More Than a Refuge: What Animal Sanctuaries Teach

The obvious purpose of a refuge is to shelter. Animals arrive from places that were hurting them, and people look after them. That alone would justify the work, and for most sanctuaries it is where the day goes.

But there is a second function, less obvious and arguably further-reaching: a sanctuary teaches. Not incidentally, as a by-product of visitors wandering through, but by design — and it teaches several things that are difficult to teach anywhere else. This piece is about that, and it leans on a framework set out by the Catalan educator Joan Rodríguez, whose model for what a twenty-first-century animal institution ought to be remains the clearest account of it we know.

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What captivity teaches by accident

It helps to start with the counter-example, because most of us met so-called wild animals for the first time in a zoo.

Jane Goodall put the problem simply: an animal sitting in a small cage with nothing to do cannot show its personality, which makes the conventional zoo a poor educational model for children. The philosopher Marta Tafalla goes further, and her formulation is hard to shake — that our civilisation teaches us from childhood to dislike freedom, which is why schools take children to see cages, so that they come to believe cages are homes.

There is also a straightforwardly scientific problem. Ethology is the study of animal behaviour in the animal’s own terms and its own environment; in enclosures, what you can observe is largely simple, stereotyped and repetitive. Rodríguez uses a good example. A squirrel raised in a cage will still know how to open a nut — that much is inherited — but it will never get better at it. A squirrel raised in its own ecosystem improves over time, because others show it how. Take away the environment and you have not merely impoverished the animal; you have falsified the lesson.

Take away the environment and you have not merely impoverished the animal. You have falsified the lesson.

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The first thing a sanctuary teaches: the individual

Here is the conceptual move that changes everything, and it is smaller than it sounds.

Conventional animal institutions educate about species and ecosystems. Their subject is the tiger, the elephant, the coral reef. What they do not educate about is the individual animal — this one, the one in front of you, with a history and interests of its own. In Rodríguez’s model the subject is precisely that: the individual, its interests and its wellbeing.

The conceptual move at the centre of Rodríguez’s model: the subject of the lesson changes.

Sanctuaries do this almost automatically, because it is how they are built. The animals have names and biographies; they were rescued from somewhere specific; staff can tell you who is friends with whom. Farm Sanctuary, which has run humane education programmes for decades, describes the core of its method as introducing a student to an individual cow, pig or chicken — learning a name, meeting a gaze, hearing a story. It sounds sentimental until you notice what it does: it makes the abstraction impossible. You can hold a category at arm’s length. You cannot do that with someone who has a name.

And the criterion for who counts is not cleverness. This matters, because our tendency is to rank animals by how closely their minds resemble ours. The relevant question is the capacity to have experiences — to be harmed in a way that is felt. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness set out that the absence of a neocortex does not prevent an organism from experiencing affective states; the evidence now extends to fish. An interest, in this framework, is simply what is beneficial to someone. Animals have an interest, for example, in not suffering, and that interest does not require them to pass a test in reasoning first — any more than it does in our own case.

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The second thing: that care is a form of thinking

There is an etymology worth knowing. The Catalan and Spanish verb for caring, cuidar, descends from the Latin cōgitare — to think. Caring and thinking share a root, which is a useful corrective to the assumption that one is the soft version of the other.

The ethics of care, formulated by Carol Gilligan against the abstract, justice-based model of moral development that preceded it, describes moral life as responding to the needs of an individual who cannot meet them alone. Its characteristic feature is attention to detail: the small things, the minuscule gestures, which are in the end what makes a life bearable. A sanctuary runs on exactly this. Feeding regimes, mobility aids, medication schedules, knowing which animal cannot be housed with which. It is not a philosophy of grand principles. It is a philosophy of Tuesday morning.

The standard objection is that such an ethic is parochial — that if morality grows out of relationships, it will only ever reach those we happen to know, which would leave most animals outside. Theorists including Josephine Donovan, Carol Adams and Grace Clement have answered it convincingly. We cannot be agents of care, Donovan argues, if we are unable to care about the interests of beings we know to be suffering. And the parochial reading collapses under its own logic: we have no personal relationship with the vast majority of humanity either, and nobody concludes from this that abandoning them is acceptable.

The Spanish philosopher Angélica Velasco Sesma frames the shift as moving from an arrogant relation to the non-human world to an affective one — and argues that this is what makes the expansion of ethics possible. We have written more about how knowing and caring depend on each other in our piece on animal minds and what we owe animals.

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The third thing: perspective-taking, as a skill

Humane education has a working definition that is more demanding than its reputation. The Academy of Prosocial Learning describes it as a pedagogy encouraging cognitive, affective and behavioural growth through critical thinking, problem-solving, perspective-taking and empathy — as these relate to people, animals, the planet, and the connections between them.

Note what sits in the middle of that list. Perspective-taking is a skill, and like any skill it can be practised or left to atrophy. It is also, not coincidentally, the theme chosen for World Animal Day this year: See the World Through Their Eyes — which we wrote about here.

The Open Sanctuary Project makes the further point that this kind of teaching does more than transfer knowledge: it gives learners a way to work out what they actually value, and then to act consistently with it. That is a different educational objective from remembering that a pig has forty-four teeth, and a sanctuary is unusually good terrain for it.

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The fourth thing, and the least discussed: it reaches learners a classroom misses

Rodríguez was an inclusive-education specialist, and this is where his framework does something most writing on sanctuaries does not.

Universal Design for Learning starts from a claim that sounds obvious and is routinely ignored: barriers to learning are not inherent in the capacities of learners, but mostly in rigid teaching materials and methods. If a child cannot access a lesson delivered as text, sitting still, in one register, the problem is the design.

A sanctuary has more than one door into the same lesson. A textbook has one.

A sanctuary is almost the opposite of that design. It is multi-sensory, embodied and unhurried; it can be entered through sound, smell, movement, touch or story rather than through reading; it accommodates very different paces at once. For learners with sensory or communication differences, with attention profiles that classrooms punish, or with a first language other than the one of instruction, that is not a nice extra. It may be the difference between being taught and being reached.

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Does any of this work?

It would be poor practice to argue for evidence-based pedagogy and then skip the evidence.

Research on visitor experiences has found that immersive encounters can inspire real changes in behaviour towards animals and ecosystems, and — importantly — that those changes are associated with deliberate moral-education programmes rather than with the visit alone. In other words, the place is necessary but not sufficient. What is taught in it, and how, is doing the work.

The honest caveat is that the field is thinner than it should be. Humane education was widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and faded afterwards, largely because very little empirical research was done to demonstrate that it worked — not because research showed that it did not. Modern programmes report substantial reach, and there is evidence linking humane education to benefits in academic performance and student development. But anyone claiming certainty here is overstating.

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What it teaches about us

There is a last claim in Rodríguez’s model that is easy to read as sentimental and is not.

Moral education directed at animals and habitats, he argues, returns as peace between people. The reasoning runs through a parallel: ecologically, a healthy system is one with high biodiversity, and a system in which a single species spreads and eliminates the others is fragile and sickens. Ethically, a just society is one that fosters and respects a diversity of ways of living, and the totalitarian system is the extreme expression of injustice. Kant made a narrower version of the same observation — that cruelty towards animals hardens a person in their dealings with other people.

Which returns us to where we began. A refuge shelters some individuals, and that is worth doing on its own terms. But a refuge that also teaches changes the conditions that filled it — which is the only way any of them will eventually be less needed.

A refuge saves the animals inside it. A refuge that teaches works on the reasons they arrived.

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Where we come into this

We make shoes, which is a smaller thing than running a sanctuary, and we would not pretend otherwise. What the two have in common is the starting premise: that an animal is someone rather than something, and that this ought to change what we do rather than only what we feel. Not using animal materials is our version of acting on it. Supporting the places that shelter and teach is another, and one anybody can do — sanctuaries run on donations, volunteers and visits, and most of them will tell you the visits matter as much as the resources. You can read more about the thinking we work from on our values page.

We would like to end by thanking the author of the main source behind this piece, for the work he left us.