The dairy industry is often perceived as less cruel than the meat industry, mainly because no animals are directly slaughtered to make dairy products. In reality, the dairy industry can be just as harmful, if not worse, than the meat industry in terms of animal welfare.

Those with some understanding of the realities of animal farming may experience a moral conflict between their actions and their beliefs — for instance, consuming meat while believing that it’s wrong to harm animals. This is referred to as cognitive dissonance. Because it’s uncomfortable, people tend to engage in different strategies to try and reduce it. In terms of meat consumption, this can look like:

1. Reducing or eliminating their consumption of meat; or
2. Denying that farmed animals are sentient beings who possess consciousness and can experience emotions like pain, fear, suffering, and pleasure, making it easier to continue eating meat.

Previous studies have primarily focused on cognitive dissonance reduction strategies related to meat consumption. This study, however, is among the first to investigate how people manage the moral conflict they experience consuming dairy.

To investigate this, the researchers recruited 345 participants ages 18 to 70 on social media and randomly split them into two groups. Through an online survey, each group was presented with information about a type of dairy farming, either conventional (intensive) or organic. Participants were then asked a series of questions to assess their perceptions. These included whether participants thought that the life of a cow is as valuable as a human’s, if the farming methods were harmful to the cow, how guilty they felt about consuming dairy from that farm, and if they were going to reduce their dairy consumption afterwards.

The researchers hypothesized that participants shown information about the conventional farm would either:

• Dehumanize the cows, thereby reducing the need to show concern for them; or
• Report greater intentions to reduce dairy consumption than those in the organic group.

They also expected that those who felt more guilt would be more likely to engage in these cognitive dissonance reduction strategies. Finally, they predicted that the impact of the farming condition would be stronger in those with lower levels of speciesism — the belief that some animals are more worthy of moral concern than others, with humans at the top of this list.

As expected, those in the conventional farming group perceived higher levels of harm to the cows than those in the organic group, feeling more guilt and being more likely to engage in cognitive dissonance reduction strategies. Those who felt guiltiest were more likely to deny that cows are sentient beings able to feel pain and pleasure, thus showing less moral concern for them. At the same time, they also expressed greater intentions to reduce their dairy consumption.

These contradictory findings continued when exploring the effect that speciesism had on participants. It was anticipated that those with higher levels of speciesism would attribute fewer mental capabilities to cows, leading to reduced guilt about farming practices and less intention to reduce dairy consumption. These individuals did indeed attribute less sentience and intelligence to, and moral concern for, cows on conventional farms than organic farms. Yet, surprisingly, they were more affected by their guilt in their intention to reduce their dairy consumption than those with lower levels of speciesism. Therefore, while those with higher levels of speciesism are more accepting of animal harm in principle, it seems they’re still reactive to perceived animal suffering.

According to the researchers, one possible explanation for these surprising findings is a ‘ceiling effect’ — those with lower levels of speciesism already showed high levels of guilt and therefore had limited room left to increase their guilt scores.

Even though the results of this study are promising for animal advocates, the authors explain that more research is needed to explore the factors that maximize behavioral change, while minimizing the effects of increased ‘mind denial’ and reduced moral concern. Moreover, the participants were overwhelmingly highly educated white women, reducing the generalizability of the findings.

Despite these limitations, animal advocates can still use the findings in their work. The study shows that people are more likely to attribute sentience and mental capabilities to cows when given information about organic farming, yet show greater intentions to reduce consumption when presented with information about conventional farming. As such, it could be beneficial to first show imagery and descriptions of higher welfare farms to drive moral concern for cows, and then contrast that with conventional farms to drive behavioral change towards reduced dairy consumption.