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There is an ever-growing multidisciplinary interest in the nature of human-animal relationships.1 When I first learned about Professor Laurent Bègue-Shankland’s new award-winning book, The Social Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond, and read the glowing accolades, I couldn’t wait to read it. Now that I have, I agree that this book is truly important. As he writes, “This book shows how much our relations with animals—from attachment to abuse—reveal our identity and our relations with others.”
Marc Bekoff: Why did you write The Social Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond?
Laurent Bègue-Shankland: My aim was to create a broad overview of our multiple connections to animals from a social psychological perspective. Animals have shaped our beliefs for as long as we’ve existed. They appear in our religions, our myths, and even shared our graves. We’ve relied on their strength, turned them into symbols, and shifted their place in our cultures again and again—sometimes putting them on pedestals, sometimes on our plates. Take cats, for example. In ancient Egypt, they were literally worshipped as the goddess Bastet. Centuries later, in medieval France, people were burning them at summer festivals, and cat pelts were still being traded up through the 19th century. And it wasn’t until 2020 that China officially removed cats from its list of animals considered edible.
While writing the book, I kept wondering: Is there any part of an animal we haven’t transformed into something for our own use—whether it’s goods, knowledge, or symbolism? Humans have found a purpose for everything: droppings, neurons, hooves, feathers—you name it. Even the earliest books about animals were physically tied to them, sometimes bound with glue made from their tendons and cartilage. I also explore how our personalities and political beliefs shape the way we relate to animals. Our relationships with them can act like a mirror, revealing how we think about people who are different from us and how we understand “otherness.” And when it comes to how we treat animals, we often tie ourselves in knots, trying to balance our emotional attachment to these creatures—with whom we’ve evolved side by side—with our desire to use them however we please.
MB: What are some of the topics you consider, and what are some of your major messages?
LBS: In the book, I write about a large study we ran in my lab that was basically a twist on the classic Milgram obedience experiments—except this time the “victim” was an animal. Even though science has long debunked the idea that animals are little emotionless machines, labs still tend to treat them like disposable tools. More than 115 million animals are killed every year for research, and that puts huge emotional pressure on the people who have to carry out painful or invasive procedures.
In the study, about 750 participants were told they had to give increasing doses of a toxic chemical to a big 20-inch fish as part of a learning experiment—doses that would eventually kill it. The twist? The fish wasn’t real. It was a biomimetic robot swimming in a tank across the room, but participants had no idea.
The drug was described as something that could boost learning in Alzheimer’s research, but also as something that became painful and deadly at high doses. Participants had to press 12 buttons in a row, each one adding another dose via a motorized syringe. When they hesitated, a research assistant nudged them to keep going. They watched the “fish” doing a task, and were told the drug would help it learn. Under the buttons, the supposed chance of killing the fish was clearly written: 0% at button 1, 33% at button 3, 50% at button 6, 75% at button 9, and a guaranteed 100% at button 12. Its heart rate was displayed on a screen, complete with audio signals to mimic distress. And, just like in Milgram’s original studies, a lot of people pushed through to the end, which meant certain death for the fish. Among those who killed the fish, there were more males, and individuals with lower empathy and a higher score on a speciesism scale developed by Lucius Caviola at Oxford University.
In a follow-up experiment, I wondered whether simply thinking about science could make people more obedient. So we repeated the same setup, but before the task, half the participants wrote about why they loved and valued science, and the other half wrote about what they disliked or found problematic about it. Then everyone did the fish experiment. The outcome was pretty clear: People who had been put in a “pro-science” mindset were more willing to follow orders and keep administering the doses, even as things got more painful for the animal.
MB: How does your work differ from the work of others who are concerned with some of the same general topics?
LBS: In the book, I review recent studies on the human-animal bond published in scientific literature and also write about some original work from my own lab. I also focus on fish, as in my Milgram-like experiment, the victim is a fish. It’s really hard for us to relate to marine animals. Fish don’t cry, they don’t scream, and they don’t have the facial expressions we humans rely on to read emotion. Their faces—if we can even call them that—don’t show anything that looks like individuality to us. Add the flat, unblinking eyes, the slippery bodies, and the fact that they live in a completely different, silent world, and it’s no surprise they feel distant. On top of that, they’re often tiny and come in shoals, which makes it even harder for us to see them as individuals.2
MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about the nature of human-animal bonds they will come to appreciate how important they are for both humans and nonhumans?
LBS: I hope that the awareness of our invaluable bond may motivate some change in dealing with animals. Of course, no one can predict what our relations with animals will be like in the future. All we know is that some species will be absent. Between 1970 and 2016, populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish decreased by 68 percent, and we are the ones to blame. We also know that our future is filled with uncertainty, as we can tell from books and articles with striking titles like Farmageddon or Aquacalypse Now, which document the environmental havoc we keep wreaking. In the face of these frightening signs, will we understand that we are now deep in the coalmine with the canary, breathing the same air?
