July 27, 2023
Empathy is a crucial aspect of our relationship with the living world. “True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are.” (Waal, 2017, p. 274). In elementary schools, we often use stories that describe situations where animals are substituted for humans to illustrate human behaviors and values. Most children and many adults are fascinated by animals; however, there is a disconnect between this fascination and taking action to protect them. Josie Messeter, author of Animals Around The Globe, suggests that the decline in our planet’s biodiversity could mean that ten endangered animals may not survive 2023. These include tigers (threatened habitats), leatherback turtles (through fishing), orangutans (forest degradation), the Amur leopard, Irrawaddy dolphin, and the Addax, a white antelope (oil exploration and unauthorized hunting). It is easy to forget that we humans, largely responsible for this decline, are animals too. On whose terms do we value our relationship with the animals around us? Why is the lens we approach the living world important for not only understanding it but also for ourselves?
Our fascination with animals can clearly be seen in the popularity of animal videos on social media, according to one video marketing site (ReelSEO.com). YouTube has over 2 million cat videos that have been viewed over 25 billion times. Believe it or not, that works out to an average viewing of 12,000 views per cat video. However, there can be more to what we see on social media than meets the eye.
Photos of Moroccan tree-climbing goats on social media are an amusing and fantastical image. Finding out that this amusing story has a darker side raises ethical issues. Due to the worst drought in decades together with increased temperatures, farmers dealing with crop failure were forced to give up farming and trained their goats to stand in trees for three to four hours at a time in order to get tips from tourists to feed their families. However, when the Covid pandemic swept the world, tourism stopped.
Asma Kamili, head of the Moroccan Animal Health Division for the World Organization for Animal Health explained the behavior is natural and the goats do sometimes climb Argan trees. The fruit is nutritious and the goats disperse the seeds so there are more trees; a good result all around. Ecologist Jose Fedriani from the Desertification Research Centre (CIDE) Valencia, Spain, who studies environmental degradation, says due to drought the goats aren’t just eating the fruit but also eating the leaves and seedlings so this actually prevents tree rejuvenation. Animal welfare advocates from World Animal Protection (a global nonprofit) believe that the goats are being exploited as they are forced to stay in trees for hours without water, food, or shade. Local farmers feel they have no option as the drought has made farming wheat impossible and goat tourism is the only way to create an income in this parched land. This is an ethical dilemma that is very difficult as whichever decision you make, others are badly affected. Do you feel empathy for the goats made to stand in trees or the farmers who have lost their ability to farm food and feed their families?
Milo’s Moods
What Can We Do in the Classroom?
We can explore the complexities of the human-animal relationship in multiple ways to engage our students and foster empathy (remember they have probably all watched some cat videos!).
- One example that you may be familiar with in many elementary school classrooms is a mood or emotions chart that young children use to describe their feelings. Sometimes young children find it easier to point to a photo of an animal than use words.
- An examination of other animals’ problem-solving skills can enrich your students’ perspective of animals, to encourage reflection on critical and creative thinking skills:
In our Design classroom, we shared some of Stoffel the honey badger’s escape strategies with our students (assuming that he wasn’t trained) to illustrate some different ways of problem-solving. Stoffel had been secured in a safe space in a rehabilitation center in South Africa after being attacked by a lion but found inventive ways of escaping from his enclosure. Examples included working alone as well as with his mate; he would clamber over her to reach the first bolt while she opened the second one and they escaped together. He used whatever tools and materials were available such as a rake as well as making and rolling mud balls and digging up and stacking rocks in a corner to scale the wall. What might an interdisciplinary unit inspired by animal cognition look like in Engineering Design and Sciences, for example, through an investigation of levers, construction, materials, and most importantly, problem-solving? - Your students can also be inspired to reflect on the human-animal relationship through projects such as Games for Change; a national game design competition that offers opportunities for students to explore important issues through game design. For example, one of their design prompts is to create a game demonstrating the benefits of the human-animal bond to support inclusion. According to their research, 85 million households in the U.S. are enjoying the benefits of the bond between humans and other animals.
- Let’s look at a few examples of other aspects of the human-animal relationship, such as ethical issues and entertainment that your students could discuss:
- Students can also explore how observation of the natural world and what we can learn from it, can enrich our understanding of life around us, something that indigenous cultures have always been aware of. Reflecting on how engineers are already inspired by the natural world to design and improve processes, products, and systems, author and academic Barbara N. Horowitz, M.D from Harvard University said that using a comparative approach could have other benefits such as supporting girls in middle school to manage complex hierarchies by drawing parallels to similar issues within a school of salmon or bighorn sheep herd. In Horowitz’s view, knowing more about how animals problem-solve issues of child care and sibling rivalry could be used to inform how we humans parent. The author’s perspective is also a point of humility; Horowitz is using this parallel loosely and not comparing human parenting skills directly to those of fish or sheep. We need to be very clear here that this could be controversial, but as always we like to keep an open mind to explore and discuss a range of views that surround the research of the ideas we are investigating.
Animals in flow — towards the scientific study of intrinsic reward in animals
What makes us think we are so much more special than other animals? Frans de Waal considers human cognition as one variety of broader animal cognition, questioning how exceptional ours is in comparison to an octopus, whose cognition is spread over eight arms, each independently mobile and driven by its own neural supply (Waal, 2017). In our books, we place importance on the concept of the cognitive process Flow (Csikszentmihalyi), which is “a state of complete absorption in an intrinsically rewarding activity” as an optimal way of learning (Harbord & Khan, 2020). There have been numerous studies of flow with human subjects but Sara Hintze and Jason R. Yee have conducted the first study on non-human animals with an aim of advancing the field of positive animal welfare. The researchers’ motivation for the study was a desire to improve their (animal) lives so they thrive rather than just survive, as society’s expectation of how animals are kept and treated has changed considerably in recent years. In the conclusions of the study Hintze and Yee reported observations scattered across the field of biology suggest these concepts (of flow) are not unique to humans (Hintze & Yee, 2022).
Innovations in technology and AI are now revealing previously unheard and unseen worlds of living creatures. In one recent example, scientists used AI algorithms to analyze bat vocalizations and discovered that young male bats are taught territorial songs in particular dialects by their fathers, which they sing to defend their territory and to attract potential mates. Dr. Karen Bakker, a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Study, and author of The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants comments that this behavior has been characterized by the scientists as culture (Bakker, 2022). Will we develop greater empathy in our students by approaching the living world through a humbler and deeper understanding? By recognizing the commonalities we share with other creatures, shall our students have greater humility and value these relationships with our world? Another question worth considering is if a deeper knowledge and understanding of human behavior makes a difference in how we treat others.
References
Archives of Ontario (Ed.). (2011, December 28). Human–animal connections kit. Ministry of Ontario public and business service delivery. Retrieved July 19, 2023
Bakker, K. (2022, November 30). Science is making it possible to ‘hear’ nature. It does more talking than we knew. The Guardian. Retrieved July 20, 2023
Bowers, K. B. N. (2012). Zoobiquity: what animals can teach us about being human. Random.
Fitts, A. S. (2015, August 27). The surprising reasons humans love cat videos. Huffpost. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
Games For Change (Ed.). (2022, August). Take the challenge: how the human-animal bond benefits people and pets. Games for Change. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
Harbord, M. J., & Khan, S. R. (2020). Interdisciplinary Thinking for Schools: Ethical Dilemmas MYP 4 & 5. John Catt Educational.
Harbord, M. J., & Khan, S. R. (2020). Interdisciplinary thinking for schools: Ethical dilemmas as myp 1, 2 and 3. John Catt Educational, Excerpt From InterdisciplinaryThinkingforSchools-EthicalDilemmasMYP1,2.”9781913808686.” AppleBooks.
Hintze, S., & Yee, J. R. (2022, December 29). Animals in flow – towards the scientific study of intrinsic reward in animals. Wiley Online Library. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
Hobart, E. (2022, June 6). The real story behind Morocco’s tree-climbing goats. National Geographic. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
The Open University (Ed.). (2019, December 23). Animal problem-solving: using tools. open.edu. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
US Service Animals (Ed.). (2019). The 14 best therapy dog breeds. US service animals.org. Retrieved July 19, 2023.
Waal, F. B. M. de. (2017). Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? W.W. Norton & Company.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Harbord & Khan for Intrepid Ed News.
