It seems obvious 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 should be so , because caring for the closest members of our community is a way to increase the chances that a large part of our genes, which are also found in people with a lineage close to ours, will be passed on to future generations.

This scheme of the social functioning proper to 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 of our species? Can it be normal that we are capable of feeling more empathy for a non-human animal than for a person ? This possibility doesn’t seem to be out of the question, judging from what has been explained previously in this article, but there are also specific studies that address our way of empathizing with humans and pets and the preferences we show between one and the other.

Empathy does not understand about species

A few years ago, the sociologists of Northeastern University Arnold Arluke and Jack Levin decided to find out to what extent it is true that we tend to be more empathetic towards pets or people . To do so, they showed 240 men and women a text that looked like a newspaper article describing criminal acts. These stories included a part in which one could read how an assailant had beaten someone using a baseball bat . In one version of the article that was only read by some people, this assailant attacked a dog puppy until he broke some bones and knocked it unconscious, while in alternative versions of this same article it was an adult dog, a baby or an adult human being of about 30 years of age that received the blows.

After reading one of these versions of the article, and without knowing that these were fictional stories, each of the people who participated in the study scored on a scale the degree to which they empathized with the victim and felt sorry for what had happened to her. 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 indifferent. The story that caused the most consternation was that of the human baby, followed closely by the puppy, while the adult dog’s story came in third.

Arluke and Levin point out that when it comes to arousing feelings of empathy, both species and age matter. However, the variable that seems to explain more our emotional response in these cases is not the species of the being that is in danger, but the degree to which we perceive that it is a helpless and defenceless being . In this way, it can be explained why an adult dog arouses more compassion in us than a 30-year-old human being. The former seems 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 Georgia Regents University and Cape Fear Community College , several researchers focused on 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 a group of 573 people of virtually all ages as a sample. These participants were put in a hypothetical situation in which an uncontrolled bus put the lives of two beings at risk (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 just 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 the 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 an unknown person from the same city (37% preferred to save the dog). But only 14% preferred to save the dog when both he and the person were anonymous.

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

First and second class animals

Of course, this last experiment is in the realm of the imaginary, and may not correspond exactly to what would happen in a real situation. Come to think of it, something tells me that if a scenario actually occurred in which a bus pounced 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 timely push. However, it is curious to see how some animals have managed to enter the area of our moral operations and are able to be treated as beings towards whom we direct our decisions and our ethics .

In spite of this, we know that being an animal of one species or another has a great influence on the way we are considered. It is only necessary to see how some cats have managed to take possession of 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’s not everything. We may only spontaneously pack some species that are evolutionarily prepared to live with us and the rest are treated as little more than raw material for the meat industry, but for now we know that we are not programmed to protect only our own kind. Our more distant relatives are perfectly capable of being considered as important as anyone else, if not more so.