Vox Article: Americans Disapprove of Factory Farm Practices, Fine with Eating Meat that Mostly Comes from Factory Farms. “The Meat Paradox.”
Interesting article summarizing a lot of research on lack of public awareness of factory farming’s prevalence, cognitive dissonance, moral attitudes, etc. Gist I think is American attitudes are an outgrowth of both ignorance and human psychology, ie, the brain’s aggressive efforts to ignore or rationalize information that might require you to completely change your habits or outlook. Then few people see meat consumption per se (ie, in isolation from considering where the meat comes from, which most people don’t want to think too hard about) as a moral issue.
Proposal at the end is that the best thing to do now is push for more humane farming practices—incremental improvement focusing on things the public actually can be persuaded to care about. Notes the success of activism around cage-free eggs as an example.
Not to ignite a variation of what I’m sure is a well-trodden debate on this sub, but some musings…
Reminds me of the early abolition movement: arguments focusing on things like the trauma of crew members transporting slaves (yes, really—see the work of Thomas Clarkson) were more successful early on in persuading people who otherwise wouldn’t care to end the slave trade. Then focusing on the greed of slaveholding aristocrats—they’re taking white jobs!
Similarly, criticisms of factory farms based on corporate greed/concern for small farms seem to resonate with a lot of people. Environmental concerns work sometimes too, though there’s obviously already a lot of overlap between vegetarians/vegans and people who care about the environment.
Then health concerns are also frequently effective, and can be linked to the corporate greed angle—people understand that inhumane mass production tactics lead to lower quality, even dangerous foods. Think Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”—supposed to be about corporate greed and inhumane conditions for the workers (he portrayed horrific things happening to the animals, but even that was more about the working conditions for the humans), but what the public heard was, “oh my God, the way make our meat is disgusting, we need to fix that!”
Point is, people’s cognitive defenses activate when you make variations of the core “killing and torturing animals unnecessarily is wrong” argument. Rarely respond to new information or evidence by adjusting their outlook, just rationalize it in their existing frames. (Of course, I doubt this thread would exist if that was universally true—this is just a general observation.) The article notes even IVF and using marijuana are far more likely to be seen by Americans as morally wrong than eating meat.
Then again, I’m not aware of a successful “treat the slaves humanely” movement (which, to be clear, I’m not saying would’ve been the right approach). I think this was tried in England, but the slave plantations refused to follow the rules, so then that helped cement that abolition was the only solution. Don’t know about anything comparable in the States. This is far from a perfect historical comparison.