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Testing the Pets Over People Hypothesis 
As 
The Guardian
article indicates, the mismatch between the public outrage over 
the shootings of a dog and a pregnant mom a mere 14 hours and 50 miles apart is 
striking. But was this an aberration? In the wake of Ferguson and now South 
Carolina, police shootings of human beings have been big news. Do the tragic cases 

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of Jeanetta Riley and Arfee support the view that our love of animals trumps our 
concern for people? 
Two sociologists at Northeastern University have tested the claim that people are 
more upset by news stories of animal abuse than they are about attacks directed 
toward humans. The researchers, Arnold Arluke, an authority on human-animal 
relationships, and Jack Levin, an expert on serial killers and mass murders, had 
college students read fake news accounts on a crime wave in Boston. For instance, 
one of the articles included the statement, “According to witnesses present, one 
particularly vicious assault involved a one-year-old puppy that was beaten with a 
baseball bat by an unknown assailant. Arriving on the scene a few minutes after the 
attack, a police officer found the victim with one broken leg, multiple lacerations, 
and unconscious. No arrests have been made in the case.” 
The subjects in the experiment did not know the articles were bogus. Nor did they 
know that there were actually four slightly different versions of the newspaper 
articles, each portraying a different victim: a puppy, an adult dog, a human infant, 
or a human adult. After they read one of the four news stories, each subject 
completed a scale which measured how much empathy and emotional distress they 
felt for the victim of the beating. 
Arluke and Levin reported the results of their study at the 2013 meeting of the 
American Sociological Association. As you might guess, the story in which the 
victim was a human adult elicited, by far, the lowest levels of emotional distress in 
the readers. The “winner” when it came to evoking empathy was not the puppy but 
the human infant. The puppy, however, came in a close second with the adult dog 
not far behind. Arluke and Levin concluded that species is important when it comes 
to generating sympathy with the downtrodden. But they argued that the critical 
difference in responses to the stories was based on our special concern for creatures 
that are innocent and defenseless.