Feeling at Home with Animals: Exploring How Bonds with Animals Shape Our Care for the Environment

Animals often stand as the most vivid symbols of the natural world, shaping how people imagine, value, and care for the environment. This study examines how emotional connections with animals relate to environmental attitudes and whether feelings of place attachment mediate this relationship. Drawing on frameworks from conservation psychology and sense-of-place research, two animal connection constructs—Animal Empathy and Animal Solidarity—were tested as predictors of environmental concern among a U.S. sample of 282 adults. Each mediation model was estimated with 5,000 bootstrap samples, entering one predictor at a time while controlling for the other. These mediation models were specifically designed to evaluate whether place attachment functions as an intervening variable linking each animal connection construct to environmental attitudes, allowing us to estimate both direct and indirect effects while accounting for the other predictor. Results showed that both Animal Empathy and Animal Solidarity were positively associated with pro-environmental attitudes and with both measures of Place Attachment. Place Attachment partially mediated the relationship between Animal Empathy and Environmental Attitudes. In contrast, Place Attachment did not significantly mediate the effect of Animal Solidarity, which was directly predictive of environmental concern. These findings suggest that empathy-based and solidarity-based connections with animals may foster environmental care through distinct psychological pathways. Understanding how affective bonds with animals shape place-based and environmental engagement can inform education, communication, and relational approaches to fostering ecological responsibility.