Dominic Barfield and Sophie Adamantos respond

We thank you for reaching out to us with your comments on our paper and we are sorry that you were upset by it. This was certainly not our intention. We have no argument that creating happy working environments will lead to happy employees and the best quality veterinary care for animals under our care. As outlined in our short communication,1 Grit is a marker that has been used in some areas to identify whether there are objective measures that can be used to determine success within some fields. As the majority of university-based interns intend to apply for residency programmes at the end of their programme we used attainment of one of these as success in the context of this paper. In a previous paper we asked interns for their definition of a successful internship and the answer was overwhelmingly ‘obtaining a residency’.2 Neither of us share this opinion of success, nor is it the stated aim of the internship programmes at either of the institutions we were …