Commentary

How to Practice Empathy with Animals: 

A Maibomian Account*

Waldberg, Elizabeth. and Kristin Andrews. 2026. “How to Practice Empathy with Animals: A Maibomian Account.” 

 Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 8, no. 1:  24-31. https://doi.org/10.33497/2026.earlysummer.4.

Abstract: This commentary argues that Maibom, in her book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, offers compelling epistemic reasons for empathizing with nonhuman animals. Maibom suggests that we learn more about the world when we empathize with those unlike ourselves, rather than reserving empathy only for those most like us. We argue that this conclusion extends beyond human-to-human cases of empathy, imploring us to practice empathy with other animals. We ground our case in Maibom’s claim that empathy, as a form of perspective taking, is an inherently embodied and embedded process. Through the exploration of three test cases, we show that the common features of embodied experience allow humans to extend their empathy to animals, and that doing so has significant consequences for the ethics of animal welfare.

Keywords: embodiment, empathy, perspective taking, animal cognition, animal ethics

In The Space Between (2022), Heidi Maibom focuses on the interpersonal and cross-cultural difficulties we face in today’s society. With wars and political fighting, us and them mentality is part of our daily news diet. To help manage these conflicts, Maibom offers guidance in developing empathy for other humans. In this commentary we would like to see if we can expand her approach to better our relationships with other animals. As the world’s environment warms and humans expand into previously undeveloped wilderness, 

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tensions between humans and other species rise, too. At the same time, humans and other animals also share close relationships, with companion animals in our homes, farms, sanctuaries, labs, and zoos. Can adopting Maibom’s approach to empathy toward other animals help us understand these sometimes close, sometimes strained relationships? Can it help to guide us in improving our relationships with them?

Maibom characterizes empathy as a kind of perspective taking that involves placing ourselves within the “web of interests” of another person in order to feel their emotions. This allows us to better understand ourselves, other agents, and the world we share. Empathy grants us a more accurate, objective understanding of the world by providing us the chance to experience diverse perspectives that we may not otherwise get. Because there is no “objective observer,” our best strategy is to aggregate as many perspectives as possible.

We argue that Maibom offers us good epistemic reasons to develop empathy towards those most unlike ourselves, whom we often are biased against - other animals. Because one’s perspective is shaped by their embodiment and environment, and nonhuman animals are most different from us in these respects, we could learn the most from empathizing with them. Doing so would provide us with a rich diversity of perspectives from which we could glean a wealth of new information about the world we share.

REQUIREMENTS FOR PRACTICING EMPATHY

Recall that Maibom tells us that empathy is a special kind of perspective taking, an affective process where we experience another’s emotions for ourselves. The process of empathizing with someone constitutes “imaginatively occupying a position in a web of interests, concerns, and relationships that mirrors theirs” (Maibom 2022, 239). This “web of interests” is the environment of the person we’re trying to empathize with and how they relate to it.

For instance, when I’m commuting home after work my “web of interests” includes objects such as the train, other commuters, and perhaps colleagues or friends. In any particular moment I am experiencing different emotions, thoughts, and sensations regarding these objects – this is how I relate to my environment within my unique, embodied perspective. If I were to recount a stressful story about my train being delayed to a friend who has never used public transit, she would need to imagine a scenario that kept the relevant relationships in place while swapping out the individual objects for ones that connected to her in the right way. If she does this correctly, she’ll experience the frustration I felt when my train was delayed. Maibom argues that empathy gives us access not just to others’ emotions, but also their motivations, likely actions, thoughts, and desires. It is not enough for my friend to know that I was frustrated about the train delay - in order to fully understand my perspective in that moment, she must actively work to recall and embody a similar web of interests to the one I experienced. This is how empathy offers us the rare opportunity to experience the world as others do.

Maibom’s account is explicitly consistent with the human capacity for empathizing with animals. She even seems to practice this herself, at one point imagining a walk in the woods and happening upon a fox. She reflects that “had I been a rabbit and encountered a fox, I imagine I would have been quite scared” rather than delighted (Maibom 2022, 140). To accomplish this feat, she simulates the rabbit’s context and maps what she can on to her own, preserving the relevant relationships such as “predator/prey.” In this way, it seems empathy could also offer us the opportunity to experience the world as other animals do. The embodied nature of

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perspective shapes what these feelings will be, with certain bodies giving rise to a certain set of needs, motivations, and emotional responses. We can expect that beings with the same biological inheritance will share these feelings. One example is hunger - all animals need to eat - and the feeling of being hungry accompanies that need. Another is pain. All sentient beings demonstrate pain markers in the face of at least some kinds of injuries. And perhaps a third example is joy—an emotion which is currently being researched in a range of animals to offset the focus on pain experience. While animals may experience hunger, pain, and joy differently, the shared aspects of our biology can provide a method for approximating those feelings and the functions that they serve.

CHALLENGES WITH PRACTICING EMPATHY

Empathizing with others, human and nonhuman alike, is not always easy. Being a good empathizer is a skill that requires practice. There are three features of empathizing with others that Maibom points to as challenges for human-to-human empathy: they are biases, power differentials, and cognitive differences. These challenges are especially salient when trying to empathize with humans who are quite different from ourselves, be it because of culture, political leanings, abilities, etc. These challenges become even more significant when considering empathy with nonhuman animals — we propose differences in embodiment as a fourth, animal-unique challenge. Despite the numerous challenges, we also stress that there are key similarities that make empathy with animals possible. The most important among these is sentience, or the ability to feel things like pleasure and pain. There is a growing acceptance  that animal sentience is widely distributed across species, including in insects, octopuses and many other invertebrates (Andrews et al. 2024). 

BIASES

Maibom often points to the difficulties that arise when trying to empathize with others when biases get in the way or when empathizing causes intense and painful feelings. While empathy can be “an easy gateway to the other,” cognitive obstacles such as “pre- existing antipathy, distraction, inattention, or sheer discomfort if the other is suffering” can make empathy difficult (Maibom 2022, 245). These difficulties are only accentuated when trying to empathize with a frightening animal like a snake or a spider. For some, empathy with such animals would seem impossible due to phobias. Others may find it impossible to take the perspective of a dog, given feelings that the species is unclean. Innate and cultural aversions to certain species is one kind of bias, but motivated reasoning is another. Consider animals farmed for food such as pigs, chickens, and cows. We might not want to think of them as individuals with their own emotions and a web of interests because we want to kill them and eat them. Our interest in exploiting animals for resources may also dovetail with a general bias against viewing animals as sentient beings with perspectives of their own, creating a substantial obstacle to successful empathizing. This obstacle is not so different from those faced in human-human empathy cases, however - biases held by majority groups about marginalized groups are often enabled by a desire to exploit others for economic or social gain and a tendency to dehumanize them. 

POWER DIFFERENTIALS

The second feature that makes empathy challenging is power dynamics. Maibom references a study that shows bosses struggle to empathize with their workers, and it’s easy to see how such a case might extend to other animals. Animals have no legal standing in most of the world, at best receiving consideration as property. Humans are the persons, and animals merely things. As a result, we hold significant power over them. For wild

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animals, we get to decide when to destroy their habitat and when to preserve it, whether to build green corridors to promote migration, or whether to reintroduce wolves into land where they haven’t been seen in generations. Our dominance over captive animals is perhaps more obvious. Humans occupy an authoritative role in our relationships with our pets, animals in zoos, and other types of captivity. Pet owners can put shock collars on dogs and declaw their cats. We build entire industries around forcing animals to have sex and reproduce for our benefit. We are in control.

COGNITIVE DIFFERENCES

Maibom points to the difficulties involved in empathizing with a human whose psychology is different from one’s own. As noted, all human beings share certain kinds of embodied experiences such as hunger, pain, joy, etc. Despite these similarities, there is enormous psychological diversity within and between our communities. Psychological diversity might come in the form of cultural, linguistic, and even neuropsychological differences such as autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. It is harder to empathize with those who think differently than we do - take the example of a neurotypical person trying to empathize with an autistic coworker. The neurotypical person might struggle to understand what it is like to miss subtle social cues, making it hard to place herself in her autistic coworker’s “web of interests.” For animals with different cognitive capacities, it may be difficult to even approximate what might matter to them or how they might conceptualize their world. Here looms the specter of anthropocentrism.

Comparative cognition research has as one goal to determine the differing cognitive capacities that are typical of different species. Does the chimpanzees have a theory of mind? Do rats have episodic memory? Do scrub jays plan for breakfast? These are all live research questions for other species, and progress is slow. When we don’t know what kind of cognitive capacities are shared with an animal who we are trying to empathize with, we risk projecting our own anthropocentric biases in place of genuinely empathizing. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to develop our skills as empathizers and perspective-takers. We may never be able to perfectly situate ourselves in the complex web of interests of a being with a decentralized nervous system, such as an octopus, but we believe Maibom offers us good epistemic reasons to try. While it is not necessary for an animal to be cognitively capable of perspective taking to be an appropriate target of our empathy, research suggests that apes (Andrews and Gruen 2014) and rats (Bartal et al.  2011) may also engage in prosocial behavior indicative of empathy.

EMBODIMENT

The final challenge for empathizing with animals also doubles as one of empathy’s strengths in human cases — it is a fundamentally embodied process. While embodiment provides a common starting point for human empathy, Maibom suggests that members of the same species, in virtue of their similarities in embodiment and environment, will understand each other best: “Our understanding is human understanding” (Maibom 2022, 57). This means that the larger the differences between species, the harder it might be to find common points of reference. The differing embodiments and sensory systems found in different species do raise significant challenges, along similar lines to the problems we saw with differing cognitive capacities. But they also offer an unparalleled opportunity to learn about the world from a novel set of perspectives.

In addition to the differences in environments, sizes, and sensory systems, we also have large differences in our basic needs and how we experience them. Bumblebees see the world in different spectrums of light. Dolphins

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live their whole lives underwater and can use echolocation. Understanding the world from these perspectives would be challenging. What does hunger feel like to a ball python who eats just once a month? While practicing empathy correctly will yield new knowledge about the world, we risk getting it seriously wrong if we simply imagine what it would be like for us to be in their position.

PRACTICING EMPATHY: APPLICATIONS TO THREE ANIMAL CASES

Maibom suggests the end goal of empathy is “to see the world as someone else sees it” (Maibom 2022, 135), which sometimes feels impossible when we empathize with humans, even more so with other animals. Given these four challenges for empathizing with animals, we must consider how we might manage them. Is there a smaller aim we can strive toward in our quest to understand nonhuman perspectives? How can we develop the skill of empathy when it comes to other animals?

We might address our biases toward other species in the same way Maibom suggests we tackle biases toward other humans: “We can hold back when it comes to visceral reactions, we can populate our imagined scenarios with more contextual factors to avoid focalism, and we can imagine that the person we are trying to empathize with is someone we really care for” (Maibom 2022, 176). This might include consciously overriding our fear reaction towards snakes and spiders before acting. To address power dynamics in human cases, Maibom cites research showing that if “one focuses on one’s responsibility toward those one has power over, it actually increases one’s tendency to take their perspectives” (Maibom 2022, 197). Lastly, we could address the cognitive differences and embodiment challenges by focusing on the many similar ways in which humans and other animals relate to their environments. Because “a good deal of the time, perspective taking has less to do with figuring out the other’s precise thoughts and feelings than with relational meanings,” (Maibom 2022, 173), we might not need to know what it’s like to have a distributed mind in order to understand how an octopus feels when she senses danger. We examine three animal cases to illustrate how empathizing with animals might work.

PETS

There is one group of animals that many people interact with, and perhaps even try to empathize with, on a daily basis - our pets. Maibom uses the example of domesticated dogs to support her claim that emotional experience often accompanies embodiment and action: “Dogs likely don’t just bark, but they also experience the affect connected with the bark” (Maibom 2022, 112).

While the attribution of emotional states to dogs suggests that they have a perspective with which we can empathize, we also face unique challenges in doing so. The first obstacle is the difference in species, and therefore embodiment, between pets and their human caretakers.

Humans may struggle to grasp the “affect connected with the bark” of a dog with the same ease that we can understand the emotion behind the crying of a human child. Putting ourselves into our pet’s “web of interests” means identifying and reimagining the relevant relations between them and their environment, which is harder to do when there are substantial differences in cognition and perception. One useful tool pet owners have when empathizing with their pets is the close interpersonal relationship they share. For example, I am quite good at determining what my cat wants based on the way she meows, a skill which took time, familiarity, and patience to develop. This knowledge helps me figure out what she may be feeling. There may

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be some differences we cannot overcome, such as understanding what the world looks like to a dog who lives their life in a world of scent. Without instruments that don’t yet exist, humans cannot gain the information dogs have when they perceive who has been to this corner recently, and what their mood was like at the time.

Harder to confront is the inherent power disparity in the human-pet relationship. We have control over how our pets’ basic needs are met, who they socialize with, and whether they receive medical care. There are many examples of the lack of empathy we generally have toward pets compared to other humans - neglecting or abusing pets is not always considered a crime (and it is rarely punished very severely) while unwanted pets are oftentimes euthanized. Maibom’s strategy for addressing power imbalance in the human case involves focusing on the responsibility we have toward those we have power over. Will this help us empathize with our pets? Not if we don’t really understand the differences between our distinct sets of psychological, sensory, and embodied capacities and needs. What emerges from Maibom’s views is a testable hypothesis about how one might improve empathy with one’s pets: learn about their psychological and sensory systems, and remind yourself about your responsibility over them.

Such an intervention can be compared to welfare outcomes that can be independently measured. Identifying a causal relationship between the practice of empathy and positive welfare would also help to support the more general claim that empathy has positive outcomes.

STREET DOGS

Urban animals occupy a unique space in terms of their relationships with humans. They are not pets, so they lack the familiarity of the human-pet relationship and they are free from some of the power relations, but they are also not strangers to human interaction. Free-ranging dogs, which are prevalent in many cities throughout the world, offer one particularly interesting example. They are a normal feature of the environment for the humans they share cities with, and they are common enough that human-dog interactions are a daily occurrence. This relationship is fraught, however, as free-ranging dogs also constitute a major public health problem: issues include human-animal conflict, the spread of zoonoses, and uncontrolled population growth (Bhattacharjee et al. 2018). There are debates in India regarding how to best manage the free- ranging dog population, with some advocating for feeding the dogs so that they trust humans enough to be safely vaccinated and spayed or neutered, while others believe humans should aim for population reduction by withholding care from the dogs or even culling them.

Maibom’s account of empathy could help communities manage their relationships with free- ranging dogs and other urban wildlife, although we face additional challenges in comparison to the case of pets when practicing empathy. Not only do we have the challenge of different species membership - and therefore different embodiment - but we lack the close interpersonal familiarity we share with our pets.

Because free-ranging dogs are viewed as dangerous by some, there is also the problem of our “visceral reactions” and biases getting in the way of empathizing. While these present large obstacles to empathizing with free-ranging dogs, another aspect of Maibom’s account could help - perspective taking, and therefore empathy, is an embedded process. This means that our perspectives are embedded within the features and affordances of our environment. Humans can use their shared environmental context as a starting point for empathizing with these dogs. After all, since we are both sharing the same city streets, parks, and public spaces, we both have

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knowledge of these environments. The specific intervention that Maibom’s account suggests would be the same as with pets, plus thinking about the use of shared space from the perspective of the dogs. Empathy in such contexts can form the beginning of a behavioral negotiation between humans and the street dogs we share our communities with, progressing toward the goal of changing interspecies social norms in a way that can benefit both populations.

WILD ANIMALS

The animals we know the least provide the greatest challenge for developing empathy, but they also benefit most from humans overriding our biases, acknowledging our power differential, and attending to their variable psychologies and embodiments. This is because in the Anthropocene, our actions are having significant impacts on other animals whether we notice them or not.

In cases of human-wildlife conflict, the Maibomian suggestion might be much like what we propose for the street dogs: acknowledge biases, learn about the psychological, social, and physiological needs and capacities of the animal, recognize where the responsibility lies, and consider that the animals are agents who we can negotiate with.

But most wild animals live their lives far from humans, in the seas, forests, and mountains that are only indirectly impacted by anthropogenic activities. What about empathy for them, the animals we barely notice? Here we take there to be a bigger challenge, one that goes beyond advice about how to practice empathy. While Maibom offers a strong incentive for empathizing with all emotional beings, we argue that this constitutes an epistemic reason to take the perspectives of those most unlike ourselves. Consider the example of bees. The perceptual experience and ecological niche of a bee is radically different from that of a human, making successful empathizing seemingly unlikely. But there are fundamental shared aspects of our experiences, such as the experience of pain (Gibbons et al. 2022). We propose using such basic, shared experiences as the starting point for empathizing even with animals most unlike ourselves. 

CONCLUSION

We have both epistemic and moral incentives to empathize with other animals. The former on account of the knowledge we could gain from learning about perspectives radically unlike our own. The latter because, according to Maibom, taking someone’s perspective is an admission of equality between yourself and the target. She gives factory farming as an example: “Factory farming is not the horror it is because we are failing to fully appreciate the differences between us and cows, pigs, and chickens. It is because we deny them feelings, suffering, and a wish for autonomy. In other words, it is because we deny that they are like us in these crucial respects” (Maibom 2022, 195). With these words, she suggests that we should put in the hard work of learning to empathize with other animals, no matter how difficult it is. They deserve it. And it will make us better humans if we can learn to do so.

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*Each author is responsible for 50% of this paper.

References

1. Andrews, Kristin, Birch, Jonathan, Sebo, Jeff, and Toni Sims. 2024. “Background to the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness.” nydeclaration.com.

2. Andrews, Kristin, and Lori Gruen. 2014. “Empathy in Other Apes.” In Empathy and Morality, edited by Heidi L. Maibom. Oxford University Press.

3. Bhattacharjee, Debottam, Shubhra, Sau, and Anindita Bhadra. 2018. “Free-Ranging Dogs Understand Human Intentions and Adjust Their Behavioral Responses Accordingly.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 6.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2018.00232 

4. Bartal, Inbal Ben-Ami, Decety, Jean, and Peggy Mason. 2011. “Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats.” Science, 334: 1427–1430. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1210789

5. Gibbons, Matilda, Crump, Andrew, Barrett, Meghan, Sarlak, Sajedeh, Birch, Johnathan, and Lars Chittka. 2022. “Chapter Three - Can insects feel pain? A review of the neural and behavioural evidence.” Advances in Insect Physiology 63: 155–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aiip.2022.10.001

1. Maibom, Heid L. 2022. The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works. Oxford University Press.

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Elizabeth Waldberg & Kristin Andrews © 2026 

Author emails: andrewsk[at]yorku[dot]ca; waldberg[at]yorku[dot]ca