When pets matter more to us than humans do

People's empathy is sometimes somewhat illogical.

It seems obvious that we tend to empathize empathize more with those people we know well: our friends, family members and, in general, people we have seen from time to time for many years.

From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that this should be soFrom an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense, because caring about the closest members of our community is a way of increasing the likelihood that a large part of our genes, which are also found in people with a close lineage to us, will be passed on to future generations.

This scheme of the social functioning proper to all human beings may seem robust, but it is far from explaining everything. What happens, for example, when there are members of our community who are not even of our species? Can it be normal for us to be able to feel more empathy for a non-human animal than for a person? feel more empathy for a non-human animal than for a person?? This possibility does not seem far-fetched, judging by what was explained earlier in this article, but there are also specific studies that address our way of empathizing with humans and pets and the preferences we show between one and the other.

Empathy knows no species

A few years ago, sociologists at Northeastern University Arnold Arluke and Jack Levin decided to find out how much it is true that we tend to empathize with humans and pets. to what extent it is true that we tend to empathize more with companion animals or with people.. To do this, they showed 240 men and women a text that looked like a newspaper article describing criminal acts. These stories included a part in which they read how a mugger had beaten someone up using a baseball bat. baseball bat. In one version of the article that was only read by a few people, this assailant attacked a puppy dog until he broke some bones and left it unconscious, while in alternative versions of the same article the one who received the blows was an adult dog, a baby or an adult human being of about 30 years of age.

After reading one of these versions of the article, and not knowing that these were fictional stories, each of the people who participated in the study rated on a scale the degree to which they empathized with the victim and felt distressed by the and felt distressed by what had happened to her. The results do not leave the adult human being, whose story left most of the volunteers feeling the most indifferent, in a very happy position. The story that produced the most consternation was that of the human baby, followed closely by that of the puppy, while the story of the adult dog came in third.

Arluke and Levin point out that both species and age matter when it comes to arousing feelings of empathy. However, the variable that seems to explain most our emotional response in these cases is not the species of the being in danger, but the degree to which we perceive it to be helpless and defenseless. we perceive it to be helpless and defenseless.. This may explain why an adult dog arouses more compassion in us than a 30-year-old human being. The former seems to us less capable of protecting its own life because it lives in a world controlled by our species.

Time to choose: would you save a human or an animal?

In another experiment conducted by members of Georgia Regents University and Cape Fear Community Collegeseveral researchers focused on how we empathize with animals when faced with a moral dilemma. Specifically, they set out to see to what extent we behave better with animals or with humans using as a sample a group of 573 people of virtually all ages. These participants were put in a hypothetical situation in which an out-of-control bus put the lives of two people (a human and a dog) at risk and they had to choose which of the two to save. and they had to choose which of the two to save..

The results of this study, published in the journal AnthrozoosThe results of this study, published in the journal Anthrozoos, show once again how empathy with pets or humans cannot be predicted solely on the basis of the species to which the potential victim belongs. When it came to giving an answer, participants took into account who was the human at risk and who was the dog. 40% of people preferred to help the dog when the dog was described as their pet and the human was an anonymous tourist.The same was true when the person was a stranger from the same city (37% chose to save the dog). But only 14% preferred to save the dog when both the dog and the person were anonymous.

Interestingly, moreover, the women who participated in the experiment showed a greater propensity to offer protection to the four-legged animal. The likelihood of choosing to save the dog more or less doubled when the respondent was a woman.

First- and second-rate animals

Of course, this last experiment moves in the realm of the imaginary, and possibly does not correspond exactly to what would happen in a real situation. Come to think of it, something tells me that if a scenario were to actually occur in which a bus were to rush at a person and a dog, the instinctive reaction of most observers would not be to decide which of the two to save with a well-timed shove. However, it is curious to see how some animals have managed to enter the area of our moral operations and are capable of being treated as beings towards which we can orient our decisions and our ethics. to orient our decisions and our ethics..

In spite of this, we know that being an animal of one species or another has a great influence on the way we are considered. We only need to see how some cats have managed to take over Youtube, while other species (mosquitoes, spiders, mice, birds of prey...) seem to awaken in a large part of the population a tremendous desire to kill.

Species matters, yes, but it is not everything. We may only empathize spontaneously with some species evolutionarily prepared to live with us and the rest are treated as little more than raw material for the meat industry, but for the moment we know that we are not programmed to protect only those of our lineage. Our most distant relatives are perfectly capable of being considered as important as any person, if not more so.