Becoming Animal People: Empathy Pedagogies and the Contested Politics of Care in Jordanian Animal Welfare Work

A common refrain among animal welfare and protection workers in Jordan is that Jordanians are not "animal people." This article explores the implications of this statement, and argues that such claims are closely connected to neoliberal practices of care increasingly found in the world today. I examine the educational methods of three transnational animal welfare groups in Jordan as they work to transform Jordanians into animal people, focusing in particular on the cultivation of empathy for animals. I follow this pedagogical approach as it entangles with other discourses of care central to neoliberal humanitarianism, and as it challenges different models of human-animal relationality and humanity in Jordan. I suggest that the criticisms some Jordanians make of animal NGOs reveal the slippage points that accompany global animal welfare work as it inculcates particular versions of humanity and animality. Amidst these conflicting discourses and practices—what I refer to throughout the article as the economies and politics of care—empathy is used as a common language that is both an arguing point and proof of humanity for different discourses of animal and human care. What on the surface are clashing models of care are in fact mutually constitutive discourses that bolster one another by providing evidence of opposing claims. With empathy as a common language, animal welfare and human welfare as global, moral projects are deeply entwined, even as they conflict on local scales.