Survey on Human Compassion Towards Their Pets

Problem: Due to recent charges of animal abuse among pet owners, I have decided to do a survey on the amount of respect owners give to their animal companions, also known as pets. Animals, other than us "intelligent" humans, seem to be treated with little respect, if any. In Spain they celebrate their dominance over animals once a year. This celebration consists of the mass murder and torture of goats, bulls, sheep, and other "subhuman" creatures. Throughout the world animals are undergoing constant experiments on their body tissues, organs, and immune system. There is no mercy for the animals in today's modern and fast paced world where cures are more and more needed, and the tasty flesh of animals is in demand. Or is there? Recently, animal rights activists and organizations are sprouting up like dandelions, nice looking and hard to get rid of. Vegetarianism is also becoming more popular, and may very well be the way of the future. The problem is most people think that animals are less better than us, and should be treated with far less respect than we would give a fellow human being. Hypothesis: I think that people care less for animals due to the way society programmed to think and behave. Since the day that we were born, most parents preached to us "Be nice to the family dog," or the cat or whatever the case may be, and right after that they would say "Time for supper." When the children came to the table, on their plates would be some nice broccoli, a potato, and a slab of meat. The way society teaches us to be nice to animals while they stab the animals in the back, literally, is a hypocrisy. They say one thing, and then do the complete opposite. Society, in more cases, cannot even follow their own morals they teach. Luckily, thanks to the animal activists and organizations, society is having to revise their misguided ideology about the rights of animals. Human compassion is blossoming, and that is why I hypothesize we are more caring toward animals now, than we have been in the past. This will be proven by a series of questions, each showing how much they either care, or don't care. Data Gathering: To obtain the information I needed, I could have used many different methods. However, I decided to use the telephone as a tool to acquire the answers and responses I would need to validate my hypothesis. I devised a table (on the next page) to keep track of the information. Eleven questions were asked and are listed below: 1 Do you have a pet? 2 What type of animal is it? 3 Is it a male or female? 4 Where did you get him/her? 5 How long has he/she been with you? 6 Do you bring him/her in for regular checkups? 7 Do you groom him/her? 8 Is this done professionally or personally? 9 Who cares for your pet when you go on a vacation? 10 Do you consider him/her a part of your family? 11 Do you eat meat? With this series of questions I hoped to get a good idea of how they treated and cared for their animal companions. The first question about having a pet led to the asking of the other questions, except for the last one which will be explained later in this portion of the survey. Obviously, if someone doesn't have a pet I can't ask if they groom it or if they consider it to be part of the family. The next few questions after the first are seeing how much knowledge the respondent has of their pet, and the questions after those are seeing how much they seem to care or not care about their pet. When I started to phone around to get the results, I chose only random numbers. This way I hoped to get a broader picture of the whole pet-owner scene. I introduced myself, and asked the questions as politely as I could. Every answer given was put into the computer and saved frequently incase of a malfunction in the program I was using. I pretested the questionnaire with some of my friends and mother, which was successful. I was pleased to see that they understood my questions clearly and answered as I expected them to be answered. That does not mean that the answers were fixed, only that the answers replied to the questions made sense. Since everyone answered in the same correct format (answers actually answering the questions), I found no need to make any revisions. Fortunately, my planning of the questions before testing them has paid off. Data Analysis: My hypothesis of people being kinder to animals than they would have in the past proved to be correct. However, through the data gathering and the tabulation chart, I have surprised myself. I have made the misconception that people are mean and disrespectable toward animals other than the human race. Humans are kinder than I ever thought possible. I was expecting to hear some respectful comments here and there to prove my hypothesis correct, but instead I found out that a lot of the respondents respect their animal companions and have great pride of them. Out of the people who had animal companions (75%), more than half of them (60%) take time out of their own schedule to groom them. The noble cat seemed to be the most popular of the "pets" (47%), in second place are the dogs (27%) which surprised me as they are the stereotypical pets in North American culture. Birds ranked in third (20%), followed by the rat (6%). The females were the dominant sex in this survey (73%). I think that females are more common as domestic pets because they are less aggressive in most situations. Male animals tend to be violent when another animal passes into its territory, which could harm itself, another animal, or human. Sixty-six percent of all the animal companions were bought at a pet store, and the others were family (20%), friends (6%), or other (6%). More than half of the subjects (66%) bring their pets to the veterinarian for regular checkups, which clearly demonstrates the owner-pet attachment is fairly high. It shows that they want their animal friends to be healthy and safe, so they can live longer to provide company and love for both the owner and the pet. I thought that the owner would like the animal companion to be taken care of by the most trustworthy being they know, that usually being family. Only forty-seven percent of the respondents have their pets taken care of by the family, and fifty-three percent taken care of by friends. Now I think it isn't always the family who is more trustworthy. It is possible that the friends can be as or more trustworthy than family. Another possibility could be whoever is around to take care of the pet. If the animal lives in one part of town, and so does a friend, and the family lives on the other side, the friend would probably be the one chosen to take care of it. It would be a burden on the family to travel across town when a friend could easily walk or take a short drive over there. I have also found that twenty-five percent of all of the respondents are vegetarians in some form or other. That means if this percent was constant throughout the world, one in four people would be a vegetarian. Unfortunately this probably isn't the case, but it is a really nice thought. This experiment could have been improved by doing more surveying to get a broader view of the problem. The results would be more accurate if more people had a chance to give their valuable input. I could have also had more questions to ask to validate my hypothesis. But when all is said and done, I think I have composed a well-written survey. Conclusion: The human race is a constantly changing species and hard to monitor. One moment we are driving thousands of animals to extinction and endangerment. Now we are trying to repair the damage we have caused. Every day is a new, unpredictable day and is impossible to say what the next new trend in society's treatment of animals will hold. Hopefully the trend will be to respect them more as the trend seems to be now. The results of this survey have shown how we are respecting animals more and more. It has also shown how I have underestimated the humanity of the humans. Humans aren't a bad species, we just make a lot of mistakes and it is up to us to correct them. The sooner we start correcting our many mistakes, the longer the human race and all of the other planet creatures will exist.