Marshall farms animal liberation front
These animals were spoken about with sincere love and affection, and participants supported strong laws to protect them. From there, people connected each category to a different set of moral obligations and ideal forms of legal protection.Ĭompanion animals included household pets, mostly dogs and cats but also a host of other domesticated animals, such as horses and rabbits. In order to inform research and practice, I wanted to understand how people make sense of these issues on their own terms.īased on my focus groups and some additional surveys, I came to identify four main categories of animals that people held within their mental schema: companions, wildlife, food/farm, and pests. While these existing categories are useful for scholars, they don’t really reflect how people discuss animals in their everyday lives. Researchers have found that people categorize animals based on the animal’s perceived warmth (defined as whether they have good intentions toward humans) and competence (defined as whether they have capability and skill). The groups included predators (low warmth, high competence), companions (high warmth, high competence), prey (high warmth, low competence), and pests (low warmth, low competence). One study proposes four clusters based on the animal’s perceived warmth (defined as whether they have good intentions toward humans) and competence (defined as whether they have capability and skill). The psychologist Hal Herzog put it in pithy terms with the title of his 2010 book: Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. The topic has received some attention in recent years from social psychologists and anthrozoologists, although there remains ongoing debate about what, exactly, these categories are, as does a recognition that there will be major differences across global cultures. The conversations showed people slot different animals into different mental categories, a mostly unconscious sorting process that has enormous implications. As one respondent put it, “There is definitely a hierarchy.” Regardless of their response to the poll, almost no one endorsed the idea that all animals deserved legal protection on par with humans.
When thinking about the poll question, many people told me their mental picture of “animals” was restricted to only those they considered pets.
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How we categorize and rank animalsįor the focus groups, I first screened participants by asking them the same Gallup poll question - whether they believe “animals deserve the exact same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation.” What I found in my research demonstrates the serious barriers that stand in the way of change - while also pointing to some strategies to shift the way people think and eat.
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Until we have a clearer picture of how people actually think about animals, we have little hope of changing public opinion, let alone the laws that govern how animals live and die.Īs a way to better understand these surprising poll results and their inconsistencies, I conducted a series of focus groups with diverse groups of Americans. How we sort animals into different categories is shaped by an intersecting and evolving mix of factors, based in human psychology, cultural norms, direct experience, and media exposure.Įach year in the US alone, billions of animals are factory-farmed in terrible conditions, millions are confined in cages in medical labs, and countless animals’ habitats are cleared for development. Case in point: 75 percent of my survey respondents identified as an “animal lover,” though only about 6 percent followed a vegetarian or vegan diet. In reality, people have a classification system for animals in their heads, and then perceive and treat them differently based on those classifications. But when respondents support animal rights in polls, they’re not actually talking about all animals. These results might lead you to believe that one-third to a half of Americans support giving animals substantial rights. In U.S., More Say Animals Should Have Same Rights as People.