Attitudes toward Animals: The Effect of Priming Thoughts of Human-Animal Similarities and Mortality Salience on the Evaluation of Companion Animals

Human attitudes toward nonhuman animals are complex and quite contradictory. They can range between extremely negative (animal cruelty) to positive (treating companion animals like human surrogates). Attitudes toward animals are especially negative when people think about human creatureliness and personal mortality. This paper investigates people's attitudes toward highly valued animals (companion animals). The research presented here tested whether companion-animal caregivers would respond to reminders of human creatureliness and mortality salience (MS) with more negative attitudes toward pets. Participants completed an online survey in which MS and human-creatureliness conditions were manipulated. Results showed that, under MS, even pet owners responded to reminders of human creatureliness with less positive attitudes toward the average pet. Thus, the effects observed in previous research extend to more popular animals, even among people with presumably positive attitudes toward animals.

Changes in the Behavior of Pet Owners across Generations

200 adults (100 men and 100 women with a mean age of 58.8 yr.) were interviewed to assess the associations of recollections about their grandparents' and parents' attitudes and their adults' attitudes and behaviors toward pets. Subjects were categorized into Never-owned pets, Always-owned pets, Owned-in-childhood-only, and Owned-in-adulthood-only groups ( ns = 25). Subjects were asked about their present and past ownership and experiences, and the attitudes toward ownership of pets by their grandparents and parents. Although the literature suggests that childhood experiences strongly affect adults' attitudes toward pets, there were no differences in attitudes between adults who had always owned pets and those who owned pets only during adulthood. These two groups had significantly more grandparents and parents who owned pets than did the other two groups. Significantly more subjects who had owned pets only during childhood reported unpleasant experiences with pets than did subjects of the other three groups. Subjects who had owned pets only during adulthood were persuaded by their children or significant others to acquire pets to which they became very attached.

Views of Pets in the General Population

Attitudes toward pets in the general population were explored. Although the 26 owners' perceptions and feelings about pets were similar to other reports, attachment scores were significantly lower than those of people who had adopted pets from a shelter.