Farm-to-Table Compassion: Saving Peppa Pig

We are more concerned for our family and friends than strangers; more concerned about a specific individual than a group. We identify more with them. When it comes to farm-to-table eating, 

“The recognition that meat consumption causes harm to animals who are generally liked and positively valued evokes an aversive state referred to as meat-related cognitive dissonance.”

In other words, some of us will eat venison; no one will eat Bambi. A study reported in Appetite looks at how children perceive “edible animals.” 

Most of us buy meat in supermarkets, where, except for chickens, the food bears little resemblance to a cow, lamb, or pig. That allows us a slight distancing from that cognitive dissonance. Another common perceptual approach is to reject that animals have “human-like” feelings or can suffer. But science is tearing down this idea that animals are less than us simply because we do not share the same umwelt – sensory world. 

Vegetarians who no longer eat meat most frequently do so for moral or health concerns. Of late, the impact of factory-farmed beef on the environment has been invoked as a different moral necessity. The study has a bias to the extent that the researchers are looking “to predict the potential effectiveness of interventions that employ the effect of identifiability to decrease meat consumption.”

For those wondering why we would bother to look at whether children are more or less inclined to eat meat they identify with, this is part of research looking at a more general phenomenon, the identifiable victim effect (IVE) – “an increased willingness to help a single identified victim compared to anonymous or statistical victims.” One critical factor in IVE is our emotional connection to the victim, and that particular trope has been used for centuries in our wars and politics. 

Identifiability promotes pro-social behavior, from children sharing more stickers with a child identified by name rather than anonymous, to an individual’s empathetic neural pathways being more evoked when a vegetable is simply given a name, and then poked with a needle. 

“The main aim of this research was to provide experimental evidence on whether identifying an edible animal by a name and specific preferences encourages children to perceive the animal as more similar to humans, increases their willingness to relate to the animal (i.e., befriend it), and makes them less willing to consume it.”

The first of two studies, both done in Poland, involved 85 urban, primarily Caucasian, meat-eating children aged 5 to 6. One group was told about a pig with a name, personal habits, and preferences (identifiable); the second group was told about pigs and their general qualities (non-identifiable) [1]

When children “identify a pig as a unique individual, their willingness to befriend the animal increases, and their willingness to consume it decreases.” This significant effect was primarily driven by that willingness to “befriend the pig” – we do not harm our friends. The researchers also found that a child’s knowledge of the origin of meat had no effect. 

In the second study, the researchers replaced the pig with a chicken and introduced a second control, neither identifying nor non-identifying the chicken. [2] They queried 122 5 and 6-year-old children. Once again, identification reduces the distance between the chicken and the child, diminishing the willingness to eat “their friend.” A closer look at the data indicated that this identification was due to the child’s belief in the increased similarity to humans, not a willingness to befriend the creature. Identifying information makes the difference – “similarity to humans may be a stronger mediator.”

Of course, you knew that. Anyone who has seen the commercials to send money for starving children or endangered animals, foreign or domestic, has noted that each of these charities sends you a note with information about the child, elephant, or dog your money is protecting. 

Young children “perceive animals as more worthy of moral concern than adults,” they are “not OK to eat.” Only with time and cultural exposure does that perception change. There is a more general message here: a bit of experimental data to go along with centuries of observation around societal conflict. It is far easier to harm those dissimilar from you; in that regard, the more dissimilar, the better. In increasingly divisive times, it might be worth paying attention to this study, not necessarily to reduce meat consumption, but to recognize that when we identify commonality over difference, we are less likely to bring harm to others.    

[1] In the identifiability condition: “This is Lelka, the only pig of her kind in the world. She lives in a pigsty with other pigs. Lelka’s favorite food is warm potatoes, and as soon as she smells them, she happily chomps, chrum, chrum. Lelka enjoys running in the field, digging in the ground, and splashing around in the mud.” In the non-identifiable condition: “This is a village pig, and there are many, many pigs like her in the world. Pigs live in a pigsty with other pigs. They usually eat potatoes, and when they smell them, they happily chomp, chrum, chrum. Pigs enjoy running in the field, digging in the ground, and splashing around in the mud.” 

[2] For the first of the two conditions, you need only substitute chicken for pig in footnote 1. In the no-information condition, the experimenter only asked about a chicken “without providing any specific information about the animal.”

Source: Eating pigs, not Peppa Pig: The effect of identifiability on children’s propensity to humanize, befriend, and consume edible animalsAppetite DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2024.107505