“It Almost Makes Her Human”: How Female Animal Guardians Construct Experiences of Cat and Dog Empathy

SIMPLE SUMMARY: As highly social animals, humans experience better mental and physical health when they have access to social support. One aspect of social support is the extent to which those in supporting roles empathise with us. Many humans use–and rely upon–companion animals to provide social support and believe them to be empathic in times of need. This study used in depth interviews with six participants who identified as having had experiences when their dog or cat empathised with them, to examine how they made sense of these experiences. The participants consistently reported that changes to their animal’s normal behaviour was key to identifying animal empathy, but there was significant variation in their understanding of how and why their animals performed empathic actions. Inconsistencies in participant explanations may illustrate the difficulties in understanding animals’ emotions, motivations, and cognitive abilities in light of a history of denial of animal capacities on one hand, coupled with burgeoning scientific evidence about animal communication on the other. The findings in this study can be applied in areas where companion animals are used explicitly for social support, such as animal-assisted therapy and emotional support animals. ABSTRACT: Understanding how humans perceive and construct experiences of non-human animal empathy (hereafter, ‘animal/s’) can provide important information to aid our understanding of how companion animals contribute to social support. This study investigates the phenomenology of animal empathy by examining how humans construct sense-making narratives of these experiences, with the hypothesis that anthropomorphic attributions would play a key role in these constructions. Comprehensive, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six participants, using established interpretative phenomenological analysis methodology to facilitate deep examination of how they interpreted and reacted emotionally. Participants were consistent in reporting changes to their companion animals’ normal behaviour as the key to the identification of animal empathy experiences, yet they were highly paradoxical in their constructions of perceived internal drivers within their dogs and cats. Explanations were highly dichotomous, from highly anthropomorphic to highly anthropocentric, and these extremes were combined both within individual participant narratives and within some thematic constructs. This research demonstrates that experiences of companion animal empathy can be powerful and meaningful for humans, but the inconsistent mixture of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric reasoning illustrates the confused nature of human understanding of animals’ internal states. Insight into how humans construct animal empathy has implications for the moral status of these animals and an application for companion animals used explicitly for social support, such as in animal-assisted therapy and emotional support animals.