Pets As Ambassadors?

The increasingly strident calls from wildlife enthusiasts for pet owners to keep their animals – especially cats - under control (see my previous post) seem to fly in the face of a largely forgotten proposal, now termed the “pets as ambassadors” hypothesis. First mooted twenty-one years ago by James Serpell and Elizabeth Paul, then at the University of Cambridge, this idea seems to have stemmed from their observation, since confirmed in several other studies, that pet-keeping in childhood may lead to a positive disposition towards animals in general, later in life. This early experience (and/or possibly an inherited bias) appears to be expressed not just by a greater-than-average likelihood of these people obtaining pets of their own (after all, they could simply be copying their parents), but also as membership of animal welfare charities, and even environmental and conservation organisations (though the link to the latter is weaker than the others).

This idea recently resurfaced at the 2015 meeting of the International Society for Anthrozoology, held in Saratoga Springs, NY. Béatrice Auger’s poster (which won the Best Student prize), together with an earlier poster co-authored with her supervisor Catherine Amiot at the Canadian Psychological Association, examined the link in more detail, using the concept of identification – how closely their subjects included pets, animals in general, and nature in general in their concept of self.

Identification with a favourite pet not only showed a strong association with identification with animals in general, it was also linked positively to identification with the natural world as a whole. Auger’s research also provides a potential explanation for this link, the self-concept that mankind is part of nature, not separate from it.

It’s still not clear, at least to me, what is cause and what is effect here. For example, do people who naturally (whatever that means!) identify with animals and the places where they live, also crave the company of animals, and hence obtain pets? Or does close contact with animals in childhood somehow predispose people to have more positive attitudes towards the animal kingdom as a whole, later in life?

When Ayaka Miura and I were comparing attitudes to animals between the UK and Japan, we found an unexpected correlate of the experience of pet-keeping in childhood. Not only were we able to confirm the links with positive attitudes towards pets, animals in general and animal welfare in particular, and in both countries, our sampling strategy accidentally revealed another possible association. Based in a medical sciences faculty, it would have been too easy to have used only our own students as subjects, so I urged Ayaka to venture into other faculties where knowledge of animals was not part of the curriculum. When we compared these samples, we found that students studying economics or business had less experience of pets in childhood than those studying biology – and in both countries. Again, it’s not straightforward to disentangle the causes of this bias – perhaps parents who are themselves predisposed towards animals channel their children towards gaining qualifications that later enable them to obtain places to study biology at university.

Taken as a whole, it’s tempting to see these connections as dividing people into those who regard themselves as part of the natural world, and those who conform to the anthropocentric notion of man as separate from, and assuming dominion over, nature. Such attitudes are undoubtedly strongly influenced by culture – the former is an intrinsic part of Buddhism, the latter is made explicit in the Book of Genesis – which is why I find it slightly puzzling that Ayaka and I detected the same phenomenon in people from both East and West.

Whatever the underlying psychological phenomena, the message for conservationists seems clear. There are undoubtedly some conflicts between the practices of pet-keeping and the preservation of the natural world, but looking at the bigger picture, pet owners as a whole are sympathetic towards – and therefore presumably more likely to give money to - the protection of wildlife.