Beliefs About Fishes and Chickens & Their Relation to Animal-Positive Behaviors in Canada

Background

Animals raised for food generally receive significantly less attention and funding than companion animals (Faunalytics, 2019). In Canada, as in most countries, small-bodied animals like chickens and fish are killed in particularly massive numbers: Over 770 million chickens were slaughtered in 2019 and nearly 840 thousand tonnes of fishes were slaughtered in 2018 in Canada alone (Faunalytics, 2020). Unfortunately, the welfare of these animals is not well-protected by Canadian law. The federal government does not regulate farming practices to guarantee animal welfare, instead opting for a system of de facto industry self-regulation (World Animal Protection, 2020). Due to the resulting standards, Canada receives a “D” grade for its protection of animals used in farming from World Animal Protection.

Despite fishes and chickens constituting a huge proportion of farmed animals, little is known about public attitudes toward these animals in Canada. This study replicates our study of fish and chicken beliefs in the U.S. to illuminate which beliefs the Canadian public has about small-bodied animals, and how these beliefs are related to animal-positive behaviors. Specifically, we examined the relationships between various beliefs and a willingness to reduce consumption of chickens or fishes and to sign a petition calling for improved living and slaughter conditions. Answering these questions is a first step toward understanding beliefs and attitudes that drive pro-animal behavior in Canada. The findings presented in this report may also prove useful to animal advocates who are seeking to target a Canadian audience more effectively. 

Key Findings

1. People were more likely to sign the petition than to take the dietary pledge. People were more likely to sign a petition that calls for welfare reforms than to take a diet pledge to reduce their own consumption of fish or chicken. Fewer than half of people were willing to take any of these pro-animal actions.
2. The beliefs that had the largest correlations with signing a pledge to reduce fish consumption were that fish can feel positive emotions like pleasure, that fish are loving, that big fish farms are gross, and that fish are more intelligent than they are given credit for. Focusing advocacy efforts on bolstering these fish-related beliefs may be the most effective way to obtain dietary pledges to reduce consumption.
3. The beliefs that had the largest correlations with fish welfare petition signatures were that fish can feel positive emotions like pleasure and that fish can learn. Advocates working on petitions for fish welfare may want to incorporate these themes in their messaging and presentation.
4. The beliefs that had the largest correlations with signing a pledge to reduce chicken consumption were that chickens are loving, that chickens play, that chickens are beautiful, and that most chickens are raised inhumanely. Those trying to get people to reduce their consumption of chicken may wish to focus on these themes.
5. The beliefs that had the largest correlations with chicken welfare petition signatures were that chickens are more intelligent than people give them credit for and that chickens can bond with humans. Advocates working on corporate campaigns may find messaging around these beliefs leads to an increase in petition signatures for chicken causes.

Recommendations

1. Try messaging around the top beliefs to see if you can improve your advocacy efforts. Based on these findings, messaging around emotions, personality, intelligence, and socialness will likely lead to the best results, even outside the context of diet pledges and welfare petitions. Slightly different beliefs were also important for each animal and each outcome. Therefore, we’d suggest focusing on the strongest messages in each group of beliefs, trying them out, and keeping track of their effectiveness in order to get the best results!
2. Try stacking your asks. People were more likely to agree to sign a petition than to take a diet pledge to reduce their consumption. If you have interest in both outcomes, try asking for the petition signature first, and then go for a diet pledge after they’ve signed the petition. This may help increase diet pledges due to something known as “behavior consistency”—people generally want to be consistent in what they do, so following one successful ask with another related ask may increase uptake. Be careful to avoid overloading people with requests, though.
3. Explore the results from other countries and check back for more recommendations as our program of research focusing on chickens and fishes continues. We have also examined these beliefs in other countries, including the U.S., Brazil, China, and India. We will also be using experimental research to provide stronger recommendations about how these beliefs can be leveraged to alter behaviors. Although we have provided preliminary recommendations in this report, an experimental comparison of the most common and strongly associated beliefs is needed to see which can be used most effectively. This research will focus on the U.S., but may have implications for future research in Canada. Stay tuned for more from our line of research into small-bodied animals!

Research Team

This project is a collaboration between researchers at Faunalytics and Mercy For Animals (MFA): namely, Zach Wulderk, Jo Anderson, and Tom Beggs of Faunalytics and Courtney Dillard, Walter Sanchez-Suarez, and Sebastian Quaade of MFA. We are indebted to Meredith Hui, Rashmit Arora, Diogo Fernandes, and Vitor Clemente for their assistance with linguistic and cultural translation, and to Cristina Mendonça, Meredith Hui, and Nikunj Sharma for their invaluable feedback.

We’d like to thank the CEA Animal Welfare Fund, the Culture and Animals Foundation, and an anonymous donor for funding this work, and the Tipping Point Private Foundation for funding the report translations.

Method Overview

This research is a replication of Faunalytics’ 2020 report Beliefs About Fish and Chickens & Their Relation to Animal-Positive Behaviors, which focused on U.S. adults’ beliefs about small-bodied animals. For this project, we explored beliefs held by adults in Canada. We examined 7 categories of beliefs: about emotions, suffering, personality, intelligence, socialness, consuming the animal, and an “other” category. There were several beliefs in each category, meaning the full list consisted of 33 beliefs about fishes and 32 beliefs about chickens. 

We surveyed 1,339 Canadian adults and randomly assigned them to either the fish or chicken version of the survey. We then asked them to rate their level of agreement or disagreement with each of the beliefs for their assigned animal. The survey instrument can be found on Open Science Framework.

We examined two key outcome measures in order to understand how much each belief was associated with important behaviors related to the welfare of each animal: willingness to take a “diet pledge” and willingness to sign a “welfare petition.” For the diet pledge outcome, each participant was asked if they would pledge to reduce their consumption of their assigned animal. For example, participants assigned the fish condition were shown a prompt that read, “In recent years, many people have begun to reduce how much fish they eat, a pattern that is expected to continue. Will you pledge to reduce your own fish consumption?” Those who agreed were then asked to specify the amount they would limit themselves to and to provide a digital signature for their commitment. 

For the petition outcome, each participant was asked if they would sign a petition to improve the welfare of their assigned animal. For example, participants in the chicken condition were shown a prompt that read, “We would like to give you the opportunity to sign a petition that would encourage legal reforms to improve the lives of farmed chickens. Specifically, the petition is designed to build support for regulations that would ensure that chickens raised on farms would have improved living and slaughter conditions. Would you be willing to sign this petition?” Participants were able to respond with “yes please” or “no thanks.” 

The diet pledge and petition questions were presented at the end of the survey, where they saw a prompt reading, “Great, thank you! Before you finish, we have a couple of quick requests for you. You don’t have to agree to either, but please answer each question.” We specified that respondents’ participation incentive did not rely on them committing to the diet pledge or signing the welfare petition. The two outcome measures were counterbalanced, meaning that half of the participants saw the diet pledge first and half saw the welfare petition first. 

Throughout this report, we use the plural “fishes” rather than “fish” in order to acknowledge that we are discussing a collection of individuals. Exceptions are made for verbatim references to the survey instruments, which used the plural “fish” because it is more common among the general public. 

All top-line descriptive statistics were calculated using data weighted to match population values for gender, age, race, and region. However, as the differences between the weighted and unweighted data were not large, inferential statistics were calculated using unweighted data to avoid introducing additional sources of variance. Additional information on participant traits can be found in the Supplementary Materials.

Results

How Many People Took the Pledge and Signed the Petition?

Figure 1: Rates of Animal-Positive Behavior

39% of Canadian participants pledged to reduce their consumption of fish and 37% agreed to reduce their consumption of chicken. 44% of participants agreed to sign the fish welfare petition and 47% agreed to sign the chicken welfare petition. 

Among the participants who pledged to reduce their consumption of fish, 9% pledged to never eat fish, 77% pledged to eat it less than once per week, and 12% pledged to eat it only 1-3 times per week. Of chicken pledge-takers, 5% pledged to never eat chicken, 66% pledged to eat it less than once per week, and 24% pledged to eat it only 1-3 times per week. 

The Most Common Canadian Beliefs about Fishes & Chickens

The following figures show all of the beliefs included in the study and the proportion of people who either agreed or disagreed with each, depending on which value was greater. This can give a sense of how common each of the beliefs are, which can be helpful in deciding which beliefs already exist and can be tapped into, and which beliefs need to be encouraged.

Fishes

Figure 2: Beliefs About Fishes

Chickens

Figure 3: Beliefs About Chickens

Which Categories of Beliefs Were Most Strongly Associated with Animal-Positive Behaviors?

Each individual belief is presented in the figures in the next section, grouped by category for each animal. The relative importance of each item within a group of beliefs can be seen for both diet pledges and petition signatures. We also discuss the top-performing individual beliefs across the categories. In general, average correlations for the beliefs in each category were small (< .20), with each category of beliefs showing similar correlations with diet pledges and petition signatures.

Table 1: Average Correlations With Pro-Animal Behavior (Overall Rankings)

Notes. Given the ordinal nature of the beliefs scale, Spearman rank-order correlations were used for all belief correlations.

Beliefs About Fishes

Belief categories are presented in order of the size of their average correlation with taking the diet pledge.

Fish Emotions Beliefs

Beliefs related to fish emotions showed the largest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .16, SD = .09) and signing the petition (r = .18, SD = .02) out of all the categories of beliefs. In other words, people who believe that fishes experience emotions were more likely to take the diet pledge and sign the welfare petition. All three emotion-related beliefs were associated with animal-positive behaviors, but the strongest relationship was between the belief that fishes can feel positive emotions like pleasure and willingness to take the diet pledge or sign the welfare petition. 

Because of the relatively strong correlations in the fish emotions category, advocates should consider focusing on this type of belief when asking individuals to take a diet pledge or sign a welfare petition. 

Figure 4: Fish Emotion Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Social Beliefs

Beliefs about the social nature of fishes had the second highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .15, SD = .02) and the fourth highest with signing the welfare petition (r = .11, SD = .09). Individuals who believe fishes can communicate with each other were more likely to both take the diet pledge and sign the petition. However, those who believe that fishes don’t care for their young were less likely to take the diet pledge.

Figure 5: Fish Social Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Personality Beliefs

Fish personality beliefs had the third highest average correlation with both taking the diet pledge (r = .13, SD = .05) and signing the petition (r = .12, SD = .06). Individuals were more likely to take the diet pledge if they believe that fishes are loving, can bond with humans, or play. Signing the welfare petition was associated with the beliefs that fishes are curious, loving, or play. Those who believe that fishes have no personality were less likely to take both actions, suggesting that advocates would benefit from emphasizing that fishes do have personalities and highlighting positive traits like curiosity, lovingness, and playfulness. 

Figure 6: Fish Personality Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Intelligence Beliefs

Beliefs related to the intelligence of fishes had the fourth highest average correlation with willingness to take the diet pledge (r = .12, SD = .06) and the third lowest with signing the welfare petition (r = .11, SD = .09). Individuals were more likely to take both actions if they believe that fishes are more intelligent than people give them credit for and that fishes can learn. Those who believe that fishes have a lower IQ than most animals were less likely to take the diet pledge. 

Figure 7: Fish Intelligence Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Suffering Beliefs

Fish suffering beliefs had the third lowest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .10, SD = .06) and the second lowest with signing the petition (r = .10, SD = .04). Individuals who believe big fish farms are gross were more likely to take the diet pledge. The same is true for those who believe fishes can feel pain and that they need room to explore and exercise. Individuals who believe that fishes need room to explore and exercise were more likely to sign the welfare petition as well, as were those who believe that most farmed fishes are raised inhumanely and those who believe that fishes can feel pain.

Informed by these findings, advocates may have success when emphasizing the inhumane or gross conditions of fish farms. When discussing the barren or crowded nature of these farms, advocates may find success when highlighting the specific issues this causes, such as lack of exercise and exploration, to paint a clearer picture of the conditions. 

Figure 8: Fish Suffering Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Other Fish Beliefs

“Other” fish beliefs had the second lowest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .08, SD = .06), but the second highest with signing the welfare petition (r = .13, SD = .04). People who believe that fishes are contaminated with plastics, heavy metals, and chemicals were more likely to take the diet pledge and to sign the welfare petition. Individuals were also more likely to sign the petition if they believe that fishes are beautiful. In contrast, those who believe that fishes are gross were less likely to sign the petition. 

Advocates may wish to focus on the beauty of fishes when seeking petition signatures, as it may appeal to those who already believe they are beautiful or help shift the perceptions of those who believe they are gross.

Figure 9: Other Fish Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Consumption Beliefs

The lowest average correlation with both taking the diet pledge (r = .04, SD = .03) and signing the welfare petition (r = .07, SD = .03) was found for beliefs about consuming fish. However, individuals who believe that eating fish doesn’t contribute as much to climate change as eating other animals were less likely to take the diet pledge. People who believe that fish products labeled “sustainable” come from fishes with good welfare or who believe that fishes are a good source of protein were more likely to sign the welfare petition.

Because of the comparatively low correlations between fish consumption beliefs and animal-positive behaviors, advocates may find more success exploring other categories of messaging, such as the emotional traits of fishes.

Figure 10: Fish Consumption Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Beliefs about Chickens

Belief categories are presented in order of the size of their average correlation with taking the diet pledge.

Chicken Emotions Beliefs

Beliefs related to chickens’ emotions had the highest average correlation with both taking the diet pledge (r = .17, SD = .01) and signing the welfare petition (r = .17, SD = .01). All three emotional beliefs—chickens can feel positive emotions like pleasure, chickens can feel negative emotions like pain, and chickens can feel stress—were associated with both taking the diet pledge and signing the petition. This suggests that advocates may find success with various types of appeals that focus on chickens’ ability to experience emotions of any sort. 

Figure 11: Chicken Emotion Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Personality Beliefs

Beliefs related to chickens’ personalities had the second highest average correlation with both taking the diet pledge (r = .16, SD = .08) and signing the welfare petition (r = .16, SD = .04). Individuals who believe that chickens are loving, play, or can bond with humans were more likely to take the diet pledge, while those who believe chickens can bond with humans, are loving, or are curious were more likely to sign the welfare petition. Highlighting any or all of these qualities could be a fruitful approach for advocates seeking either animal-positive behavior.

Figure 12: Chicken Personality Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Suffering Beliefs

The third highest average correlations for both taking the diet pledge (r = .12, SD = .06) and signing the welfare petition (r = .14, SD = .04) were with beliefs related to chicken suffering. In both cases, individuals were more likely to take an animal-positive action if they believe that most chickens are raised inhumanely, many of the farms that produce chickens have horrible living conditions, or that chickens need room to explore and exercise. The belief that most chickens are raised inhumanely was particularly strongly associated with diet pledges. 

These results suggest that advocates may find success when specifically highlighting the poor or inhumane conditions of chicken farms and how they can limit chickens’ ability to engage in natural activities such as exploration and exercise. 

Figure 13: Chicken Suffering Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Intelligence Beliefs

Chicken intelligence beliefs had the fourth highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .11, SD = .07) and the second lowest with signing the petition (r = .11, SD = .10). In both cases, the belief that chickens are more intelligent than people give them credit for had the strongest association with pro-animal behavior. People were also more likely to take both actions if they believe that chickens can learn. Advocates may have more success highlighting the intelligence of chickens and their ability to learn rather than comparing chickens to other animals. 

Figure 14: Chicken Intelligence Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Other Chicken Beliefs

“Other” chicken beliefs had the third lowest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .09, SD = .10) and the fourth highest with signing the welfare petition (r = .11, SD = .09). People who believe that chickens are beautiful were more likely to take the pledge and sign the petition, while those who believe that chickens are gross were less likely to sign the petition.

Figure 15: Other Chicken Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Consumption Beliefs

Beliefs related to chicken consumption had the second lowest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .05, SD = .04) and the lowest with signing the welfare petition (r = .03, SD = .03). People who believe that chicken products labeled “organic” come from chickens with good welfare were more likely to take the diet pledge, while those who don’t believe that eating chickens contributes to climate change as much as eating other animals were less likely to take the diet pledge. There were no particularly strong associations with signing the welfare petition. Because of the comparatively weak associations between chicken consumption beliefs and animal-positive actions, advocates may find more success focusing on other categories of beliefs about chickens, such as their emotions, personalities, and suffering on farms.

Figure 16: Chicken Consumption Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Social Beliefs

Beliefs related to the social nature of chickens had the lowest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .04, SD = .03) and the third lowest with signing the welfare petition (r = .11, SD = .00). While people who believe that chickens can communicate with each other were more likely to sign the welfare petition, those who believe that chickens don’t care for their young were less likely to do so. There were no notable associations between social beliefs and taking the diet pledge.

Figure 17: Chicken Consumption Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

What Role Did Participant Traits Play?

Table 2 shows the rates of each pro-animal behavior for demographic groups that showed significant differences using a chi-square test of independence. Trends within ordinal variables were also identified using simple logistic regressions. These characteristics include age, income, education, and frequency of fish and chicken consumption. More detailed results can be found in the Supplementary Materials.

• Gender: Men were less likely than women or other genders to take the chicken diet pledge, but there were no other gender-based differences. 
• Race: Those who identified as white were less likely to take the chicken diet pledge than people of other races. 
• Age: In general, younger people were more likely to take the chicken diet pledge than older ones. The same was true for the fish diet pledge. The opposite trend was true for petitions: older people were more likely to sign both the fish petition and the chicken petition than younger people.
• No clear relationships were found between income and pro-animal behaviors.
• No clear relationships were found between education and pro-animal behaviors.
• Region: Regional differences can be seen for fish petition signatures, for which participants from the Prairie provinces were less likely to sign than people from other regions. Regional differences also show up in willingness to take the chicken diet pledge: people from the Atlantic and Prairie provinces were less likely to take it than other regions, while participants in Central Canada were more likely to take it. 
• Guardians of companion animals were more likely to take both pro-fish actions and to take the chicken diet pledge, compared to non-guardians. 
• Recent fish consumption: Participants who consumed fish more frequently were more likely to sign the fish petition than those who consumed it less frequently.
• Recent chicken consumption: Participants who consumed chicken more frequently were less likely to take the chicken diet pledge than those who consumed it less frequently.

As a note, people who already abstained entirely from eating fish or chicken were not offered the diet pledge for that animal.

In addition to the characteristics shown discussed above, we looked for differences based on whether participants had fished or handled chickens recently. There were no significant differences between groups, which means that the overall percentages should be used for all groups to avoid over-interpretation of non-significant differences. As a reminder, those percentages were as follows: 39% of participants took the diet pledge to reduce their consumption of fish and 37% agreed to reduce their consumption of chicken. 44% of participants agreed to sign the fish welfare petition, and 47% agreed to sign the chicken welfare petition.

Table 2: Percent Who Took the Diet Pledge or Signed the Petition Based on Group Membership

Notes. An asterisk (*) indicates that there was a statistically significant difference between groups. For details on how these analyses were conducted, see the Supplementary Materials.

Conclusions

This study has added substantially to our body of knowledge regarding public beliefs about chickens and fishes in Canada and how they relate to animal-positive actions.

Overall, 44% of participants agreed to sign the fish welfare petition, and 47% agreed to sign the chicken welfare petition. Participants were somewhat less likely to commit to dietary change, with 39% of participants taking the pledge to reduce their consumption of fish and 37% agreeing to reduce their consumption of chicken. For both fishes and chickens, the majority of pledgers—77% for fishes and 66% for chicken—agreed to eat fish or chicken meat less than once per week. Still, only 5% of participants who took the chicken pledge and 9% who took the fish pledge agreed to eliminate their consumption entirely. These results show that a sizable portion of the Canadian population may be willing to commit to take animal-positive action that is not overly costly.

Which Beliefs Were Most Common?

The relative prevalence of various beliefs are summarized in Figures 1 and 2. A notable takeaway is that participants generally had more positive views of chickens than they did of fishes. For instance, more participants believed chickens to be capable of curiosity and feeling positive and negative emotions like pleasure and fear than they did for fish. As research indicates that fishes also demonstrate these capabilities, this suggests fishes face additionally prejudiced views (Faunalytics, 2016; Faunalytics, 2020). 

However, while participants had more positive views of chickens, they were less likely to sign the chicken welfare petition and take the chicken dietary pledge than they were to sign the fish petition and pledge to reduce their fish consumption. One possible explanation for this unintuitive result is that Canadians’ willingness to take a diet pledge or sign a welfare petition may be largely driven by factors other than their views about an animal. For instance, attachment to eating each type of meat may play a role.

The prevalence of various beliefs can serve as useful guides for animal advocates when designing advocacy and awareness campaigns. For instance, animal advocates may wish to emphasize aquaculture water quality issues and the beauty of fish in the data, images, or videos used in ask-based campaigns for fish welfare, as these beliefs were both prevalent and associated with animal-positive behavior. Other beliefs, such as fishes being able to feel positive emotions like pleasure, or chickens being loving, were less common, but were nonetheless more strongly correlated with animal-positive behaviors than more common beliefs. Such beliefs are prime candidates for informational campaigns seeking to inspire greater concern for animals among the public.

In general, understanding the prevalence of various beliefs can help advocates target efforts based on where most people currently stand.

Beliefs Most Strongly Associated With Pro-Animal Behavior

Groups of Beliefs

Our calculations of the average correlation of the items in each group of beliefs, as well as the effect sizes displayed in Figures 3-16, can help advocates understand which groups of beliefs are most strongly associated with animal-positive behavior. For both chickens and fishes, beliefs about emotions and personality were more strongly correlated with animal-positive behavior than most other categories of beliefs were. Conversely, consumption-related beliefs consistently had weak associations with willingness to sign the petition or take the diet pledge. For fish in particular, social beliefs were more strongly correlated with taking a fish diet pledge, while beliefs surrounding fish beauty were more strongly associated with signing the welfare petition.

These results suggest that emphasizing the emotions and personality of chicken and fish in advocacy may yield more petition signatures and dietary pledges. Additionally, highlighting the suffering experienced on factory farms may work well for chicken campaigns, while focusing on beauty may work better for fish campaigns. Indeed, appealing to these beliefs in advocacy campaigns may prove highly effective, as chicken suffering beliefs and fish beauty beliefs were also prevalent among the study participants.

Beliefs related to the consumption of fishes or chickens consistently had weak associations with pro-animal behaviors. In other words, advocates should avoid focusing on these beliefs. A notable exception is the belief that chicken consumption doesn’t contribute as much to climate change as eating other animals. People who held this belief were less likely to take the chicken pledge. While chickens do contribute fewer greenhouse gas emissions per pound than beef or pork, their emissions are higher than legumes such as beans and lentils (Environmental Working Group, 2011). Noting such disparities in greenhouse gas emissions could be an effective strategy for shifting the beliefs of climate conscious chicken consumers.

It is important to note that ranking belief groups according to average correlations has its limitations. The individual beliefs within a group of beliefs are not always associated with behavior in the same way or to the same extent. For any beliefs advocates are considering using, we suggest paying closer attention to the strength and direction of correlation for each individual belief than to the average correlation for the overall group. 

Individual Beliefs

For both chickens and fishes, believing that they can experience positive emotions, that they can engage in play, that they can bond with humans, and that they are loving, were among the most strongly associated with animal-positive behavior. Given that these beliefs were not among the most widely held for both species, informational advocacy on fishes’ and chickens’ capacity for pleasure, play, and emotional relationships may be a way to nudge individuals toward taking actions on their behalf. This is further supported by the negative correlations observed for the beliefs that chicken and fish have no personality.

Participants who believed chickens and fishes can experience negative emotions like fear and stress were more likely to commit to a dietary pledge and sign the welfare petition. These beliefs were also more common than the belief that chickens and fishes can experience positive emotions such as pleasure. Beliefs regarding chickens and fishes being raised in poor conditions, such as being raised inhumanely or living in horrible conditions, were also among the beliefs with the strongest pro-animal correlations. However, although around 80% of participants believed that chickens and fishes need room to explore and exercise, just 56% and 50% of participants believed chickens and fishes are often raised in horrible conditions, respectively, with even fewer believing they are frequently raised inhumanely. This may mean that many participants do not connect a lack of space with inhumane conditions. Given that prevalent beliefs around chickens’ and fishes’ capacity for pain, stress, and other negative emotions are also associated with animal-positive behavior, emphasizing the emotional suffering chickens and fishes can experience—as well as the association between crowded conditions and suffering—may persuade more people to sign welfare petitions or take diet pledges.

The beauty and intelligence of chickens and fishes also stood out among individual beliefs for their notable correlations with chicken diet pledges, chicken petition signatures, and fish petition signatures. Although these characteristics are not directly related to the welfare of animals, some research has shown that emotional reactions—like the feeling someone could get from seeing a particularly beautiful or intelligent animal—can have an effect on judgments and decision-making (Angie et al., 2011). Contrasting the beauty and intelligence of an animal with the reality on industrial farms could be an effective strategy for encouraging pro-animal behavior. For instance, advocates could compare images of wild rainbow trout with those raised on farms, or complex chicken relationships in the wild with the brutal nature of chicken growing houses.

The belief that fish farms are gross had one of the strongest associations with taking the fish diet pledge. Believing chicken farms were gross was also associated with pro-chicken behavior, although not as strongly. While participants may associate grossness more with health, food safety, and quality concerns than with welfare concerns, advocates can strategically appeal to these beliefs to encourage reductions in fish consumption. For example, advocates could inform the public about the toxin content in fishes raised on farms. This approach is also supported by the association between the belief that fishes are contaminated with pollutants and fish positive behaviors. Such strategies may even be effective at shifting beliefs regarding fish welfare. Research shows that people tend to form their beliefs in the present moment to agree or justify past behavior (Albarracin & Wyer, 2000). Reducing meat consumption—even for self-interested reasons—may therefore make people more prone to adopting animal-positive beliefs.

Finally, we observe that believing “sustainable” fish comes from fishes with good welfare is positively related to signing the welfare petition, but less so to pledging to reduce one’s fish consumption. This suggests that some people may be influenced to sign fish welfare petitions due to perceived sustainability gains. Advocates could consider taking advantage of this association by noting the environmental benefits of improved fish welfare.

Participant Characteristics

This study also allowed us to examine differences in willingness to sign welfare petitions and commit to diet pledges across participant characteristics, as summarized in Table 2. These insights can help advocates understand which social groups to target to increase the number of individuals taking animal-positive action.

We find that men were less likely to pledge to reduce their chicken consumption than women or other genders, but that differences between the genders in petitioning and fish dietary pledging rates were insignificant.

There were few significant differences in the proportion of diet pledges or petition signatures across race. However, white participants were significantly less likely to take the chicken diet pledge than participants of color. This suggests that conducting more outreach to communities of color, who have historically been underrepresented in animal advocacy (Encompass Movement, 2021), may be an effective approach for advocates seeking to reduce chicken consumption.

We did not find clear differential trends in pro-animal behaviors across income or education levels. As such, advocates should not ignore lower income or less educated communities in their efforts.

Surprisingly, participants who ate fish more regularly were more likely to sign the fish welfare petition. However, they were also less likely to take the fish dietary pledge. More research is required to understand this outcome. One possible explanation is that these participants associate better living and slaughter conditions with higher quality fish. 

Future Directions

Although this research provides useful guidelines for chicken and fish welfare advocacy, more research is required to understand whether these beliefs are a cause of animal-positive behaviors, or whether they are merely associated with them. In a continuation of this line of research, we will also be testing interventions that will attempt to use some of the beliefs that appear most important based on this research to understand whether shifting these beliefs can increase animal-positive behaviors. This will take the form of an experiment (randomized controlled trial), where different groups of people are shown an intervention that targets specific beliefs to see if any of them influence animal-positive behaviors.

Supplementary Materials

Method: Additional Details

Participants and Power

Participants were recruited using a panel company called CINT. In keeping with Faunalytics’ Data Quality Assurance Plan, we performed data checks to screen out answers that may be fraudulent or participants who fail attention checks.

Responses that showed poor data quality or the failure of attention-check questions were excluded. After removing participants in the data cleaning process, we had a total of 664 participants in the fish condition and 675 in the chicken condition. Power analyses indicated that a sample size of 497 per animal would allow for the detection of a small-to-medium effect size (rho = .16) with a power of .95 in a point-biserial correlation (critical t = 1.96), so we were well-powered for our goals. For additional details on the measures, power analysis, analysis plan, and more, please see the pre-registration documents on the Open Science Framework.

Table 3: Participants Traits

Correlational Analyses

Spearman rank-order correlations were used for analyses because the outcome variables were dichotomous and beliefs were rated on a Likert scale. They can be interpreted the same way as standard Pearson correlations. The scores range from -1 to 1, with scores further away from zero indicating a stronger relationship between the variables in question. It is also an indication of effect size.

Petition Measure

For consistency with the first report in this line of research, the petition outcome variable is measured using agreement to sign the welfare petition rather than whether participants clicked the link to the petition. 

Participant Traits Analyses

For our analysis of participant traits, all of which were categorical, we used chi-square tests of independence to test for differences across levels of each trait category. For ordinal variables, we used simple logistic regressions to determine trends.

When conducting chi-square tests on tables with cells containing expected values below 5, Monte Carlo simulations were necessarily used to compute p-values.

Table 4: Summarized Chi-Square Results

Table 5: Summarized Logistic Regression Results

Average Correlation by Group of Beliefs

The average correlation for each group of beliefs are shown in Table 6 for fishes and Table 7 for chickens. These were also provided in text in the body of the report.

To get these numbers, we averaged the absolute value of each of the correlations for the items in a group for each of the outcome variables. Because the number of responses used for each correlation was approximately the same, this “average of averages” approach does not weight any correlation unduly. 

Table 6: Average Correlation of Fish Beliefs by Category

Table 7: Average Correlation of Chicken Beliefs by Category

As noted in the Results section, beliefs around the emotions and social nature of fishes were the categories most strongly associated with diet pledges. Beliefs around fish emotions were most strongly associated with petition signatures. 

For chickens, the emotion and personality groups of beliefs were most strongly associated with both pledges and petition signatures.

Individual Beliefs

Table 8 and Table 9 below contain the correlation results for all individual beliefs. By default, the beliefs with the strongest average association with the two outcome variables are at the top of the table. The “Mean” column contains a zero-centered average of the 7-point Likert scale used for each belief.

Table 8: Individual Fish Beliefs

Notes. An asterisk (*) indicates a statistically significant correlation. 

Table 9: Individual Chicken Beliefs

Notes. An asterisk (*) indicates a statistically significant correlation.