Nonhuman animals and the future of environmental education: Empathy and new possibilities

ABSTRACT

Similar to other fields, environmental education has begun to embrace the significance of nonhuman animals. This essay examines developments in the natural sciences, particularly in the field of cognitive ethology, that focus on the concept of empathy as a paradigm for conceptualizing human/nonhuman animal relationships. Drawing on my own experience using this model of empathy in a course focused on animals, society, and education, I suggest ways that environmental education can incorporate these new understandings about nonhuman animal sentience, cognition and emotion into the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Animals
• environmental education
• empathy
• cognitive ethology
• pedagogy

Notes

1 Following Lindgren and Öhman, (2018), I prefer the term “nonhuman” animal to indicate the continuity between human and nonhuman animals. However, given that my article relies on research in the natural sciences, where the term “animal” is also frequently used, that term also appears throughout.

2 Anthropocentrism is a contested concept within the social sciences, humanities, and the natural sciences. For example, within philosophy, Hayward, (1997) delineates the ontological errors that are inherent in anthropocentrism, and suggests that “speciesism” and “human chauvinism” are more precise and accurate philosophical concepts, an argument that of course was popularized by Singer (1975), drawing on the earlier work of Ryder (1970/2010). In the natural sciences, scholars and researchers have been focused on responding to critiques of anthropomorphism, often reflecting one of Hayward’s core arguments: that as humans, we are unavoidably anthropomorphic (Bekoff, 2007; DeWaal, 2016). Much of the scholarship in this area, including in the fields of cognitive ethology and primatology, has suggested that anthropomorphism is both biologically natural and advantageous, as it allows us to see the continuity and similiarities between human and nonhuman animals. Centering the concept of “continuity” in understanding human/nonhuman nature is central to cognitive ethology, and is also developed in Midgley’s (1978, 2010) scholarship in philosophy.

3 While infrequently cited, Charlesworth and Bart (1976) provided an early attempt to see connections between ethology and education.

4 This is, of course, a variation on the classic question that philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) raises when he asks “What is it like to be a bat?”

5 There have been considerable and legitimate concerns raised about some of these experiments, particularly historically, as they relied on animals held captive in labs. Canine cognition labs almost exclusively use client-owned dogs, who are brought into labs for short periods for testing, or dogs who are in animal shelters awaiting adoption. Primate labs sometimes house animals used for cognition research in reserves or sanctuaries who are then brought into labs for short periods of testing. However, this is not true for all primates used for cognition research, nor for biological testing. In 2013, the United States National Institutes for Health announced that it would begin to retire most research chimpanzees, ending many research projects. The NIH announced in November 2015 that it was in the process of retiring the remaining 50 chimpanzees in the program.

6 Even the story of their individual names is grounded in empathy and trying to understand their experiences of the world: these are not the names that I (or my family) would have chosen for them, but they were the names they arrived with when they joined us: Orie after two years in an animal shelter (so he knew his name quite well), and Bubba and Pizzazz at our back door, after being abandoned by our neighbors.

7 The “Day in the Life of an Animal” assignment, discussed earlier in this essay, was both inspired and modeled on my experience at the animal shelter.