No one likes how animals are treated on factory farms. But no one wants to stop eating them. |
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No one likes how animals are treated on factory farms. But no one wants to stop eating them.
How we can actually escape the “meat paradox.”
Many people live with an uncomfortable contradiction: They like animals and don’t want to see them harmed, yet they also enjoy eating meat, milk, and eggs.
Psychology researchers call this the “meat paradox, ” and have found that people deploy a range of creative strategies to try to resolve the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance it causes.
The meat paradox has made it incredibly difficult to make progress on the factory farming problem, which harms hundreds of billions of animals around the globe each year.
But some research-backed interventions to disarm the meat paradox seem promising.
Of all the hot-button social issues in America, there’s one that often flies under the radar but can unleash a torrent of strong feelings — swirling with apparent contradictions — when it surfaces: meat.
Case in point: Last month, the popstar Billie Eilish argued that you can’t say you love animals and eat them. Her comments made sense, though they set off a heated, weeks-long debate among X and Instagram users, who responded with a flood of strange justifications for eating meat, despite the terrible treatment of farmed animals.
The spat vividly illustrated a psychological phenomenon called the “meat paradox”: the cognitive dissonance and deep discomfort people feel when their behavior of eating meat and other animal products clashes with their fondness for animals.
The backlash to Billie Eilish’s vegan comments explains a lot about the American left (and everyone else)
This paradox has proved an exceedingly difficult hurdle to overcome in encouraging people to change how they eat — and even for having productive conversations about meat without things quickly getting heated (as they did for Eilish). But some research also suggests there are ways out of the meat paradox, which could help relieve the psychological strain for people, as well as the suffering of animals in factory farms.
How we really feel about eating animals: It’s complicated
Two recent polls reveal just how confusing American attitudes about animal products are.
The first of those polls asked close to 1,000 US adults for their views on several near-universal practices in animal farming, including stunning pigs unconscious in Co2 gas chambers before slaughter, grinding up newborn male chicks, separating calves on dairy farms from their mothers, and searing off the ends of hens’ beaks without pain relief.
The vast majority of respondents to this survey, which was conducted by the animal welfare research group Faunalytics, consider these practices “somewhat unacceptable” or “very unacceptable.”
A separate poll of more than 12,000 US adults, conducted by the Pew Research Center, asked respondents about whether they find a range of behaviors immoral. Those issues covered adultery, gambling, having an abortion, and eating meat. More........