Laboratory animal personnel as secondary victims of animal experimentation—victims who would also benefit from ending the practice. In a new paper, Aoife Milford, Bernice Simone Elger, @RodriguezP_Chri, David Shaw, @DarrylGenevieve, and Eva De Clercq use the "psychosocial hierarchy of controls" to show how the same practices that produce pain, suffering, and death in animals also harm the people who carry them out. “Repeated exposure to animal suffering, particularly when directly linked to one’s own actions, constitutes a chronic psychosocial hazard with the potential to cause psychological injury.” Risk is the highest for early-career staff and technicians. Those responsible for direct animal care often carry the highest exposure and the least institutional control. As the authors note: “it is usually animal husbandry staff who are called on to kill surplus animals, and not researchers who have ordered them.” These conditions can produce empathy-based strain, perpetration-induced traumatic stress, and moral injury. The mechanism is structural. The same role requires personnel to care for animals and then kill them. Decision-making, physical responsibility, and oversight are separated by institutional hierarchies. Breeding practices generate a steady flow of animals who are subsequently killed. Ethical review processes prioritize research protocols while largely excluding the cumulative impact of overbreeding and repeated killing. Responsibility for eliminating this harm also sits at the structural level. Approaches centered on individual resilience or staff turnover do not remove the hazard—they redistribute it to new workers in the same conditions. Moving away from animal experimentation directly reduces these harms for humans and other animals. As the authors write, these discussions do not diminish animal suffering, but help “consider human and animal interests harmoniously and draw more attention to welfare issues within animal research.” 🏛️ @ibmbch, @UNIGEnews, Maastricht University, @universitelaval