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

Background

Animals raised for food generally receive significantly less attention and funding than companion animals (Faunalytics, 2019). In India, as in most countries, small-bodied animals like chickens and fish are killed in particularly massive numbers: Over 2.5 billion chickens and over five millions tonnes of live fishes were slaughtered in India in 2018 (Faunalytics, 2020). Although the Constitution of India and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960 contain language that recognizes animals’ ability to suffer and calls for compassion for all creatures, farmed animals are not well protected by the law (World Animal Protection, 2020). For instance, there are no bans on cage systems for egg laying hens, nor are there limits on stocking densities for broiler chickens. For reasons such as these, India receives an “E” 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 India. This study replicates our study of fish and chicken beliefs in the U.S. to illuminate which beliefs the Indian 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 India. The findings presented in this report may also prove useful to animal advocates who are seeking to target an Indian audience more effectively.

Key Findings

1. Over 70% of people took diet pledges and signed welfare petitions. A large majority of participants were willing to reduce their consumption of chicken and fish, and were also willing to sign petitions calling for welfare improvements. Advocates who are aiming to secure commitments to a more animal-friendly diet may find success even with little belief-specific messaging.
2. Animal-related beliefs are not strongly correlated with pro-animal actions. We found very few significant correlations between beliefs and consumption reduction pledges or welfare petition signatures. Advocates may wish to evaluate their own successes to determine which approaches have the greatest impact while also keeping in mind that many people are already willing to take pro-animal actions when asked.
3. Many pro-animal beliefs are not especially common. Although some beliefs, such as chickens’ and fishes’ ability to experience pain, were held by large majorities, many beliefs were held by less than two-thirds of the people we surveyed. For example, less than 60% of people believed that chickens and fishes need room to explore and exercise. While some beliefs do not require more information, advocates who are interested in raising awareness of facts may wish to focus on messages about fish and chicken experiences, personalities, and intelligence.

Recommendations

1. Don’t be afraid to ask. These findings suggest that the Indian public is already open to taking consumption reduction pledges and signing petitions for improved animal welfare. You may see a significant amount of pro-animal behavior simply by asking if people would consider it.
2. Try stacking your asks. If you have interest in both outcomes, try asking for one pro-animal action after a person has already agreed to another. This may help increase pro-animal behavior 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, Canada, and China. Advocates especially interested in exploring the effects of specific beliefs could consider utilizing the strongest cross-country beliefs from these reports. 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 India. 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 India. 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 Indian adults and, after data cleaning, were left with 881 responses. More information about our data cleaning process can be found in the Supplementary Materials. Participants were randomly assigned 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. Because India does not have a single language spoken by the vast majority of the population, researchers always have to decide which language(s) to use in a survey. In consultation with an Indian researcher, we elected to conduct the survey in English, which is spoken by a large proportion of the population, and a more geographically diverse one than Hindi. Some research suggests that the English-speaking segment of the Indian population tends to have a higher level of income and education. Some random error may also exist as a result of varying degrees of English comprehension among participants. All results should be interpreted with this in mind. The survey instrument can be found in its original language 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/ethnicity, 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

72% of Indian participants pledged to reduce their consumption of fish and 76% agreed to reduce their consumption of chicken. 75% of participants agreed to sign the fish welfare petition and 72% agreed to sign the chicken welfare petition. 

Among the participants who pledged to reduce their consumption of fish, 18% pledged to never eat fish, 54% pledged to eat it less than once per week, and 20% pledged to eat it only 1-3 times per week. Of chicken pledge-takers, 17% pledged to never eat chicken, 63% pledged to eat it less than once per week, and 15% pledged to eat it only 1-3 times per week. 

The Most Common Indian 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, in groups of conceptually similar beliefs 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.

When individual belief correlations were averaged together based on belief category, such as fish suffering or chicken intelligence, the results showed weak relationships (r < .09) across the board. In other words, no type of belief was clearly preferable when designing the messaging for a campaign, regardless of whether it focuses on fishes or chickens, or whether it seeks diet pledges or petition signatures.

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

Notes. Given the ordinal nature of the belief 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. However, as noted above, all correlations were quite small, so attempting to change or work with the public’s beliefs about fishes may be less effective than other advocacy strategies not covered in this report.

Fish Consumption Beliefs

Of all belief categories, beliefs about the consumption of fish had the highest average correlation with both taking the diet pledge (r = .07, SD = .05) and signing the welfare petition (r = .05, SD = .02). Individuals who believe that fishes are the healthiest animal to eat or that eating fish doesn’t contribute as much to climate change as eating other animals were less likely to take the diet pledge. No notably strong associations stood out for petition signatures.

Figure 4: Fish Consumption Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Suffering Beliefs

Beliefs related to fish suffering had the second highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .06, SD = .03) and the third highest with signing the welfare petition (r = .04, SD = .03). People who believe that fish can feel pain were more likely to take the diet pledge. No notably strong associations stood out for signing the welfare petition. 

Advocates who are aiming to decrease the consumption of fishes in India may benefit from emphasizing the suffering many fishes endure. However, because individual beliefs about fish suffering were not significantly correlated with petition signatures, advocates seeking signatures may find more success by focusing on other belief categories or strategies.

Figure 5: Fish Suffering Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Personality Beliefs

Fish personality beliefs had the third highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .05, SD = .04) and the second highest with signing the welfare petition (r = .04, SD = .03). The belief that fishes play was associated with taking the diet pledge, suggesting that advocates seeking to reduce fish consumption should consider this line of messaging for their campaigns. No other beliefs about fish personalities were significantly associated with either pro-animal behavior. 

Figure 6: Fish Personality Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Other Fish Beliefs

“Other” beliefs about fishes had the fourth highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .05, SD = .02) and the third lowest with signing the welfare petition (r = .03, SD = .03). There were no particularly strong associations between these beliefs and willingness to take the pledge or sign the petition. As a result, advocates may find more success exploring other types of beliefs in their efforts, such as suffering-related beliefs for reducing fish consumption or personality-related beliefs for obtaining petition signatures. 

Figure 7: Other Fish Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Emotions Beliefs

Beliefs related to fish emotions had the third lowest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .05, SD = .04) and the lowest average correlation with signing the welfare petition (r = .01, SD = .01). None of the individual beliefs stood out as having particularly strong associations with diet pledges or petition signatures. The associations were small, suggesting that it may be difficult to use emotions to influence behavior. Advocates may be able to tailor their approaches more effectively using a different belief category, such as suffering or personality.

Figure 8: Fish Emotion Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Social Beliefs

Beliefs about the social nature of fishes had the second lowest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .03, SD = .02) and the fourth highest with signing the welfare petition (r = .04, SD = .03). Neither belief in this category had notably strong associations with animal-positive actions. 

Figure 9: Fish Social Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Fish Intelligence Beliefs

Fish intelligence beliefs had the lowest average correlation taking the diet pledge (r = .03, SD = .01) and second lowest with signing the petition (r = .02, SD = .02). There were no notably strong associations between intelligence beliefs and willingness to take the pledge or sign the petition. Instead of highlighting the intelligence of fishes, advocates focusing on an Indian audience may have more success if, for example, fish suffering is emphasized for diet pledges or fish personalities are discussed for petition signatures.

Figure 10: Fish Intelligence 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. Because the correlations were quite small, advocates may find more success using advocacy strategies not covered in this report rather than attempting to change or work with the public’s beliefs about chickens. 

Chicken Consumption Beliefs

Beliefs related to the consumption of chickens had the highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .09, SD = .07) and the second highest with signing the welfare petition (r = .08, SD = .05). People who believe that eating chickens doesn’t contribute as much to climate change as eating other animals were much less likely to take the diet pledge and were also less likely to sign the welfare petition. Advocates may wish to emphasize the environmental effects of chicken farming in order to counter this belief. Individuals were more likely to sign the welfare petition if they believe that chicken products labeled “organic” came from chickens with good welfare or that chicken is a good source of protein. Why? Those who associate organic practices with welfare may be more likely to value welfare in the first place, leading to more petition signatures.

Figure 11: Chicken Consumption Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Intelligence Beliefs

Beliefs related to the intelligence of chickens had the second highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .08, SD = .04), but the second lowest average correlation with signing the welfare petition (r = .03, SD = .02). Individuals who believe that chickens mostly act out of instinct were less likely to take the diet pledge. There were no particularly strong associations with chicken intelligence beliefs and petition signatures. 

Advocates should keep these results in mind when designing their messaging. Even though chicken intelligence beliefs have the strongest association with diet pledges, they do not have nearly as strong an association with petition signatures. As a result, advocates may wish to emphasize that chickens are thinking creatures in order to soften some people’s opposition to reducing their chicken consumption. 

Figure 12: Chicken Intelligence Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Personality Beliefs

Chicken personality beliefs had the third highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .07, SD = .04) and fourth highest with signing the welfare petition (r = .05, SD = .02). In particular, beliefs that chickens can bond with humans and are loving had the strongest associations with taking the diet pledge. None of these beliefs was notably associated with willingness to sign the welfare petition. Advocates who aim to reduce chicken consumption could see benefits from highlighting the strong relationships chickens can form with both humans and other chickens. 

Figure 13: Chicken Personality Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Other Chicken Beliefs

“Other” chicken beliefs had the fourth highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .07, SD = .04), but the highest with signing the welfare petition (r = .08, SD = .07). Both actions were more likely when an individual believed that chickens are beautiful. As a result, advocates may see more animal-positive behaviors come from a campaign that emphasizes the beauty of chickens. 

Figure 14: Chicken Other Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Emotions Beliefs

For both taking the diet pledge (r = .06, SD = .02) and signing the welfare petition (r = .04, SD = .04), beliefs of chickens’ emotions had the third weakest average correlation. None of these beliefs had a notable association with taking the pledge or signing the petition. 

Figure 15: Chicken Emotion Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Suffering Beliefs

As discussed earlier in this report, the strength of the average correlations by type of belief were consistently low. Chicken suffering beliefs had the second lowest average correlation with taking the diet pledge (r = .06, SD = .04), but the third highest correlation with signing the welfare petition (r = .05, SD = .04). None of these beliefs was particularly associated with an increase in willingness to take the diet pledge, but three beliefs were associated with less willingness to take the pledge. Participants who believe that chickens never find it stressful to be handled, that air and water quality aren’t that important to chickens, and that chickens don’t care about being over-crowded were also less likely to take the pledge. Participants were also less likely to sign the welfare petition if they doubt the importance of air and water quality for chickens, but were more likely to provide a signature if they believe that many chicken farms have horrible living conditions.

25% of those surveyed believe that air and water quality aren’t important to chickens, meaning a considerable portion of the sample is less likely to sign the welfare petition. Ensuring that people understand the importance of environmental factors for chickens, such as pollution and stress, may be a critical point for advocates to focus on.

Figure 16: Chicken Suffering Beliefs And Animal-Positive Behaviors

Chicken Social Beliefs

Beliefs related to the social nature of chickens had the lowest average correlation with both taking the diet pledge (r = .02, SD = .01) and signing the welfare petition (r = .02, SD = .02). Neither of the beliefs in this category were associated with taking the pledge or signing the petition, indicating that advocates focusing on chickens may have more success highlighting other aspects of chickens, such as their beauty or ability to form bonds with humans.

Figure 17: Chicken Social 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.

• Age: Older participants were less likely to take the fish diet pledge than younger participants, but also more likely sign the chicken petition than younger participants.
• Education: Participants with higher levels of education were more likely to sign the chicken petition than those with lower levels of education.
• No clear relationships were found between recent fish consumption and pro-animal behaviors.
• Recent chicken consumption: Participants who consume more chicken were more likely to sign the chicken petition than those who consume less chicken. 

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

Overall, differences between demographics only emerged when participants were asked to sign the chicken welfare petition. In other words, there may be more disagreement across different segments of the Indian public when it comes to the well-being of chickens. 

In addition to the characteristics discussed above, we looked for differences based on gender, religion, income, region, whether participants were guardians of companion animals, whether they had gone fishing recently, and whether they had handled chickens recently. There were no significant differences or trends 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: 72% of participants took the diet pledge to reduce their consumption of fish and 76% agreed to reduce their consumption of chicken. 75% of participants agreed to sign the fish welfare petition, and 72% 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

A substantial majority of participants were willing to commit to animal-positive behaviors: 75% of participants agreed to sign the fish welfare petition and 72% agreed to sign the chicken welfare petition, while 72% of participants took the pledge to reduce their consumption of fish and 76% took the pledge to reduce their consumption of chicken. 

Among those who pledged to reduce their consumption of fish, 18% pledged to never eat fish, 54% pledged to eat it less than once per week, and 20% pledged to eat it only 1-3 times per week. Among those who took the chicken pledge, 17% pledged to never eat chicken, 63% pledged to eat it less than once per week, and 15% pledged to eat it only 1-3 times per week. 

Because the correlations between beliefs and pro-animal behaviors were generally quite weak and rates of pro-animal behavior were high, advocates may find that emphasizing certain beliefs is not necessary to obtain diet pledge commitments or welfare petition signatures. Instead, advocates may find a similar amount of success simply by asking members of the public to take a diet pledge or sign a petition. This could also free up resources to be used in other efforts.

English is also not commonly spoken as a first language in India. Of the more than 128 million English-speakers in India, fewer than 1% spoke it as their first language (Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India, 2011). Because of this, participants may have had poorer reading comprehension of the survey than if it had been conducted in their first language. Advocates should keep this possibility in mind when interpreting the findings presented in this report. They may also wish to conduct their own organizational impact evaluation by carefully tacking rates of uptake for pledges, petitions, and other forms of advocacy they are conducting. This will allow advocates to identify which approaches have been most successful with their audience and update their strategies accordingly. 

Which Beliefs Were Most Common?

Animal advocates may wish to consider how to leverage the animal-positive beliefs that are already strongly held on average. Although information on these points may not be required because they are already prevalent, these beliefs may be useful to help drive change. 

The relative prevalence of participants’ beliefs about chickens and fishes are summarized in Figures 1 and 2. A large proportion of Indian participants hold a number of positive beliefs about chickens and fishes. The most commonly held belief about chickens, at 91%, was that chickens can feel pain. Participants also largely agreed that chickens can communicate with each other and can feel negative emotions like fear. At 94%, the beauty of fishes had the most agreement among participants. Other common beliefs about fishes include that they are loving, can feel pain, and can communicate with each other. Showing descriptions, images, or videos of a fish in pain before asking for diet pledges may be an effective approach for advocates to follow. This is especially true because in addition to being common, this belief was associated with diet reduction pledges. The belief that fish can play, which was held by 79% of participants, was also associated with higher rates of pledging. 

However, just because a belief is common doesn’t mean that everyone holds it. For example, some people may still need additional information on why air and water quality are important to chickens. Advocates may also wish to increase the prevalence of beliefs that are less common, like that chickens care about being overcrowded or that fishes need room to explore and exercise. 

Beliefs Most Strongly Associated With Pro-Animal Behavior

Although most individual beliefs were not significantly correlated with pro-animal actions, we found several notable associations. Because significant correlations were both infrequent and generally weak, advocates should supplement the information provided in this report with a careful evaluation of the impact of their own advocacy work.

Rates of uptake for the chicken diet pledge and the chicken welfare petition were higher among participants who believed that chickens are beautiful. However, these rates were also lower among those who believed that eating chickens doesn’t contribute as much to climate change as eating other animals, or that air and water quality aren’t that important to chickens. Advocates may be able to increase rates of both chicken diet pledges and petition signatures by, for example, showing images of an especially colorful chicken when making their asks. Alternatively, advocates could aim to reduce hesitancy to take a pledge or sign a petition by discussing the environmental implications of animal agriculture or explain the health effects of poor air and water quality on chickens.

Participants who believed that chickens can bond with humans or are loving were more likely to take the chicken diet pledge than those who didn’t hold these beliefs. Participants who were skeptical about chickens feeling stress when handled or caring about overcrowdedness were less likely to take the chicken diet pledge than those who were less skeptical. Participants who believe that chickens mostly act out of instinct were also less likely to take the pledge. Advocates seeking to reduce chicken consumption could consider approaches that contrast the harsh conditions of big chicken farms with the relationships chickens are able to form in more humane conditions. Welfare petition signatures were more common among participants who believe that many chicken farms have horrible living conditions. Discussing or displaying these conditions when asking for signatures may increase advocates’ rate of success. 

We found fewer significant correlations with beliefs related to fishes, perhaps suggesting that the public’s beliefs about chickens are more likely to affect their actions than their beliefs about fishes are. No beliefs were associated with fish welfare petition signatures. However, 75% of participants agreed to sign the petition, indicating that advocates may not need to worry about their specific message when asking for signatures. Uptake of the fish diet pledge was more common among participants who held the belief that fish can feel pain or that they engage in play. Highlighting these characteristics may result in more willingness to reduce fish consumption. By contrast, those who believe that fishes are the healthiest animal to eat or that fish consumption contributes less to climate change than the consumption of other animals were less likely to reduce the amount of fish they eat. Advocates may wish to make use of the belief that fish are contaminated with plastics, heavy metals, and chemicals, which was held by over 60% of participants, in their efforts to reduce fish consumption.

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.

With regards to age, older participants were less likely to commit to the fish pledge than younger participants. However, they were also more likely to sign the chicken diet petition than younger participants. Advocates might consider focusing on younger populations when seeking fish consumption reductions, and older populations when advocating for improvements in chickens’ living and slaughter conditions.

Participants with higher levels of education were more likely to sign the chicken petition than those with lower levels of education. However, we do not find any significant differences in pro-animal behavior adoption across income groups. While advocates might consider targeting populations with more education for chicken welfare petitions, this strategy should still consider individuals of differing income levels.

Although frequency of fish product consumption was not associated with differences in pro-animal behaviors, those who consumed chicken more frequently were more likely to sign the chicken welfare petition. This could be an encouraging signal for campaigns for improved chicken welfare, as advocates can show that regular chicken consumers support better conditions for the animals they eat. 

Finally, individuals who are companion animal guardians were more likely to take action on behalf of fish, but took action on behalf of chickens at a similar rate to those who were not companion animal guardians. It is possible that those who live intimately with another animal empathize more with fishes, who are discussed less often in conversations about animal welfare than chickens are.

Future Directions

While the lack of clear associations between beliefs and pro-animal action may accurately depict the reality in India, it is possible that these results are limited by language comprehension. Further research into Indian attitudes toward chickens and fishes could provide clarity by administering surveys in a number of the languages spoken in India. Animal advocacy organizations operating in India should also consider evaluating the relative success of their own petition and dietary pledge drives, and note which messaging and targeting strategies were associated with the greatest campaign success. 

More broadly, additional research is also required to understand whether beliefs correlated with animal-positive behaviors are the cause of those actions or whether they are merely associated with them. In a continuation of our research into beliefs about chickens and fishes, we will 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 in a country with notable correlations 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.

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). We included approximately 250 additional participants for each survey to account for exclusions due to poor data quality or the failure of attention-check questions. Because there is no single language spoken by the vast majority of Indians (discussed in more detail in the Method Overview section), language comprehension may also have played a role in data quality. We removed more participants due to data cleaning than expected, resulting in a total of 453 participants in the fish condition and 428 in the chicken condition. Many responses were excluded for having “suspicious” IP addresses according to the tool we used per our pre-registered plan. Their exclusion had little to no effect on the topline numbers and only minimal differences in the correlational results. A post hoc power analysis yields slightly reduced power of .92 in a point-biserial correlation (critical t = 1.96). 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

All of the categories had fairly weak average strengths of correlation. As noted in the Results section, beliefs around the consumption of fishes was the category most strongly associated with diet pledges and petition signatures. Beliefs about suffering had the second highest average correlation with taking the diet pledge and beliefs about personality had the second highest with the welfare petition.

For chickens, the consumption group of beliefs was also most strongly associated with pledges, followed by intelligence beliefs. Beliefs in the “Other” category had the highest association with petition signatures, followed by beliefs related to chicken consumption. 

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.