Literature Review: Exploring the Connections between Empathy for Wildlife and Empathy for People

This report is the third in a series of reviews commissioned by the Woodland Park Zoo to explore key topics of interest identified in the Advancing Conservation through Empathy for Wildlife® (ACE for Wildlife®) Network Learning Agenda.

This review explores whether empathy transfers across the human-animal divide, which has practical implications for how zoos and aquariums conduct their work. As in the other reviews in this series, this one does not examine empathy in animals, the focus remains on empathic responses in people. The core question of this review is: when zoos and aquariums work to build empathy for wildlife in their visitors, does that also affect how those visitors empathize with other people? And does it work the other way too? In other words, what is the relationship between wildlife-directed empathy and human-directed empathy? This review also delves into questions about how empathy for wildlife and empathy for people develop similarly or differently, some of the contextual factors and barriers that shape these processes, and the strategies practitioners might use to foster empathy for both wildlife and people.