Animals laboring for humans: Integrating animal dignity into I-O psychology

Hernandez et al. (2025), in their focal article, have put the spotlight on the role of animals in I-O psychology.It is true that animals are neglected by I-O psychologists, who have traditionally focused on human beings in the workplace and how they feel, perceive, and behave.It is therefore of great importance to extend our reach and research to animals.In this piece, we raise the question how I-O psychology can theorize on animals in the workplace.In so doing, we advocate integrating a dignity perspective on animals (Bal, 2017; Challenger, 2003) into the field to postulate possible research questions and provide answers as to how I-O psychologists can relate to animals in the workplace.To understand how animals fit into workplace dynamics, it is crucial to broaden our conceptualization of work.Traditionally, work has been narrowly defined as paid, intentional human activity, often tied to formal employment with written contracts.However, recent scholarship in labor studies and human-animal relations challenges this anthropocentric view, advocating for a more inclusive understanding.Work can be defined as the contribution of labor, whether cognitive, emotional, physical, or biological, toward the production, maintenance, or reproduction of value (Porcher & Schmitt, 2012).This definition allows us to recognize animals as workers, not only when they perform visible service or assistance roles but also when their bodies themselves are the object and instrument of labor, such as in meat, dairy, and pharmaceutical industries.Reframing work in this way invites I-O psychologists to engage with the often-unseen labor of nonhuman agents.Moreover, animals are not passive tools but sentient beings with cognition, conscience, attitudes, and feelings (Challenger, 2023).Therefore, I-O psychologists should be concerned with animal workers in the same way they are concerned with human workers, as both contribute to work systems and are affected by the conditions under which they labor. Animals working for humansThe primary argument of Hernandez et al. is that animals have long been used within workplaces, in various capacities and roles, such as livestock at farms, therapy animals, rescue dogs, or racing horses.Animals can be perceived as coworkers, who have feelings and attitudes, and as such are anthropomorphized, positioned akin to human beings, with feelings of joy, awe, compassion, or anxiety when integrated into the workplace.Such anthropomorphizing may be appropriate in the context of service dogs or truffle-hunting pigs but also overlooks another dimension of the role of