Let's Read A Paper: Comparing U.S. Groups' Openness To Pro-Animal Actions

Republicans aren't interested in helping animals.

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash.

In April, Faunalytics published a paper showing the results of a survey of Americans about which pro-animal actions they would support.

People are much more likely to agree to do actions that don’t cost them anything. The actions seem to me to fall into four clumps.

First, very cheap actions: voting for a ballot measure,¹ signing a petition, and supporting Meatless Mondays at school. These three actions were the only ones with greater than 50% support, and nearly three-quarters of people were willing to vote for pro-animal ballot measures. These actions involve almost no sacrifice on the part of the consumer. Notably, neither Meatless Mondays nor voting for ballot measures (which generally impose higher welfare standards instead of banning animal products) involve avoiding the use of animals entirely.

Second, non-diet-change consumer actions, such as buying humanely labeled food or meat substitutes or avoiding leather. More than a third and less than half of the population² are willing to do things of that sort.

Third, advocacy, such as making social media posts or going to protests. Between a sixth and a third of the population is willing to engage in advocacy of any sort. You would think that advocacy would be lower-cost than avoiding leather, since tweeting is the central example of slacktivism. But apparently not! My guess is that people don’t want to come off as crazy judgmental vegans who won’t shut up about factory farming. When you buy a tofu burger, no one is looking over your shoulder going “how dare you say I’m a bad person for eating meat! Nazis judged people so you’re basically the same as a Nazi! I am going to specifically eat beef in order to spite you! You’re so insensitive—my own mother was killed by a rampaging piece of tofu!”

Fourth, diet change. Less than a sixth of people want to change their diets. You can probably guess this from how vegan advocacy has been going.

I think that animal organizations should target the large-scale structural changes that people are willing to do, rather than the individual changes that they clearly are not. People are much more likely to support animal welfare if the costs are paid indirectly and non-obviously, by other people or Future Them.

A distinct group of people is virulently opposed to caring about animal welfare. The same people are strongly opposed to every pro-animal-welfare action: conservative Republicans who don’t self-report that they care about animals or climate change, as well as members of demographics that are likely to be conservative Republicans who don’t self-report that they care about animals or climate change (people over 55, men, rural people). As you’d expect, people who don’t care much about their health are more likely to be strongly opposed to dietary change, and people who don’t vote are less likely to do any sort of political activity.

In an ideal world, animal advocacy would be a nonpartisan issue: we’re not going to end animal agriculture if only half the population is bought in. But in the world we’re in, animal advocacy is deeply partisan. I suspect that most animal advocates should give up on appealing to Republicans and try to appeal to people whom they have any chance at all of appealing to. However, I think there’s a lot of room for conservative or Republican animal advocates to figure out how to frame animal advocacy in a way that is… even remotely… appealing to this group.

Different people are willing to take different pro-animal actions. Liberals, Democrats, women, and nonbinary people are reliably willing to engage in all kinds of pro-animal actions.³ However, there are some other notable patterns:

• People who are concerned about the climate are most likely to do very cheap actions (but this is a pretty small effect, cheap actions are robustly popular) and non-diet consumer actions.

• People with graduate degrees are particularly likely to do non-diet consumer actions and particularly unlikely to do advocacy.

• Conversely, people without a college degree are particularly likely to do advocacy and particularly unlikely to do non-diet consumer actions.

• Young adults (students, people aged 18-24) are most likely to do advocacy.⁴

• Young adults (students, people aged 18-24) and black people⁵ are most likely to change their diets.

Yep, there’s a conspicuous absence there—caring more about animals makes you a little bit more likely to support pro-animal actions, but the effect is quite small. Being concerned about the climate actually has a larger effect. I find this fact to be a depressing failure of animal advocacy.

It’s important to know your target audience. I’d personally suggest avoiding dietary change activism unless you’re targeting young people or black people.⁶ It might make sense to target people without a college degree if you want people to do advocacy. The relative unpopularity of advocacy combined with the relative popularity of voting for ballot measures suggests to me that people who are willing to do advocacy are pretty valuable: people who are willing to do advocacy can let the large number of people who would vote for a ballot measure know that they should do that now.

1. Fewer people are willing to vote for a pro-animal political candidate, presumably because they also care about other things.

2. Weirdly, only 45% of the population is willing to order a vegetarian entree—I thought that cheese pizza was more popular than that! I assume they’re thinking of entrees specifically labelled vegetarian.

3. If you’re wondering why “in favor of pro-animal actions” and “against pro-animal actions” aren’t symmetrical: there’s a “neutral” group. Women are more likely to take pro-animal actions, but aren’t that much less likely to be strongly against taking them.

4. Faunalytics notes that social media and protests are both more accessible to young people than older people, so some of the effect may be people’s willingness to go to a protest or make a social media post about any topic.

5. “Black people are more likely to be vegan but less likely to take smaller pro-animal actions” is a robust finding across many studies and one I find quite puzzling.

6. Given the overwhelming nonblackness of both animal advocacy and my blog readership, I’d like to urge nonblack people to only engage in animal advocacy targeted at black people if they, like, have close black friends.