Pets Can Help Solve Our National Empathy Shortage

She explained that the psychological elements of civility include awareness, respect, self-control and empathy — the very characteristics a professional dog trainer is currently helping me develop in Thurber.

Empathy — the ability to understand and share the feelings of another — is certainly a skill we Americans are losing in our increasingly isolated, angry, social-media-driven world.

But pets like my best buddy Thurber can help bring us together and help us restore our argumentative nation to a civil, well-functioning republic.

Child development specialist Denise Daniels explains in The Washington Post that “emotional intelligence,” or EQ, is a measure of empathy.

She points to the findings of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, which researches EQ and teaches people how to improve it, and notes that a high EQ score is the best indicator of a child’s success — as well as an adult’s.

Which brings us back to the value of pets.

Daniels writes that a variety of research in the U.S. and U.K. has shown a correlation between attachment to a pet and higher empathy scores.

I know my buddy Thurber has certainly improved my empathy and EQ score.

I didn’t realize that my emotions for the little guy would run so deep, or that I would work so hard and do so many things to give him the happiest, healthiest life he can experience.

Plus, everywhere we go — and he loves few things more than jumping into the backseat of my truck — he makes total strangers smile, laugh and converse with me.

His simple presence can bring human strangers together.  He not only makes us forget the petty human world — for a little while, at least — but he reminds us that a simple but magnificent creature like him can turn the most hardened souls back into an empathic, laughing, happy children.

As I work hard to train Thurber to be a great dog who exhibits compassion, self-discipline, courtesy and empathy, he is training me right back to improve all of those very same skills.

I can no longer imagine what my world would be like without my lovable Labrador enriching it for me — and everyone else who meets him every day.

Tom Purcell is an author and humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.