In this blog post, Jared Piazza considers recent findings from developmental psychology regarding children’s relationship with animals and animal products. He argues that children make an ideal audience for vegan education, and also considers the many practical challenges in reaching this audience.
Children care about animals
Children have a special relationship with animals. From a young age, children are deeply interested in animals and seek interactions with them. One study gave 1- to 3-year-olds an opportunity to play freely in a room where there was a live animal (e.g. a hamster, lizard, etc.) and many attractive toys available. Children spent more time interacting with the animal than any of the toys, and this was true even when the animal was a spider.
In society, we try to make sure that children’s interactions with animals are pleasant. Children watch television shows that have animal characters as protagonists. Parents take children to local farms and petting zoos where they get to feed animals and watch them being cared for. Children are taught to care for companion animals and to respect wildlife outside their home.
Because of these foundational experiences, most children develop a fondness for animals and care deeply about their wellbeing. Indeed, some recent studies have shown that children’s concern for animals at times eclipses that of adults.
For instance, Matti Wilks and colleagues presented a group of American adults, and a group of 5- to 9-year-olds, with theoretical moral dilemmas in which they could save either a person or an animal. Adults resoundingly chose to save the person over the animal, whereas children were much more divided about whom to save.
Children’s heightened concern for animal lives even shows up in their judgments of eating animals. Luke McGuire and colleagues found that British children, ages 9 to 11, rated it less permissible to eat animal products, compared to adults. Children also judged it more important to treat farmed animals (e.g. pigs) well. When asked to justify the wrongness of eating animals, British children tended to invoke concerns about animal rights and welfare.
An emerging, developmental puzzle
This emerging research on how children think and reason about eating animals raises an interesting developmental puzzle. We know that most children around the world are raised in families where eating animal products is commonplace, and most children themselves eat animal products. So:
Why do many children who eat animal products also judge it wrong to do so?
It could be a case of children being morally inconsistent – saying one thing while consciously doing another. More likely, it reflects a degree of naïveté in children’s understanding of the food they eat and where it comes from.
Young children may not realise that much of what they eat comes from animals and that it requires harming animals to create these products. This may be especially true of children raised in urban environments where they have little to no involvement in animal farming and the processes by which animal products are generated.
Are children unsuspecting meat eaters?
There are only a few studies that have explored what children know about the production of animal products. At least one study, with urban American children, found that they can struggle to identify which foods come from animals.
In that study, Erin Hahn and colleagues asked American 4- to 7-year-olds to sort foods according to their plant versus animal origins. They gave the children two boxes: one covered in leaves (denoting a plant source) and another covered in fur (denoting an animal source). Overall, the children performed reasonably well on this task; however, they did make a number of errors. For example, almost half of the children thought that cheese was from plants, and about 40% thought that bacon and hotdogs came from plants. Even chicken nuggets were commonly miscategorised, despite the word “chicken.”
Categorising foods according to their plant versus animal origins may be challenging for urban-raised children for multiple reasons. For one, research by Heather Bray and colleagues suggests that urban parents sometimes avoid having frank conversations with their children about the origins of animal products. Omnivorous urban parents were more likely than rural parents and vegetarian parents to tell ‘white lies,’ dodge, or deflect probing questions from their children. Such maneuvers are meant to spare children from the harsh realities involved in meat production, but they might also keep children guessing about where their food comes from.
Children’s poor performance on this food-origins task could also reflect misunderstandings children have about the task itself. Another way to test children’s knowledge is to see if they can identify which animals are used for food. Heather Henseler Kozachenko and I adopted this approach. We presented 18 animals to two groups of British children, 6- to 8-year-olds and 9- to 11-year-olds, and asked them to identify “which animals do people eat?”
When asked this way, both groups of children were pretty good at identifying which animals are eaten. For example, 91% of 6- to 8-year-olds, and 91% of 9- to 11-year-olds, correctly identified that chickens are eaten by people; 96% of older children understood that pigs are eaten (80% of younger children), and 85% of older children indicated sheep are eaten (73% of younger children). Where children struggled most was correctly identifying animals that are eaten by people outside of their own culture – for example, knowing that there are people who eat frogs, sharks and octopuses.
Together, these two initial studies suggest that American and British children’s knowledge of animal products is incomplete at best. Yet, they are far from naïve in their understanding of which animals are eaten. More research is needed to get a fuller picture of what children know about animal products and how this knowledge develops, especially in populations outside of the Western world.
From unsuspecting to aware and attached
Even when children can reliably identify which foods come from animals, and which animals are eaten, this knowledge alone is probably not enough to deter them from using and consuming animal products.
It is learning about the harsh realities involved in animal agriculture – particularly what happens to animals in large-scale factory farming and how these industrial farms negatively impact the health of our planet – that tends to motivate adults to abandon animal products. However, this is also the sort of food-systems knowledge that children tend to lack and are commonly shielded from.
Such “shielding” practices are likely guided by good intentions. Parents don’t want to upset children or cause issues for themselves at home. However, one potential long-term consequence is that children learn to stop asking questions and continue to consume animal products unabated. By the time children do learn about these realities – for example, when they are teenagers or young adults – they have already built up a strong attachment to animal products and are motivated to keep eating them, despite the conflicted feelings they may experience. Efforts to intervene become much harder once these attachments are in place.
We know from research by João Graça and others that many adults have strong attachments with meat, founded on a lifetime of eating and enjoying meat. Furthermore, we know that adults who have strong attachments to meat are more likely to defend animal agriculture and are less interested in replacing meat in their diet; for example, with plant-based alternatives. Adult meat eaters engage in a range of psychological mechanisms to maintain their positive attachment to meat, including objectifying animals used for food and disregarding information that could potentially change their attitudes about so-called ‘food’ animals.
Thus, from a psychological perspective, childhood may be the best time to intervene in order to reduce animal consumption and encourage more sustainable and cruelty-free options. In summary, this is because it is during childhood that people:
(1) care a lot about animals,
(2) are still forming attachments to food, and, as a result,
(3) are the least motivated to defend their current eating practices.
Arguably, this combination of heightened concern for animals and weaker attachment to animal products make children the ideal audience for vegan advocacy. Indeed, Heather Henseler Kozachenko and I recently found that children displayed none of the typical motivated defences adults exhibit when reasoning about ‘food’ animals.
In this new study, we presented adults and British children ages 6 to 12 information about the level of intelligence of animals commonly used for food (e.g. chickens, cows), or regarding animals not commonly eaten (e.g. kākāpō). They made judgments of the acceptability of killing animals for food and eating them (e.g. “eating hamburgers”), either from their own perspective or another person reflecting on this information.
Adults in these tasks tended to do two things:
- they judged that it is worse to harm animals described as more intelligent than it is to harm animals described as less intelligent, but only when the animal being described is not eaten by humans: in other words, they responded strategically to animal intelligence information;
- they thought other people would act on this animal intelligence information more than they actually did themselves – that is, they showed ‘self-other distinctions’ in their moral judgments.
By contrast, children did not show these hallmark motivated reactions. They tended to condemn harming and eating animals at rates higher than adults; they did not make use of animal-intelligence information strategically; and they did not exhibit self-other distinctions in their judgments.
This research is preliminary and it bears replicating with children of different ages and nationalities, but it does suggest that children may be less motivated to defend the normative practice of eating animals, compared to their adult counterparts.
Practical challenges of vegan education with children and future directions
As future stewards of the planet, children represent an important demographic for vegan education. As we have seen, children may be somewhat open to replacing animal products in their diet. Furthermore, research suggests families are often supportive of children who want to make such changes.
Nonetheless, advocates of vegan education – such as The Vegan Society’s Education Network – face a number of practical barriers when working with children and families:
- How can educators teach children about the poor treatment of factory-farmed animals, while simultaneously being considerate of their emotions and sensibilities and the concerns of parents and gatekeepers?
- How do educators introduce children to plant-based alternatives in a positive way and get schools to subscribe to more plant-based options? Is it best to focus on the health benefits of such a change, ordoes raising the environmental and moral issues also help?
- How can advocates mitigate parents’ reasonable fears about the disruptive consequences of their children adopting a plant-forward diet – for example, the need for families to learn new foods, new recipes, and cultivate new eating practices? What do we tell parents of ‘picky eaters,’ who are less willing to try novel foods?
These are some of the more difficult questions we need better answers to and should occupy the research agendas of those interested in vegan advocacy. We also need more research examining individual differences within childhood, since there is likely significant variability in children’s concern for farmed animals, their empathy, and degrees of openness to dietary change.
Children represent an important group in the consideration of a more compassionate food system because on the whole they care about animals and their attachments to animal products are still in development. Children may be the ideal audience for vegan education, but there are plenty of practical challenges involved in reaching them during this conducive period – challenges that deserve more attention from researchers and vegan educators seeking to inspire future generations of animal advocates.
The views expressed by our Research News contributors are not necessarily the views of The Vegan Society.
