Humane education research: Evaluating efforts to encourage children's kindness and caring toward animals

Humane education includes instructional approaches to teaching children kindness toward animals. Although efforts to teach children to be caring probably began within the first human social groups, formalized programs aimed at fostering children's compassion and responsibility toward people and animals are a more recent phenomenon, emerging in the United States not much earlier than a century ago. This article describes what has been evaluated in humane education programs, why such programs are being scrutinized, how programs have been evaluated (with a listing of the shortcomings of some evaluations and suggestions for improvement), and when programs and their evaluations should be directed in the future. The focus is on preschool and elementary grade programs. After a discussion of historical perspectives, recent approaches to implementing and evaluating humane education are reviewed. Special attention is given to the issue of whether teaching children to be caring toward animals has effects that are generalizable to human-directed empathy. Suggestions are offered for future research on this relatively neglected topic in child psychology.