that the discussion draw on moral philosophy rather than institutional custom.
If nine in ten people in a profession are being harmed by their work, the hierarchy of controls indicates where to look first, and page seven has already said what is there. Sleep, nutrition, deep breathing and yoga may be useful for some individuals, but they are not the solution to the systemic problem.
Author(s): Nicolas Marty, Kevin Vezirian
Affiliations:
Nicolas Marty: OXA / Observatoire de l’Expérimentation Animale, France
Kevin Vezirian: Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, LIP/PC2S, Grenoble, France; School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Australia
Competing interests:
NM is the unpaid president of the Observatoire de l’expérimentation animale (OXA), a French organisation devoted to transparency around, and ethical scrutiny of, animal experimentation, and broadly opposed to animal experimentation on ethical grounds. KV is a member of the organisation’s scientific committee. The authors declare no financial competing interests.
Social media accounts of post author(s):
- https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kevin_Vezirian
- https://www.instagram.com/oxanimale/ (@oxanimale on LinkedIn, Facebook, Bluesky and YouTube as well)