The Ambiguous Terrain of Petkeeping in Children's Realistic Animal Stories

Kathleen R. Johnson


A content analysis of 48 children's realistic animal stories shows an emphasis on pets and petkeeping that can both challenge and support traditional human-animal boundaries. The genre's sympathetic portrayal of pet animals and the condemnation of their mistreatment invite the reader to challenge such boundaries. Yet the genre's stereotypical portrayal of these animals also constrains our conceptualization of the human-animal bond. The author discusses these and other narrative elements which render this form of popular culture ambiguous terrain for negotiating an ethic of respect for nonhuman others which goes beyond most contemporary arrangements.

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Child-Animal Interaction: Nonverbal Dimensions

Olin Eugene Myers, Jr.


Examples of child-animal interactions from a year-long ethnographic study of preschoolers are examined in terms of their basic nonverbal processes and features. The contingency of interactions, the nonhuman animal's body, its patterns of arousal, and the history of child-animal interactions played important roles in determining the course of interactions. Also, the children flexibly accommodated their interactive capacities to the differences in these features which the animals presented. Corresponding to these observable features of interaction, we argue that children respond to variations in animals' agency, coherence, affectivity, and continuity. Recent research shows infants also respond to these dimensions in interactants. We review recent work on the possible developmental roots of sensitivity to these dimensions. The implications are that for the young child, animals are social others that present intrinsically engaging degrees of discrepancy from human social others; and that the child's sense of self takes shape in the available interspecies community. Interacting with animals may be more primary than human-centered factors (such as cultural meanings, anthropomorphism, social facilitation, or psychodynamic processes) in the child's experience and developing understanding of self and animal other. Our findings show an interactive source of the meaningfulness of animate action which is possibly more primary than anthropomorphism, cultural meanings, and other factors. Implications for the theories of social development are discussed.

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Exploring the Gender Gap in Young Adults' Attitudes about Animal Research

Linda K. Pifer


Young adults' attitudes toward the use of animals in scientific research were examined by using data from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY). A structural equation model was estimated using LISREL8 to examine the development of these attitudes. Gender was found to have the greatest total effect on opposition to animal research, while feminist attitudes had the second greatest total effect. Feminist attitudes, 10th grade science achievement, adult scientific literacy, general attitudes toward science, partisan affiliation, and a number of early home influences each explained part, but not all of the gender difference in attitudes about scientific research.

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Ethical Ideology and Moral Persuasion: Personal Moral Philosophy, Gender, and Judgments of Pro- and Anti-Animal Research Propaganda

Darcy Nickell and Harold A. Herzog, Jr.


We examined the relationship between personal moral philosophy, gender, and judgments of the effectiveness of materials designed by advocacy groups to sway public opinion about biomedical research using non-human animals. Twenty-six male and 74 female undergraduates evaluated 16 advertisements or brochures developed by groups which either supported or opposed animal research. The subjects also completed the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) and were offered the opportunity to sign postcards urging their congressperson to either support or eliminate federal funding of animal research. Females perceived the anti-animal research materials to be more effective than did the males, a difference that was not found in the case of the pro-animal research materials. The idealism dimension of the EPQ and gender accounted for a significant portion of the variation in judgments of the effectiveness of the anti-animal research materials but not the pro-animal research materials. The pattern of postcard signing was predicted by the subjects' evaluations of the stimulus materials but not gender or the EPQ variables.
 

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