During September, Faunalytics closely examined the reasons why people deny animal suffering, we interviewed one of the world’s leading experts on companion animal behavior, and we shared a new food recall data set. It’s all part of our mission to inform animal advocates, as well as scholars, and help them be more effective for animals. Check out these new Faunalytics resources and other highlights from the past month.

Blog Series on Denial

Faunalytics Research Director Carol Glasser explores existing research on the topic of “denial” and how it applies to animal cruelty, with a focus on large-scale atrocities. Here’s an excerpt – or you can see the latest post in full.

In the case of animals, a number of psychologists have tried to understand how the average person comes to accept and deny suffering. These researchers explain a cultural environment that engenders a denial of animal suffering even when faced with evidence to the contrary. Deidre Wick’s study about the silence and denial of animal suffering highlights the way in which animal suffering becomes normalized, routinized, and covered up through the process of childhood socialization. We learn at a young age to accept animal suffering and to engage in daily acts of denial, such as using euphemisms to describe eating animals.

Food Recall Data Set Now Available

Faunalytics is pleased to announce that we are now providing original data sets to advocates and academics for analysis purposes. Our first data set compiling USDA food recalls from 2006-2010 is now available to qualifying researchers and academics in a variety of formats for analysis. Read a summary of the food recall data set.

Interview with Dr. Emily Weiss

Faunalytics has worked with the ASPCA on a wide variety of projects over the years, including studying the effectiveness of providing free ID tags to companion animals. Below is an excerpt, or go straight to the full interview.

• With the first phase of the ID ME project, we learned that while the majority of dog and cat guardians thought ID tagging was very or extremely important, only 1/3 of them actually had personalized ID tags on their pets. This disconnect between belief and behavior is certainly not unusual in the human animal – think about recycling and changing the battery in your smoke alarm – we know both of these are important, but unless they are easy, many people do not do them.

In the next phase of the project, we placed ID tags (and collars if needed) directly on the companion animals and then followed up with them at about 8 weeks after the tag was placed on the companion animal. We found that the majority of companion animal owners kept the tags on – and a few had even lost their companion animal and recovered them because of the tag!

Volunteer Highlight

If you do the Google, you might have seen an ad for Faunalytics’ resources recently. That’s because in June we were approved for Google Grants, which provides up to $10,000 in free search advertising per month. Thanks to the amazing support from Faunalytics volunteer and former Google employee Christina Weisser, Faunalytics has been able to take full advantage of the grant. The result is many more people getting the information and research they need to be more effective for animals. Thanks, Chris!

Some readers may not know that Faunalytics has a staff of just two people, so we rely on volunteers to help with a variety of tasks ranging from data entry to in-depth analysis. Learn how you can support Faunalytics by volunteering.