How to Avoid Abusive Attitudes

While attention is often given to the connection between violence against animals and violence against people, the implication is that compassion towards animals with foster compassion towards people.

Costello and Hodson (2009) conducted a fascinating study of Canadian undergraduates that showed that

• People who saw humans and non-humans animals as fundamentally different were more likely to have negative/dehumanising attitudes towards immigrants, and
• that people provide with material emphasising the continuity between species became less prejudiced in their attitudes towards immigrants.

There seems to be an innate human tendency to justify dominance of one group over another, by reference to biological differences between the two somehow rendering differences in power and control "natural" (see: Harrawy, 1978). Thus, emphasising and being sensitive to essential similarities between groups and work against this influence.

However the situation may not be as simple as 'more empathy for animals=less violence to animals and people'.  Marten et al (2007) found that people people who felt they were more similar to bugs tended to kill fewer bugs in a self-paced experimental setting were they were encourage to put the insects into a killing apparatus.  But this group actually killed more bugs and enjoyed the killing more after being 'primed' by being instructed to make five kills.  Those who felt they were not similar to bugs made fewer voluntary kills under the same circumstances.  The authors suggest that perceived similarity reduces willingness to kill, but when one does kill it activates defense mechanisms to neutralise or even reverse the aversiveness of the killing activity.

Sources

• Costello K, Hodson G. (2009) Exploring the roots of dehumanisation: the role of animal-human similarity in promoting immigrant humanization. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 13, 3-22.
• Harraway, D. (1978). Animal sociology and a natural economy of the body politic, part 1: a political physiology of dominance. Signs, 4, 21-27(?).
• Martens A, Kosloff S, Greenberg J, Landau MJ, Schmader T. (2007). Killing begets killing: evidence from a bug-killing paradigm that initial killing fuels subsequent killing. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1251-1264.