When pets matter more to us than humans

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

From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that this is so, because caring for the closest members of our community is a way of increasing the chances that much of our genes, which are also found in people with a lineage close to ours, are passed on to generations future.

This scheme of the social functioning of 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 our species? Can it be normal for us to be able to feel more empathy for a nonhuman animal than for a person? This possibility does not seem far-fetched, judging by what was explained above in this article, but there are also specific studies that address our way of empathizing with humans and pets and the preferences we show each other.

Empathy does not understand species

A few years ago, the sociologists of the Northeastern University Arnold Arluke and Jack Levin decided to find out to what extent is it true that we tend to empathize more with pets or with people. To do this, they showed 240 men and women a text with the appearance of a newspaper article in which criminal acts were described. These stories included a part in which you could read how an assailant had beaten someone up using a baseball bat. baseball. In a version of the article that was only read by some people, this assailant attacked a puppy dog ​​until breaking some bones and leaving it unconscious, while in alternative versions of this same article, the person who received the blows was an adult dog, a baby or an adult human being of about 30 years.

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

Arluke and Levin point out that when it comes to awakening a feeling of empathy, both species and age matter. However, the variable that seems to explain the most our emotional response in these cases is not the species of being that is in danger, but the degree to which we perceive that he is a helpless and defenseless being. In this way, it can be explained why an adult dog arouses more compassion than a 30-year-old human being. The former seems to us less capable of protecting his own life because he 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 the Georgia Regents University and the Cape Fear Community College, several researchers focused on seeing 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 humans using as a sample a group of 573 people of practically all ages. These participants were put in a hypothetical situation in which a runaway bus endangered the lives of two beings (a human and a dog) and they had to choose which of the two to save.

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

Interestingly, in addition, the women who participated in the experiment showed a greater propensity to offer protection to the quadruped. More or less, the possibility of choosing to save the dog was doubled when the respondent was a woman.

First class animals... and second

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. On second thought, something tells me that if there were actually a scenario in which a bus rushes on a person and a dog the instinctive reaction of most observers would not be to decide which of the two to save with a shove timely. However, it is still 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 whom guide our decisions and our ethics.

Despite this, we know that being an animal of one species or another greatly influences the way of being considered. You just need to see how some cats they 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.

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