The Impact of Caring and Killing on Physiological and Psychometric Measures of Stress in Animal Shelter Employees: A Pilot Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animal shelter employees are in a unique position where they care for, and later kill, the same animals. The aim of our exploratory study was to assess whether “caring” and/or “killing” evokes physiological and psychometric indicators of stress in employees. Experiment 1 compared three careers that kill regularly, but involve varying degrees of husbandry (n = 28). Blood pressure (BP), salivary cortisol, heart rate (HR), and heart rate variability (HRV) were collected; data showed higher HR and lower HRV during the process of killing. Psychometric scales showed that burnout and Impact Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) scores were higher in careers with higher contact with animals. Experiment 2 compared three careers that involve husbandry, but varying exposure to killing (n = 41). BP, cortisol awakening response, HR, and HRV were measured as well as Professional Quality of Life Scale, IES-R, and Moral Injury Event Scale were administered. There were no significant differences across careers in any measures. The data suggest that the process of killing may be physiologically stressful to the person, and higher levels of animal contact in a euthanasia context may be associated with burnout and traumatic stress, but that the act of euthanasia is not a unique predictor of overall occupational distress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".