ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Humanities and Social Sciences
This article is part of the Research TopicAnimal wellbeing, conservation, research, and education: Supporting people in caring professionsView all 17 articles
Human –animal bonds: first cross-sectional study in laboratory animal care professionals in Argentina
Provisionally accepted
Gisela Marcoppido1*
Juan Santiago Guidobono2Marcos Trangoni3Maria Alumine Mattana4
Agustina Resasco5
Silvina Laura Diaz2- 1Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (Argentina), Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 2Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 3Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia Agropecuaria, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- 4Universidad Nacional de Cordoba Facultad de Psicologia, Córdoba, Argentina
- 5The Francis Crick Institute, London, United Kingdom
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Working with laboratory animals can bring satisfaction but may also result in workplace stress. The established bonds between laboratory animals and their caretakers can make a person feel physically, mentally or emotionally uncomfortable. This phenomenon has been described as Compassion Fatigue (CF), a combination of burnout (BO) and secondary traumatic stress (STS). Although CF has been recognized in the field of laboratory animal science, the information about laboratory animal workers is still scarce. Our aim was to investigate the prevalence of CF and Compassion satisfaction (CS) and identify risk factors in laboratory animal care professionals (LACP) in Argentina. We conducted our study during 2.024. A total of 106 LACP completed an online survey regarding social support, euthanasia, environmental enrichment, stress and pain caused to animals, professional quality of life and human-animal interactions. Components of CF were associated with less control over euthanasia procedures and the frequency of conducting the procedure, the use of toys as enrichment tools, and talking to animals and introducing themselves to society as LACP. CS was associated with the desire to add more enrichment and pride in communicating their jobs to others. These results provide empirical information that can contribute to the development of intervention policies to improve the quality of life of both the people who work with laboratory animals and the animals they care for.
Keywords: burnout (BO), Compassion Fatigue (CF), Compassion satisfaction (CS), environmental enrichment, Euthanasia, Human-animal interactions, Professional Quality of Life
Received: 03 Nov 2025; Accepted: 05 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Marcoppido, Guidobono, Trangoni, Mattana, Resasco and Diaz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Gisela Marcoppido
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