Three piglets were denied food and water to the point of starvation, as part of an art exhibit meant to draw attention to animal suffering in the meat industry.

The piglets would've been kept in the cage until they starved to death, except animal rights activists stole them from the galley.

"I got a lot of hate messages from around the world — I think people don't get that my art is about animals rights," Chilean-born Marco Evaristti said.

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/piglets-stolen-art-exhibition-left-to-starve-marco-evaristti-denmark/

I really like this exhibit, because it points out "the meat paradox": people say they love animals but then pay for them to live horrible lives in the meat industry. People empathize with these individual piglets because the suffering is before their eyes, but not the billion of pigs in factory farms.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche-aesthetics/

I've been experimenting with posting videos on Reddit to spread awareness. Though I've had all kinds of posts go viral, I'm wondering what works better for people to go actually go vegetarian/vegan: showing the depravity of factory farming or the humanity of animals?

When I post factory farming videos, most people condemn it, but often they just want more regulations or "something something local farms" (cue eye roll as 99% of meat comes from factory farms.) A small percentage says they'll go off meat entirely or cut off the specific animal they're seeing (I usually post pigs). Personally, when I was about 12, a Mercy for Animals video of chicks being killed in a garbage bag made me swear off meat.

On the other hand, cute animal videos may help elevate farm animals to the level of pets and make people stop eating them entirely. Some argue eating dogs in South Korea (which was already a small phenomenon) went taboo because so many people started owning them as pets.

However, cognitive dissonance is so powerful, they often don't even connect pigs as pets to the pigs on their plates. New York Times writer Nicholas Kristoff mentioned how vets anesthetize pet pigs but not for food pigs for the same procedures. This thread has thousand of comments condemning Logan Paul for abandoning his pet pig without the pork industry mentioned.

Even if people connect the animals they eat with cuteness, I'm not sure if it's enough. An adorable animal is nice to see, but doesn't quite show them as moral agents. For instance, inanimate objects like stuffed animals or plants can be cute. Also a lot of people in r/pigs, a subreddit for people with a pet pig, say they eat pork! Cuteness can be associated with stupidity ("pigs are so derpy/silly that they don't mind being in cages, they're content staring at the wall").

So a third option, is videos showing animals expressing serious emotions (fear, bravery, love). My relative went vegan after seeing two pigs in separate trailers of truck press reach out to press snouts. Here's a video I posted of a pig looking interested in the rain that seemed to make some people reflect.

What are your thoughts? Is one type of video better than another? Should we do both as a carrot-and-stick approach?