Making Connections: A Faunalytics Researcher Roundtable
In September of 2023, hundreds of animal advocates, academics, and researchers gathered for the second annual Fauna Connections, a symposium dedicated to presenting original research and discussing the real-life implications and recommendations for animal advocacy.
The official program closed with a roundtable discussion with the Faunalytics Research Team, answering questions about the state of advocacy research, future directions, and much more. We present the discussion below, with sources and supporting material linked where appropriate.
Björn Ólafsson, Research Liaison
Jo, let’s start with you: what do you think are some questions that we have successfully answered?
Jo Anderson, Research Director
This is a really “researcher” answer, but in my view there’s a difference between being successful with research and having answered a question. In my view it’s important to think about both of those things separately because we’ve had amazing success in a lot of areas, particularly understanding effective communication as advocates: how to present ourselves, how to engage with the public. But at the same time, I wouldn’t say that we are done learning about that. We know a lot, but we can definitely know more.
Similarly I think we’ve learned a lot over the past couple of decades about dietary outreach—how to talk to people about diet change, at least in the west, but this is not a closed book. There are big differences based on context, person, region, and that’s why I’m making that distinction between success and completion. The panels during Fauna Connections really demonstrated how much progress we’ve made in a really wide range of areas, but none of these conversations are finished, and some of them are just getting started.
I’ve only been part of the movement for six or seven years, and even in that time I’ve seen how much progress we’ve made — like pulling together these panels, with this many researchers on so many topics, with really well-done research, and strong evidence and data, is incredible. Even six years ago I couldn’t imagine something like this. So there are a whole lot of successes, and those are just some of the ones that come to mind for me.
Coni Arévalo, Research Scientist
I’d like to jump in and say that I agree with what Jo’s been saying about diets: Faunalytics has done so much research in terms of people’s experiences with plant-based diets. I think we have a pretty good understanding of the reasons people might want to go plant-based in the first place, how they go about doing it, the obstacles they may face along the way, and the reasons people might abandon those diets at some point. Because of all this information that we’ve gathered we have been able to figure out some strategies that advocates can implement to really help people as they transition to that vegan or vegetarian lifestyle. For example, we have a pretty good understanding that feeling healthy is really important, and so is feeling supported, not just by those people close to you but by society in general — feeling like you’re understood, and knowing you have a place in society is important. Costs and accessibility are also huge things that have come up over the years.
With all this understanding, we know that advocates can help, for example, by advocating for plant-based agriculture to be subsidized more than animal agriculture. If we want to improve that accessibility problem, providing easy, healthy, tasty recipes for people can be really helpful, especially for people with families. Reminding people of their motivation, the reason that they decided to pursue this goal in the first place, is also important. So I would say that we have a pretty good understanding of what it takes to better support people in their journey to veganism or vegetarianism, or just meat reduction. However, like Jo was saying, this knowledge is situated mainly in the Western world, so we do need to keep that in mind.
Andrea Polanco, Research Scientist
I want to build off two separate things that Jo and Coni said. Jo brought up the good point that the empirical study of animal advocacy is a field that’s only really been established in the last 20 years or so — and even among Coni, Jo, and I, we have pretty different backgrounds in terms of education and academic focus: my PhD was an animal welfare science, Jo did her PhD in psychology, Coni has a background in Wildlife Conservation. We need people from different disciplines to work in the animal protection field because everyone brings different skill sets that are equally valuable.
In terms of vegetarian and vegan research, it’s probably the top topic that has been heavily researched in our movement, so we now have a great understanding of demographic differences when it comes to eating plant-based. We know that in general, women and younger adults are more open to eating plant-based and changing their behavior than are men and older adults — something intuitive to many of us, and we now have the data to back up those claims.
At Faunalytics we’ve been conducting research that goes beyond age and gender, to understanding the influence of other personal characteristics on people’s openness to taking pro-animal actions. We recently released a study by our brilliant research scientist Zach Wulderk, and we looked at things like a person’s distance to a grocery store, if the person was a primary shopper or head of household, and if the person was concerned about the climate — and how all of these were associated with them being more open to taking a pro-animal action, not just eating plant-based. He looked at so many different outcomes, and I definitely encourage people to read the report
Björn Ólafsson, Research Liaison
So we know a lot about what is motivating people, primarily in the west, to reduce their meat intake or eliminate meat and animal products from their diets. Let’s take a look at the other side of that coin: what are the biggest gaps in our understanding of animal advocacy? What do we not know at the moment, and where should we be putting our efforts into understanding more?
Coni Arévalo, Research Scientist
Jo alluded to this before: there is a big geographical gap in our understanding. Most research that’s been done in the animal advocacy space has been focused in the global West, and that knowledge isn’t necessarily applicable to all regions of the world — we can’t really generalize the findings that we have to all regions. There are definitely cultural, economic, political, and social aspects that we need to keep in mind, and these will be different throughout the different regions of the world. What may work in North America isn’t necessarily going to apply to South America or Africa or Asia. We can’t assume that people are having the same experiences with veganism or vegetarianism in other parts of the world. They may be facing different obstacles with their diets than what we’ve seen here, so the strategies to overcome those obstacles will probably be different. We do need to move beyond North America and Europe to gain a better understanding of how we can advance and support animal advocacy in the rest of the world.
Jo Anderson, Research Director
Varda’s keynote was a great example of how to do this kind of work: the intersectional multi-faceted approach to advocacy. On the one hand, it can seem intimidating doing so many things in so many different ways, engaging with all different kinds of stakeholders, but at the same time that is exactly what we need to be doing, and I think it’s a sign of how far our movement has come, that we’re at a point where we’re trying to tackle those big multi-faceted questions in our research.
These kinds of questions aren’t as studied yet, because it’s incredibly difficult to study something like how corporate commitments interact with global trade between this country and that country, talking to the governments that regulate that trade, and talking to consumers at the same time. All of those things are happening simultaneously and it’s incredibly complex. It is essential that we find ways to talk about these harder-to-measure, interconnected systems because that’s what we’re dealing with. And we’re up against huge companies, global megacorporations that have all the money, and what we have is brains and passion and a lot of people that we can get to pull in the same direction. In my opinion, we just need to communicate well and figure out how to study and work on them in a collective way.
Andrea Polanco, Research Scientist
There have been a lot of useful metrics that effective altruism has introduced for our movement, but I also think it’s important to hear people who are critical of effective altruism to see what they have to say. There are groups, for example, who work on issues of race, class, and access to plant-based food, who have come out and said that because of Effective Altruism deciding what can and can’t be quantified, it has limited the movement’s understanding of the potential impact that more grassroots advocacy can have. I think this has led to a big gap in our movement right now — we follow certain metrics, therefore if your advocacy type can’t be measured with those metrics, then we’re just losing a lot of understanding, and supporting the potential impact that they can have.
Björn Ólafsson, Research Liaison
So by understanding these gaps, and understanding the questions that we’ve answered, what do you three think is the future of animal advocacy research? What are the questions that we’re going to be tackling over the next five to 10 years?
Andrea Polanco, Research Scientist
I definitely see a lot more region-specific research happening, in terms of understanding how to prevent factory farming from expanding in regions like Africa, or research on how to minimize the harms of factory farms in regions like Brazil and Southeast Asia. As Coni was saying before we know a lot about the harms of animal agriculture in Europe and North America, but what works best there doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll work in other parts of the world. At Faunalytics, we plan to do more research investigating animal advocacy in Southeast Asia — we regularly collaborate with Good Growth when we do this type of work, as they have local knowledge about advocacy in that region. It’s really important to actually work with folks that have local knowledge of different countries when you’re conducting research in those areas. This helps ensure that you’re going to be culturally-sensitive and ask the appropriate and right questions.
Coni Arévalo, Research Scientist
In addition to conducting research in more neglected areas, I think that more research on particularly neglected animals might also be in the future: wild animals, insects, and aquatic animals especially. With the environmental and climate crisis that we’re facing right now, I think it’s really important that we understand how the lives of wild animals are impacted, and what we can do to help them. Along those lines, insect farming is really on the rise and viewed as a more sustainable source of food and protein, but our understanding of what this means for those insect lives is really lacking. Having that information could really help advocates do more to help these animals.
Jo Anderson, Research Director
I want to again shout out Coni’s background in conservation — she’s actually doing some of that research into connections between environmental and animal advocacy right now, looking at opportunities for collaborations across movements. The recent report that she did in conjunction with Sentient Media about the harms of animal agriculture for climate and how they’re reported in the media [was incredible]—she’s modest but I will shout that out for her!
I’ll also circle back to the idea of needing a higher-level systems understanding. What I would like to see more of is collaboration with people who understand macroeconomics, to be able to convey these really complex concepts about just how money goes into animal agriculture, how it comes out of animal agriculture, and how much power is consolidated amongst these big companies. That is not my background, but our researcher Zach who does have an economics background is putting out a report [which is now published] all about this. I will be fully honest with you — I learned so much just from reviewing this work, that I am incredibly excited to put it out there, and it immediately made me think “Okay, this is amazing and we need more of it.” We need to bring more economists into the movement. We need to bring more sociologists with an understanding of social change and how that happens into the movement.
The other part of it is just having a wide variety of types of research that are happening. As Andrea highlighted with respect to our own team, it is small but diverse. At Fauna Connections, it’s amazing to see all the different types of research that everyone was talking about. We’re all working toward the same goal and I think that’s what Faunalytics is all about, and that’s what our movement is all about: everybody working to help animals in our own way, with our own research, and all working towards the same goals.
Björn Ólafsson, Research Liaison
I can’t help but notice that many of the things you three have identified as future directions are also things that the amazing speakers at Fauna Connections have been talking about: different global perspectives, neglected animals aquaculture, wild animals, etc., so it leads me to believe that many of the people and their ideas are really going to be instrumental to the movement in the next decade. I want to ask the three of you to tell me about a person or an organization whose research you find very inspiring and that you’re particularly excited by.
Jo Anderson, Research Director
First of all, everybody who spoke at Fauna Connections: You are all amazing, and thank you so much for sharing your work. Someone who was not able to be here today but I hope that some of you have heard of is Sparsha Saha, who is doing amazing work that isn’t as well known as it should be, through a political science lens — which is another field that’s I think underrepresented within the movement. She’s looking at what political candidates can say when they talk about animal rights and animal welfare, and finding essentially that there’s a lot of fear in the movement when we’re talking about veganism or our own agendas. What she’s finding is that when you’re in a leadership position, that you have a certain amount of ability to talk about things and influence others rather than turning them off, which I’m sure any of you know from just looking at leaders in the world today, is not always the case. She’s investigating the nuance of that in a way that I think is really important, because for us as a movement, putting people into positions where they can become leaders, political figures—working in the mayor’s office in New York City for instance — you can have a huge impact that way. Understanding how to communicate when you are in that kind of position and put animal protection at the forefront is just incredibly important.
Andrea Polanco, Research Scientist
An organization I’m really excited about is the Middle East Vegan Society. I saw Seb Alex give a talk at the animal advocacy conference earlier this year, and he was talking about how they planned to actually have outreach materials developed and how it talks about how veganism is aligned with Islam, so if some of you folks were watching earlier, you saw Altamush’s talk on that topic. It’s great that there’s work being done in that region on grassroots advocacy and outreach material.
Coni Arévalo, Research Scientist
I’m a little biased because of my background in Wildlife Conservation, but I’m really excited about wild animal welfare research. There was a great presentation earlier from Willem, and also Wild Animal Initiative is funding academic studies into wild animal welfare — I’m excited to see what comes out of that. There’s also a fairly new wild animal welfare program at NYU… so I’m curious to see what new information we can gain from their research and how animal advocates can apply it in the future.
Björn Ólafsson, Research Liaison
There are lots of orgs out there, and lots of great work to follow. Let’s turn to audience questions — Rachel asks the following: Do you see the movement evolving in the direction of greater coordination and a common strategy? How would that work when you have a loose collection of organizations without a single authority?
Andrea Polanco, Research Scientist
I would say it’s region-specific again. There are animal advocates all over the world and we have the common goal of abolishing animal agriculture and other type of exploitative systems — but again, what’s going to work really well in one area or region of the world isn’t necessarily going to work well in another. I do think there is better coordination in terms of researchers. We have inter-group meetings where we each talk about our own research, so there is coordination on that end.
Jo Anderson, Research Director
The person asking this [Rachel Mason] is also looking into this kind of question: how to coordinate, what people are doing, and looking at the movement as a whole in terms of how we try and take action. I do think that it is absolutely possible to coordinate better than we’re doing now, but we have made big strides and I think the reason I keep talking about [Rachel’s] work is because I think having a central understanding that we’re all coming from — basically giving us a playbook that at least a large proportion of the movement can agree upon — is important. What are we all trying to do here? What are our talking points? I also think Andrea is absolutely right: there are regional differences we need to keep in mind.
I think there’s also a tendency to slip into thinking of our own species of interest: we tend to focus on farmed animals or wild animals, and not think about connections as much with companion animal issues or animals used in science. So I think part of what’s needed are interdisciplinary, sub-movement [discussions] like we’re seeing today. People are working on different types of issues, and ordinarily, you might be siloed a little bit more, but there are so many connections between all of these different types of work that we’re doing. I think we need to remember that, seek it out, and explore possibilities for working with other movements, or within different areas of our own.
Björn Ólafsson, Research Liaison
Stephen has a question about researcher capacity building: what type of work is being done getting more researchers and more academics on board with pro-animal research or elevating the status of the type of research? Do we do that at Faunalytics? Do other organizations do that? What’s the status of this?
Andrea Polanco, Research Scientist
There is a new academic society called PHAIR, and basically their goal is to be a hub of academics — particularly in the social sciences — who do this type of work, researching animal advocacy. They’re hosting a conference every two years, and they are research capacity builders for our space. I definitely encourage you to check them out, and they have an Open Access Journal as well.
Jo Anderson, Research Director
There’s also a group called RECAP (Researchers to End Consumption of Animal Products), which I’m a co-leader of. Anyone who is a researcher working anywhere in this general space is welcome to join that. We do monthly calls talking about research in progress, or research that’s been completed and share what everyone is up to. There is so much going on now, which is incredible.
Coni Arévalo, Research Scientist
I’ll just add that collaboration is really important with and for academics, and I encourage other people and groups that may be doing research to also reach out to universities and see if there’s a potential for collaboration there because that is another way to get more involvement.
Björn Ólafsson, Research Liaison
Serenity has a question: even though we know that vegans and plant-based eaters are disproportionately women, many activists in the movement (at least at first glance) appear to be majority men. Do you know of research that explores this, and if you don’t, do you have any potential hypotheses about why this could be?
Jo Anderson, Research Director
Certainly, my observation over the last number of years is that the “classic” animal advocate sector, if you want to call it that, does tend to be majority women, whereas the Effective Altruist animal advocates are majority men—and that’s established and supported by our own surveys of the two groups. I think more broadly, within any context, domain, or workplace, we know that higher-level positions are historically more often held by white men in the West, and that’s true in animal advocacy like in any other sector. So that’s my strong suspicion of why you observe some of those things.
Björn Ólafsson, Research Liaison
Ian is asking about the potential impact of a course on emerging issues in the animal welfare world in universities and other such institutions. Do you think that would be impactful, do you happen to know of anything like this?
Andrea Polanco, Research Scientist
There have been a few randomized controlled trials in terms of the impact of classroom education, which you can find in our Library. I’m not sure if the person was asking more so about an actual university course or more so about a few lectures. But yes, it has been shown through previous empirical evidence that lectures do have a positive impact on people’s diets (Jalil et al., 2020, Schwitzgebel et al., 2020, & Schwitzgebel et al., 2021).
Björn Ólafsson, Research Liaison
We’re almost out of time, so one last question from Maynard: should we hope to develop non-animal research methodologies so that robust bodies of strategies can become the default as opposed to the alternative?
Andrea Polanco, Research Scientist
Dr. Catherine Krebs of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is doing a lot of that type of work, so I totally encourage them to check that out. We at Faunalytics wouldn’t do that type of research unless there’s a social science aspect to it, but yes absolutely we should be encouraging it.
We hope that you enjoyed our researcher roundtable discussion as much as our researchers did! Be sure to check out the rest of the Fauna Connections panel discussions over at our YouTube page below.
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