"We are carnivores and have been for hundreds of thousands of years..."
Narratives of animal use according to the UK public: focus group analysis by Animal Think Tank.
Our worldview is underpinned by narratives, and a worldview that sees fellow animals as here for human use rather than with humans as peers is no different. If we’re going to change this dominant worldview, we have to understand the narratives beneath it.
Animal Think Tank performed 11 focus groups with the UK public, and our narrative analysis revealed seven common narratives that kept resurfacing across conversation topics and across groups of people.
Justifications of meat-eating using ‘the four Ns’
“We are carnivores and we have been for hundreds of thousands of years...”
Experienced animal advocates will be rolling their eyes at this one: meat-eaters often justify their behaviour by reasoning that animal consumption is ‘normal’, ‘natural’ ‘necessary’ and ‘nice’, and our groups were no different.
The above quote from one participant perfectly illustrates an argument from the ‘natural’ position, (though we suspect they meant to say ‘omnivores’). This position sees humans at the top of the ‘food chain’, and thus that eating other animals is part of our biological destiny.
Similarly, participants who pointed to the fact that they have always eaten meat as a sign that it is normal, were under the impression that it was necessary because it’s hard to get adequate nutrition otherwise, and mentioned mentally compartmentalising animal suffering because the taste of meat was too ‘nice’.
When "psychotic” cruelty becomes a “necessary evil”
The concept of necessity represents a tipping point in our participants’ understanding of whether the use of other animals is acceptable or not. In general, the more necessary people perceived a form of animal use from a human perspective, the more acceptable they considered the practice.
Of the topics that were discussed, using animals for cosmetics testing, circuses, hunting and agricultural labour generally didn’t make the cut in terms of acceptability, while using animals for medical testing and the labour of support animals was seen as necessary for human survival and thus acceptable.
Interestingly (and dishearteningly), the practice of using animals for food seemed to buck the general trend around necessity and acceptability. Although its necessity was disputed in some focus group conversations, participants nevertheless agreed that it was still acceptable. For this practice alone, ‘individual preference’ mattered more than necessity.
Beinghood and property status
"It's a life, not an accessory...[that’s] quite a horrible way to think about something that does have the ability to think and feel."
Our analysis identified many narratives that our participants use to justify animal use, but there was another deeply held narrative at play: one that likely drives the cognitive dissonance some participants described around eating animals.
Although they stopped short at insects and fishes, our participants believed that other animals are emotional beings with feelings and minds of their own; although they didn’t use the word, ‘sentience’ is what they were describing.
Belief in this narrative led to discomfort and unease around the concept of animals as property. Some participants seemed to distance themselves from this feeling by using ‘it’ as a pronoun for animals and calling them ‘things’ even when referring to them as sentient, while others tried to resolve the discomfort by suggesting reframes of the idea of ownership, such as ‘legal guardianship’ or ‘legal responsibility’.
This as a dominant narrative represents hope for the animal freedom movement in the UK because, when uplifted and extended to all animals, it has the potential to make any form of animal objectification unjustifiable in the eyes of the public.
To discover the four other narratives we identified as well as our recommendations for animal freedom communicators, read the Narrative Insights Report here.
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