Developing our emotional intelligence can improve our sense of empathy and increase our effectiveness.

Humane education focuses on turning knowledge into compassion, and its importance can't be overemphasized.

Jane Goodall celebrates a message of hope, responsibility, and connection in a challenging world.

As a kid, I spent as much time outdoors as possible. Even at age 3, I rode my tricycle along Brooklyn sidewalks, eager to encounter all the dogs, birds, squirrels, and ants who shared our neighborhood. My parents told me I was constantly “minding animals”—conversations that resulted many decades later in a book of the same title. Later, I understood this to mean two things: I attributed minds and emotions to animals, and I was concerned with how they were treated. As a youngster, my fascination with animals continued in the woods of Long Island. I could feel their emotions as I soaked in their dogness, frogness, and fishness. On these forays into nature, I fostered my own empathy and compassion; it felt natural to imagine the points of view of different animals. I think that’s true for most children.

These youthful explorations led me to become a field ethologist. Not only did I want to observe animals as a career, but I also wanted to prove through research that what I intuitively knew as a young person was true—that nonhuman animals are........

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