2025-06-182025-06-182024https://zeal.kings.edu/zeal/article/view/78https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/67279Humanity is often a very lonely species. Thinking that our big brains and technological advancements set us above all other beings (hu-man exceptionalism andspeciesism), we often feel a profound dis-connection from the other living creatures with whom we share the Earth. Yet evolutionarily speaking, we are hard-wired to want to love and connect with animals and, when we prevent ourselves from doing so,we naturally suffer from ills such as anxiety and depression.1In this article, I will discuss two experiential assignments that I have developed for my undergraduate anthropology course on Animals, Religion, and Culture (ARC) at Texas Christian Universityto help students learn to pay closer attention to ani-mals and human-animal relationships, with the ultimate goal of the stu-dents feeling more closely connected to and compassionate toward other than human animals.experiential pedagogyhuman-animal relationshipsArticleCC BY-NC 4.0