Typological study on Japanese attitudes toward animals

Abstract

This study aims to identify types of Japanese attitudes toward animals. At first, Kellert's attitude types were inspected and hypothetical concepts of each attitudial types were established.
These concepts were refined through interview and pre-questionaire to 32 people who were involved in activities or jobs about animals. After this pre-research, new concepts about Japanese attitudes toward animals determined. Most of the new concepts weren't so much different from those of Kellert's. But small changes were made. The humanistic attitude was classified as the familiar attitudes to animals. The basic concept of aesthetic attitude was shifted from emphasizing beauty of animals to tasting their beautifulness in natural habitat. The new questionaire was made to idetify individual attitude type objectively and sent to people who were interviewed. This question aire has 65 questions about attitudes toward animals. Using 48 questions among them, the attitudinal scales was made to know the intensity of each attitudes of answerers with score range of 0 to 8. The results gotton from this questionaire fitted with the results of pre-research.