Accepting Animal Harm For The Sake Of Tradition

Humans are prone to holding conflicting beliefs about the welfare of animals. Humans often support compassionate and humane treatment of some animal species but not others. Further complicating this picture, these beliefs often change from person to person, or from culture to culture, where people will defend practices that harm animals if those practices are viewed as culturally important.

This behavior is called selective moral leniency, which is the tendency for people to view harmful practices as more acceptable when they are part of their own culture than when other cultures practice them. Researchers set out to investigate whether support for these practices differs depending on whether they come from one’s own culture, and to identify ideological and identity-based factors associated with these beliefs: national identification, social dominance orientation (SDO), and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). SDO is the preference for group-based dominance and inequality, whereas RWA represents preferences for conformity, tradition, and authority.

Researchers ran two studies asking participants how they felt about practices that were significant to their culture (“ingroup”), and practices that were significant to other cultures (“outgroup”). The first study was performed with people from the United States. This study focused on rodeos as the ingroup practice, and whaling and bullfighting as the outgroup practices. The second study was performed in Norway, Spain, and Australia, where the ingroup practices were whaling, bullfighting, and kangaroo hunting, respectively.

Both studies recruited respondents from the country of interest to fill out an online survey. Both studies gauged the respondents’ approval of both ingroup and outgroup practices, as well as their levels of SDO and RWA. There were also questions assessing how strongly the participants identified with their nationality, and measuring their speciesism, which in the U.S. study included how they felt about practices like factory farming and animal testing.

Overall, 242 Americans, 356 Norwegians, 360 Spaniards, and 360 Australians responded to the surveys. Respondents in all four countries showed selective moral leniency toward their own ingroup practices, with respondents in each country supporting their ingroup practice more than the outgroup practices.

In three of the four countries (the United States, Norway, and Spain), support for the ingroup practice was associated with stronger national identity and higher RWA. However, this was not true in Australia, where support for kangaroo hunting was not associated with national identity or RWA. Researchers suggest that the difference is due to how the practice is seen. In Australia, kangaroo hunting may be seen as wildlife management or pest control rather than a national tradition, lessening the influence of identity and social cohesion. In Spain, national identity was also associated with support for the outgroup practices of whaling and kangaroo hunting.

However, SDO was not tied to any one practice or country. Instead, in the second study, higher SDO was associated with support for all three practices in all three countries, regardless of whether the practice was considered ingroup or outgroup. In the U.S. study, it was associated with support for whaling and bullfighting, but not rodeos. SDO was also associated with greater levels of speciesism.

While these studies show associations between identity and the acceptance of animal exploitation, the data are correlational, so they can’t show that identity or ideology causes this support. The researchers also didn’t directly test why people favor their own culture’s practices; for example, people may simply know more about their own traditions. The studies only focused on Western countries, so these associations may not hold in other parts of the world. Additionally, these studies only look at self-reported beliefs, not real-world behavior, and the surveys were run in 2016 and 2018.

However, taken as a whole, this paper offers helpful insights for animal advocates: people tend to be more accepting of animal exploitation when it’s part of their own culture. This is especially true of people who score higher in RWA or identify strongly with their nationality. This paper also demonstrates that people higher in SDO tend to approve of animal exploitation regardless of cultural context. Keeping these details in mind could be helpful when choosing and crafting messages for certain audiences. Advocating against culturally important animal exploitation practices must be done with care, and perhaps in a way that avoids invoking identity or tradition.