Beyond Humane Education: Why Awareness Isn’t Enough, and What Might Work Better

Education is one of the most common responses to animal-related harm. When dogs bite, when animals roam in ways that create risk, when communities struggle with population management or safety, the solution offered is often the same: more education. Humane education. Awareness campaigns. Workshops. Curriculum. Materials.

This instinct is understandable. Education feels constructive. It signals care. It avoids punishment. And it allows institutions to say they are doing something.

But education is not neutral, and it is not always effective. In many cases, it functions less as a solution and more as a placeholder, standing in for services, infrastructure, and systems that were never built.

This is not an argument against education, or against people who have built educational tools with care and integrity. It is an argument against education being treated as a substitute for institutional responsibility.

In animal welfare, education is frequently used to explain problems that are structural. When veterinary services are unavailable, when bylaws are absent or unenforceable, when animal housing is scarce, when food insecurity affects both people and animals, education is asked to compensate. Communities are told they need more knowledge, more awareness, more instruction.

But knowledge does not vaccinate dogs. Awareness does not spay and neuter the pups and kittens. Posters do not create access to emergency care. Education cannot fix gaps produced by jurisdictional exclusion and chronic underinvestment. When education is used this way, it quietly reframes systemic absence as individual deficiency.

Education also carries hidden assumptions. It establishes roles: teacher and student, knower and learner. In animal welfare, the teacher is often external to the community, even when materials are culturally adapted or well-intentioned. This creates a familiar hierarchy in which expertise flows in one direction and responsibility flows the other. 

The message, even when unspoken, is that behaviour must change before systems arrive.

This framing matters because it changes where attention goes. Instead of asking what services are missing or what supports were never put in place, the focus shifts to what people are assumed to be doing wrong. Care becomes defined as following someone else’s rules, rather than being understood as something shaped by relationships, circumstances, and the resources actually available.

Animal welfare organizations often talk about education as if it is a single activity. In practice, it usually includes several distinct forms of learning, all of which affect public health and safety in different ways. One is dog bite prevention, which focuses on reducing immediate risk and injury. Another is basic animal care, such as feeding, water, shelter, exercise, and access to veterinary care, which directly influences disease, population growth, and stress related behaviour. A third is how animals fit into our societies, including cultural roles, shared space, ethics, and responsibility, which shapes how communities manage animals over time and how conflict is prevented or escalated.

When these are blended together under a single idea of “education,” it becomes harder to design responses that actually reduce harm. Efforts aimed at immediate safety get tangled up with judgment-based messaging, and long-term public-health planning gets reduced to lessons or campaigns rather than systems.

Education persists as a default intervention not because it reliably changes conditions on the ground, but because it produces visible, reportable activity. Workshops can be counted. Materials can be distributed. Attendance can be tracked. These signals are legible to funders, boards, and institutions, even when evidence of lasting change is thin.

This mirrors a familiar pattern in marketing and communications, where success is often now measured in likes, follows, and impressions. These numbers are easy to report and easy to defend, even when few are willing to claim they translate directly into donations, sales, or lasting change. What is measurable becomes mistaken for what matters. Activity stands in for impact.

From a higher altitude, it is tempting to say education systems have failed. But that framing assumes they were designed to solve the kinds of problems communities are now being asked to manage. A more accurate statement is that they have succeeded at what they were designed to do. Colonial education systems were built to standardize, discipline, and transmit dominant norms. They were designed to make people and communities manageable to institutions, not to cultivate curiosity, relational knowledge, or self-determined learning. That design logic did not disappear. Humane education inherited many of the same structures.

If education feels ill suited to the challenges communities face today, that is not a flaw. It is a feature.

Decades ago, experiments in self-directed learning revealed something quietly radical. Children, given access to tools, time, and encouragement, will teach themselves. Not in isolation, but together. Curiosity, when supported rather than controlled, becomes a powerful driver of learning.

This matters because curiosity does not position people as deficient. It does not require correction before engagement. It invites exploration, collaboration, and empathy. It also resonates strongly with many Indigenous knowledge systems that emphasize relationship, observation, and learning through experience.

Some of the most impactful learning does not look like education at all. 

Youth photography projects that ask young people to see their community from an animal’s perspective. Creative work that explores how shared spaces are experienced differently. Hands on projects where care, responsiveness, and consequence are visible rather than abstract.

These approaches do not begin with rules. They begin with relationship. They also do something instruction-based humane education struggles to do. They develop empathy without targeting it. Empathy is not something certain communities need more of. It is something the entire world is short on, across species, across borders, across systems.

If humane education is to matter at scale, it needs to change form. That may mean more STEAM grounded projects rather than colouring books. Storytelling and speculative fiction rather than instruction. Technology that responds to care rather than lectures about it. Learning environments that invite experimentation rather than compliance.

It also requires honesty about limits. Education can support safer behaviour. It can build understanding. It can reinforce values. But it cannot carry the weight of systems that were never built. It cannot replace veterinary services, animal infrastructure, or governance. When it is asked to do so, it becomes a polite way of blaming people for problems they did not create. That does not mean learning disappears once systems exist. It means learning changes form.

Education has a place. It cannot be the place.

If we want safer communities, healthier animals, and more than just outputs, we need to invest in systems that make care possible. Education must accompany that work. It cannot stand in for it.

Curiosity is fundamental. Supported curiosity, within systems that make care possible, is even better.