More than companions? The shifting focus of human-animal relations research…

'There's increasing recognition of how deeply entangled human and non-human lives are'

Dr Matthew Adams is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton and author of Anthropocene Psychology. He explores human-animal relationships and the climate crisis from an interdisciplinary perspective.

There's been a surge of interest in things like multi-species justice, or justice for other species in relation to humans, as well as the idea that ethical and political concern should extend beyond the human sphere. One of the most striking recent developments in this area is the increasing recognition of how deeply entangled human and non-human lives are. The depth of our entanglement can be seen materially in the world, but also conceptually in the way that we're developing theories, and methodologically in the way that we're developing methods to approach that entanglement as well.

Psychological research is paying more attention to the emotional and psychological aspects of that entanglement and human-animal relations, which is my more specific focus. Sometimes that's in relation to that bigger political picture around ecological grief and the climate crisis.

The bigger picture has been 'the animal turn', as it's sometimes been called. This refers to a shift in the humanities and social sciences where researchers began to pay attention to animals as real, sentient beings with agency and subjectivity, and to the deep entanglements of human and animal lives in society and culture. This has encouraged us all to rethink concepts in ways that challenge a lot of established, entrenched anthropocentric assumptions in psychology and beyond. 

For example, in the growing movement around animal-assisted therapy, animals are not just passive participants but are co-therapists of sorts, recognised for their ability to shape human emotional experience. Their popularity in therapeutic settings has grown so much that it's also led to greater scrutiny around animal welfare. Some have even proposed a 'therapy animal's bill of rights' to ensure that animals' wellbeing is protected in these relationships.

Another example is how companion animals became integral during the COVID-19 pandemic. People reported stronger bonds with their pets, seeing them as sources of comfort, stability, and even mutual care. That's kinship and interdependence in action –across species boundaries. That is really interesting for me as it challenges Western thought more generally. A lot of the political movements around this recognition have roots in indigenous ontologies and indigenous politics, and engaging with indigenous understandings.

That extension of rights to non-human beings, even conceptually, challenges the dominant theoretical and ethical paradigms in psychology as well as in other traditions. For example, animism, in the context of my work, refers to a worldview that recognises the vitality, agency, and subjectivity of non-human beings and the more-than-human world. It's not just about believing that animals or natural entities have spirits, as it's often caricatured, but about acknowledging that these beings are participants in shared worlds with humans, deserving of ethical consideration.

That's quite a challenging perspective for us to think about, and it invites a different ethical and political stance as well. In recent writing, I've been engaging with different research that takes that proposition seriously in terms of a psychological perspective as well as a therapeutic practice. These shifts are really interesting and significant for me… they suggest we're in the midst of some kind of conceptual and ethical transformation, and one that moves beyond human exceptionalism.

On one hand, the climate crisis is facilitating that heightened awareness of the ethical and ecological costs of human exploitation of animals, particularly in relation to industrialised animal agriculture, which we know is also contributing to the climate crisis.

But at the same time, we have a continued global rise in meat consumption despite the growing awareness of its environmental impact – this demonstrates the deep entrenchment of cultural and economic systems that prioritise production and profit over sustainability and animal welfare. Psychological concepts such as cognitive dissonance have been really useful in helping us understand why we can switch off from the harm we are causing.

Whether our growing awareness of climate change and human-animal relations will lead to meaningful change is the billion-dollar question. Are we willing at an individual, social, cultural and political level to fundamentally rethink our food systems? Not just in terms of justice and sustainability, but also in terms of justice for non-human beings in a world where we don't have justice for all human beings? It's a difficult thing to consider, but the climate crisis is forcing us to confront these tensions. I'm always optimistic, but the direction of change remains uncertain.

Some of the older concepts in psychology, such as cognitive dissonance, defence mechanisms, and in-group and out-group dynamics, have been helpful in making non-judgmental sense of the complex emotional, cognitive and social processes that let us carry on as 'normal' in unprecedented times. I think psychology and the engagement of the discipline has really helped encourage an awareness and thinking through these issues in different and productive ways.

One crucial question is how can we reimagine human-animal relations in ways that promote ecological sustainability, but also justice for non-human beings? This includes thinking about companionship and emotional support with animals, through to how we use animals in society and entertainment and culture and food consumption. 
We can think about alternative models of cohabitation, agriculture or conservation that try to move beyond exploitative paradigms and think about human and more-than-human wellbeing. Species loss and the loss of biodiversity is a real, pressing, material question here as is the impact of climate displacement on animals both wild and domesticated.

There's an approach to history which advocates the practice of 'telling big stories through little stories'. I like the idea that by focusing on a specific story, you are illustrating and telling bigger stories – in my case, about animal systems or the way we treat animals in different settings. Recently, I have looked at the role of experimental animals in psychology. 

I was lucky enough to have an AHRC fellowship where I focused on the lesser-known details of the famous study of Pavlov's dogs. Their stories reveal much more than the foundations of classical conditioning, which is what we normally hear about in psychology. This 'little story' ended up being a 'big story' too, questioning not just the foundations of experimental psychology, but the ways in which we represent animal research in psychology today. You can find out more by visiting the online exhibition exploring the lives of the dogs.

'Animals can be a shining example to us all'

Professor of Communication and Social Interaction, Elizabeth Peel (Loughborough University), speaks about shifts in human-animal interaction research, pet bereavement, and her own research on dog companionship during Covid.

We're moving away from traditional psychological approaches to understanding human-animal interaction. We have now moved towards innovative qualitative approaches. By sitting outside of our human-centric frame of reference and thinking about animal agency and a genuinely reciprocal and symbiotic relationship. There's been an increased awareness and acknowledgement that our relationships with companion animals are embedded in a wider connectedness with nature, and where humans also sit within that environment.

We are still very human-centric and Psychology is fundamentally about humans, but there's an increased understanding that we are animals too, even though we see ourselves as very special animals!

I would like to see pet loss and pet bereavement being taken more seriously from a non-human-centric point of view. It would help us to properly acknowledge that these can be very significant and profound losses for people.

I've recently trained as a person-centred psychotherapist, and I wrote my dissertation on ordinary dogs in therapy. One of the things I'm interested in is normalising non-human animals. You have specially trained dogs which are seen as being particularly beneficial to autistic children or offenders, or older people living with dementia, for instance. But I'm interested in the fact that we're all part of nature, and we could move away from a dyadic, human-centric way of thinking about improving psychological health, and consider the active contributions that animals and nature make to that.

My focus has been on dogs, particularly these non-human actors can bring something into a therapy space, not just as an add-on or as a specialism. Boris Levinson, who was an American psychologist working in the 50s, first coined the term 'canine co-therapist', and I think that's a great term. We often talk about nature as a co-therapist, and I think it's time to seriously look at that in a way that attempts to integrate it rather than seeing it as being a special add-on.

In my Master's in counselling and psychotherapy, I did an online survey with therapists, and I was asking them what their dogs bring to therapy. Some were incredibly humble and said their dogs brought their own skill set, for example, in allowing safe touch. Touch in the context of human therapy is contentious and comes with a lot of loaded meanings and risk. Some therapists talked about their dog leaning on the client or sitting on the client, almost like a weighted blanket, and helping them self-soothe or regulate. Dogs can bring those non-verbal skills to therapy, and it's something distinctive and unique.

I launched my Dog Talking and Walking project just after the COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in 2022. I had 673 responses to the online survey and then did 41 follow-up interviews. See a summary of findings. I wrote an article for a special issue of Qualitative Methods in Psychology, which was a deep dive into the Covid element of that project. We're more than five years on now, and there's a bit of a social taboo about Covid, and I really wanted to hone in on the impact of the pandemic. People are still profoundly affected by that experience and the collective trauma we all went through, but there's some cultural amnesia about it.

The key things in terms of Covid were that people's relationships with their dogs seemed to attenuate their feelings of human loss, but also the losses of their routines and work. Having a dog at home during that time acted as a buffer against Covid losses for those I spoke to. There was also this idea of dogs as a mediator in families, a bridge between the humans who were sometimes quite fractious with each other. Dogs acted as a way of softening and diffusing some of that tension.

Life took on an exceptional quality during the pandemic, and although relationships with dogs might not have been quantitatively different, they were qualitatively different in terms of the intensity of people's relationships with their dogs at that time. There's a lovely quote from one of the early researchers in this field who wrote about companion animal bereavement, Weisman, from 1991 about the positive impact of companion animals in that they 'are notoriously indifferent to status, wealth, looks, or any other value that the rest of society uses to judge its members'. Animals can be a shining example to us all.

'Not everyone is suited to owning a pet'

Dr Deborah Wells (Queen's University Belfast) researches animal welfare and ways to improve the wellbeing of animals kept in captivity through evidence-based enrichment strategies.

There is a greater awareness now that the field of human-animal interactions (HAI) is not without its problems from a methodological perspective. Numerous articles have touched on the need for more longitudinal work in the area, using more robust approaches to data collection. There is also greater concern now for the welfare of animals employed in the human-animal mix, and organisations using dogs and cats, and horses in a therapeutic role are starting to take this on board.

I'm intrigued by the role that AI, robotics and other technologies may be able to play in advancing the field of human-animal interactions. Most of the research in the field of HAI has been driven by psychologists, anthropologists and animal welfare scientists, usually without much of a focus on technologies.

owners' personalities. Contrary to what one may expect, we have found that people who are more strongly attached to their pets actually suffer from poorer mental health than individuals with weaker bonds of attachment, with the trait of neuroticism playing a mediating role. 

Not everyone is suited to owning a pet or will gain any health advantages from an animal. It is important to determine what types of people may or may not benefit from pet ownership – this certainly has a knock-on effect on bigger animal welfare-related issues, including cruelty and relinquishment.

We still don't know a great deal about the mechanisms underlying any health benefits arising from human-animal interactions. Animals can improve the health of some, although not all, people, but how they do so still remains a mystery. Suggestions include, amongst others, the provision of companionship, increased production of oxytocin and improvements in social relationships. Longitudinal work, which is still sorely lacking in this field, would potentially help to unravel what mechanisms might be at play in this respect.

I often hear of professionals recommending that parents acquire a pet dog in an effort to provide emotional support and enhanced wellbeing to their child. However, dogs do need training for this type of role, and parents may or may not see benefits from this sort of pet acquisition. 

It would be useful to start exploring the advantages and disadvantages of pet ownership for people who obtain a pet to improve their child's mental health and determine how these differ from those who own a trained emotional support animal. More generally, there needs to be a greater awareness that pets are not a panacea for human ill-health, and we certainly shouldn't regard them as a 'one size fits all' remedy.

Most of the research in this area, understandably, has focused on dogs, and to a lesser degree, cats. We still don't know a great deal as to whether other types of pets are capable of enhancing their owners' health or facilitating other areas of functioning.  Small mammals in particular, would be worthy of exploration, given the huge number of hamsters, gerbils and guinea pigs purchased for children, often under the assumption they make good 'starter' pets. 

We need to start exploring the impact here on both the animals' welfare and the role they play in their young owners' lives.

Further reading

• The kingdom of dogs, Matthew Adams revisits Pavlov's labs from a dog's perspective.
• Special issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology, edited by Matthew Adams: Qualitative methods in psychology after the animal turn: human-animal and multi-species relations.
• Elizabeth Peel, An antidote to "armageddon and potential doom": accounts of canine-human companionship during Covid-19.
• Summary of findings of Elizabeth Peel's Dog Talking and Walking Survey.
• Peel, E. (forthcoming) Revisiting the canine co-therapist: Qualitative survey of therapists' perspectives. Counselling Psychology Quarterly.
• Read more about Dr Deborah Wells' research.
• See also our 'Animals' collection