If you are a cat person, now is the time to leave the room.
People love and care about dogs more than their fellow man, according to two major studies.
According to the Times of London, people have more empathy for dogs in bad circumstances than they do for humans who suffer.
Two years ago a medical research charity, Harrison’s Fund, tried an experiment. It printed 2 adverts, both of which asked the following: “Would you give £5 to save Harrison from a slow, painful death?” The difference was that on one of the adverts Harrison was a person, on the other he was a dog.
Would anybody be surprised to learn that Harrison the dog got surprisingly more clicks than Harrison, the human? Surely not the researchers who were behind the recent study into human-dog empathy. They discovered that people are usually more distressed by reports of dogs being beaten up or hurt in any way than they are by the same reports about adult humans.
For that study, which was published in the journal Society & Animals, the researchers presented 240 students with a fake newspaper clipping. The little dog got way more contributions.
According to a Northeastern University study, only a baby human could compete with the man’s best friend, as the New York Post reports.
In that study, students were shown fake newspaper news about a baseball-bat attack on a little puppy, an adult dog, a one-year-old infant and 30-year-old human. Then, they were asked questions to gauge their empathy. Guess who took the last place in their hearts? The adult human.
“Respondents were significantly less distressed when adult humans were victimized, in comparison with human babies, puppies, and adult dogs,” said Northeastern researchers. “Only relative to the infant victim did the adult dog receive lower scores of empathy.”
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