Meat Consumption, Moral Reasoning, And Age
Many people consider it morally wrong to harm an intelligent animal. However, farmed animals who are regularly exploited and killed for food have rich and complex cognitive lives. In fact, it’s often said that pigs are smarter than three-year-old humans.
Where does this double standard come from? Research has shown that adult meat-eaters consider an animal’s intelligence when asked how bad it would be to harm them, but only when the animal in question is not considered food. Additionally, when given information about a farmed animal’s intelligence, many omnivores don’t show concern but expect that other people would.
In other words, adults strategically ignore information that might cause moral discomfort with their dietary behaviors. But do children do the same? In this paper, researchers aimed to find out using a two-part study design.
Study 1: Comparing Food Vs. Non-Food Animals
In the first study, researchers tested how children and adults use information about an animal’s intelligence based on whether or not the animal in question is conventionally used for food. 148 children and 410 adults were either shown kākāpōs (native birds from New Zealand) or chickens. Participants learned that the animal in question was either highly intelligent or had low intelligence levels. Then they rated whether it was okay to harm the animal in various ways (overall harm, displacing them, putting them in a cage, or killing them for food).
In general, adults thought it was worse to harm the kākāpō, while children didn’t distinguish between the kākāpō and the chicken. When it came to killing them for food, everyone, including the children, thought it was worse to kill the kākāpō. However, adults generally felt it was more acceptable to kill the chicken than children did. In line with previous research, adults had different judgments about the kākāpō based on their intelligence. They considered it worse to kill and eat the more intelligent kākāpō than the less intelligent one, but they didn’t differentiate between the more and the less intelligent chicken.
Children did not strategically ignore intelligence information. They judged the killing and eating of a bird the same, regardless of their intelligence. So while they did ignore intelligence information, this was not self-motivated. Instead, children seemed to not care about intelligence either way.
Study 2: Comparing Me Vs. Others
In the second study, the researchers tested whether 147 children and 389 adults would strategically ignore intelligence information depending on their perspective. Some participants were given information directly, while others were told a story about John, a hamburger-lover who learns about cow intelligence. Afterward, participants rated how bad they feel (or how bad they think John feels) about eating hamburgers and how wrong they think it is (or how wrong they believe John thinks it is) to eat hamburgers.
When cows were presented as animals with low intelligence, people didn’t differ in their responses. However, when cows were described as highly intelligent, adults believed that John would feel bad and believe it was wrong to eat hamburgers — but those who were asked whether they felt it was wrong didn’t change their own judgment. Meanwhile, children’s judgments about eating cow meat were unaffected by perspective.
Conclusion
The results of this study suggest that adults more readily apply mental strategies to avoid meat guilt compared to children. According to the authors, one possible explanation is that children don’t categorize animals as readily as adults. Therefore, they may be less motivated to treat farmed animals as objects to the same extent as adults. Furthermore, kids often don’t understand how their diets contribute to animal harm, so they may not experience cognitive dissonance the same way that adults do.
Often, parents and caregivers try to protect children from the truth about where meat comes from. Thus, they may lack the motivation to devalue food animals. This study, once again, showcases how our attitude towards non-human animals becomes more biased as we grow older. It’s important to educate children that farmed animals are as morally worthy as other animals before this bias sets in.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sode.12709