Can empathy for animals be taught?
Humane educators at HEART believe in instilling a capacity for empathy in their students at a young age through interactive lessons, stories with clear messages, and opportunities to engage with communities outside the classroom. During their animal welfare unit, students visit farm animal sanctuaries and learn about the challenges faced by animals on factory farms. (Photo source: HEART)
How is it that some people swear off meat and dairy as soon as they learn about the inhumane living conditions suffered by factory farmed animals, and others do not?
A class of HEART students from South Bronx visit the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary after participating in a unit about the challenges animals face in factory farm environments. (Photo Source: HEART)
The question is an important one—and not just because of animal welfare concerns. A variety of estimates have been calculated over the years, but every one of them concludes that reducing factory farming can significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions.
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that livestock operations account for at least 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Steven Chu, former U.S. Secretary of Energy, was quoted as saying, “If cattle and dairy cows were a country, they would have more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire EU." In a more dramatic estimate, researchers at the University of Cambridge found in a recent study that if everyone switched to a plant-based diet we’d see a 49 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
But how does a collective behavior shift like this one begin? Can empathy be taught? Researchers, educators, and animal welfare advocates have been trying to parse the difference between plant-based eaters and omnivores for years.
Humane Education Advocates Reaching Teachers (HEART) is an organization that believes early childhood education can change the world, specifically, by instilling a capacity for empathy during the early, formative years of a child’s education. Peer-reviewed studies, along with service projects undertaken by students of HEART’s programming, suggest that teaching empathy can, and often does, inspire positive action and change.
“In terms of our programs for animal protection, our goal is to spread awareness about different issues facing animals—animal companions, farm animals, and wildlife,” says Kim Korona, Senior Program Director at HEART. “We want the students to think critically about the systems in which those animals live, and then decide for themselves how to think about their own relationships to animals. If they have concerns about the treatment of animals, what actions might they want to take on a local or global level?”
HEART aims to inspire awareness in its students, but also to empower them to take action on issues they find compelling. Lessons consist of stories about individuals who have taken different approaches to addressing the issues they see in the world around them. Teachers share stories of those who advocate for legislative actions, for instance, or for change in their school cafeterias. They talk about the value of eating less meat and dairy, and getting involved with animal sanctuaries.
Teachers follow manuals like this farm animal guide, which uses research-based strategies for teaching reading, writing, social-emotional learning, and critical thinking. HEART also provides book lists for education on specific topics (one of which features two of Stone Pier Press’s very own publications: Sprig the Rescue Pig and Gwen the Rescue Hen). The goal is to offer extensive examples of positive action to help students realize their own potential to make change in different and achievable ways.
Humane education lessons include activities like guessing the identity of a farm animal based on a fact about its species. Teachers also facilitate conversations about how human parents and animal parents care for their young. (Photo source: HEART)
On the subject of factory farming, Kim shares a few of her favorite projects undertaken by students during the service unit of HEART’s programming, where students pick an issue around which to build a project and learn research skills, active listening, and how to support consensus-driven decision-making.
One fifth grade student named Kacey wrote a moving essay about how shocked she’d been to learn about systems that mistreat people, animals, and the environment. She was most distressed by factory farming, so she became a plant-based eater with her family’s support and later started a group called the Anti-Factory Farming Coalition with her classmates. The organization produced presentations to teach others about the problems with our food system and potential solutions.
Another project that impressed Kim raised enough money to sponsor a cow at a farm animal sanctuary. “These were students in an underserved area, so raising this much money was a big undertaking,” she recalls. They also created cafeteria menus that highlighted the plant-based options in their cafeteria, and advocated for more of them to be offered.
So does Humane Education really work? Kim’s stories speak for themselves, but HEART also assesses changes throughout their programs. It performs pre- and post-program assessments, some of which are published on its website. Assessments from its first two years of teaching (2006-2007) report that participating students had “more concern for the animals and the environment,” “stronger beliefs about humane ideals,” “felt empowered” and “reported stronger intentions to act and help,” than those placed in a control group where humane curricula was not taught.
Peer-reviewed studies have been published on the results of HEART’s humane education programs. One of them, released in 2016, concluded that participating students displayed improvement in their humane attitudes and “prosocial behaviors,” that is, the intent to benefit others.
There are many limits to gathering conclusive, qualitative data about the impacts of humane education, including the difficulty of studying cognitive change, the many protections afforded to children when it comes to publishing information, and the fact that it's hard to conduct longitudinal studies when families move between school systems. But the impact, when measured, is crystal clear.
“Part of what brought me to this work,” Kim says, “was that I kept thinking, ‘wow, if I’d only learned about this when I was younger, I would have made changes sooner.’ It’s all about awareness.”
It would be wrong to say that humane education is the golden ticket to a plant-based future, but it’s clear that humane curricula make students think critically about the world around them at a much younger age than most elementary school curriculums do, and it's hard to argue against the benefit of that.
Sarah Katharine Hurlock is a Stone Pier Press News Fellow based in Needham, MA.