The first time I was forced to think about what compassion meant was when Peter Roberts of Compassion In World Farming interviewed me for the position of national campaigns officer in 1976.
“Do you have a problem with the word compassion?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” I replied. “Why?”
“Well,” I recall him saying, “some men are embarrassed by the word.”
“Not me,” I reassured him.
My answer was motivated more by wanting the job than understanding what compassion means. I cannot say that I understood what it meant then but it is a word that I have subsequently grown to respect.
So, what is compassion?
My copy of Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary describes compassion as a “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” The Penguin English Dictionary simply describes compassion as “sympathy, pity.”
It is easy to confuse sympathy with compassion. Webster describes sympathy as an “affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other.” Penguin describes it as the “capacity for sharing the feelings of another.” Then there is empathy, which Webster‘s describes as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.” Penguin defines empathy more succinctly as an “ability fully to understand and share another’s feelings.”
Sympathy, empathy and compassion are siblings in a family of nouns that describe concern for others. Each one has a different personality. For example, you may feel sympathy for animals, you may even empathize with them, but you are not motivated to act on such feelings. Compassion, on the other hand, connects you to other’s needs and inspires you to act for them. This is why I believe compassion–not sympathy or empathy–is a core value of animal advocacy.
Compassion is the most important of all human attributes. It inspires altruistic action for others. We help everyone when we help someone. Selfless thought and action dissolves prejudice and prevents violence. It is an altruistic love which we experience when we open our eyes, hearts and minds to the suffering of others and make a positive difference in their lives. It is a truth, an emotional intelligence, vital to our happiness and well-being. As author Ian McEwan wrote, “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it’s the beginning of morality.”
It was not for some time that I began to understand Peter Roberts’ point about compassion and masculinity. He was inferring that many men are embarrassed by compassion because they see it as a feminine characteristic.
“Males, in our patriarchal society,” writes animal behaviorist and veterinarian Michael W. Fox, “may well show more cruelty toward animals, or justify the same, because they close off empathy more than females when faced with others’ helplessness and suffering.” Compassion is not, of course, a gender-based attribute; it is something that is innate within us. It is nurtured by the education we receive, the values instilled in us and the choices we make in our lives. “Self-serving religious and political ideologies,” Fox writes, “also impair the ability to empathize, notably such ideologies as: man’s God-given dominion (over women, animals and nature).”
My respect for compassion deepened when I began to appreciate its spiritual strength and learned more about Buddhism, which places compassion central to its principles. Interestingly, the definitions of compassion do not include any reference to religion or spirituality. Compassion’s intrinsic power for inspiring positive change challenges us to transcend our everyday preoccupations and look beyond ourselves.
“Compassion is the aspiration that beings be free from suffering,” observes Peter Harvey, professor of Buddhist Studies. “It is the antidote to cruelty.”
If compassion is one of our core values, altruism must always be our motivation. By demonstrating our compassion for animals, we bear witness to our convictions and inspire others to also act by our example. Our machismo culture tends to focus only on heroic acts of bravery, particularly in times of human conflict. But the everyday actions of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for those who are in need are just as heroic–even more so when our actions for animals are ridiculed and dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant. We are often accused of caring more about animals when there is so much human suffering in the world. But as Henry Salt observed, “[H]ow can we successfully safeguard it in one direction while we violate it in another?”
