Empathy for humans and animals

One of the common criticisms made of people who work in animal welfare fields is that they should be helping humans, and that helping animals instead of humans is somehow wrong.  I have always rather suspected that these armchair ethicists are opting out of helping anyone at all, but perhaps that is overly suspicious of me.

A paper by Signal and Taylor (2007) however does established that people in the animal protection community do care about people, in fact more so than a general community sample.  Quite how anyone think callous treatment of animals will enhance compassion towards people... well, I don't know.

• Signal TD & Taylor N. (2007). Attitude to animals and empathy: comparing animal protection and general community samples. Anthrozoos, 20, 125-130.