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For two decades, the distress of animal care workers has been talked about in ways that largely locates the problem inside the worker and asks them, essentially, to cope better. The research at Fortifyu starts somewhere else, with a different premise: that much of this suffering is moral injury, the wound that forms when people who entered this work to protect animals are placed in conditions that force them to participate in, witness, or fail to prevent harm.

Fortifyu has been a pioneer in bringing attention to moral injury in animal care. Its research program tests, empirically, how that injury appears, where it actually comes from, how it differs from burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue, and which conditions inside organizations make it more or less likely. The findings point consistently outward toward: public hostility, institutional betrayal, and the structure of the work itself, rather than toward any deficiency in the people doing it.

It is rigorous science, held to peer review. It is also written to be read by the people it is about.