Woodland Park Zoo Blog

Posted by Sydney Dratel, Empathy Initiatives Imagine a virtual classroom full of kindergarteners staring at a Madagascar hissing cockroach. You might imagine grimaces and comments such as "Scary", "Gross!" or "Freaky". However, by the end of such a session with the 6-legged critter, not a single one of the 154 students who participated expressed a negative or even neutral emotion about this bug. They even said they would be happy to see the cockroach and would help it if it was in danger! Why? Because staff focused on building empathy for the cockroach by working with the students to name her 'Sophia'. This project was just one of Woodland Park Zoo’s pilot round grants to build organizational capacity to foster empathy in partner zoos and aquariums. Did you know that Woodland Park Zoo has a team in our Learning & Innovation department dedicated to developing and carrying out a range of Empathy Initiatives? Empathy is a powerful emotion that  dr...

Posted by Kirsten Pisto, Communications and Laurel Abbotts, Learning and Innovation, Woodland Park Zoo. Empathy is an emotion that is very useful to coexisting with other people. In its most basic definition, empathy is an understanding of experiences or perspectives of others. Whether those ‘others’ are kids sharing the swing set with you or a fellow commuter stuck on I-5, we can all pretty much agree that empathy is an important tool to getting along with your fellow humans. But what about empathy for animals, and even more so, what about using empathy to inspire conservation action? If the opposite of apathy is empathy, surely we can harness our very human emotions to collectively take action on behalf of wildlife, ecosystems and the planet. Watch:  https://youtu.be/CIZnvA4y3RQ "Woodland Park Zoo has co-created  Advancing Conservation Through Empathy for Wildlife , a learning network with 19 zoos and aquariums from around the United States to study how empathy is s...