Farm animals and humans should be treated the same, children say

Children think farm animals deserve to be treated as well as human beings but lose this belief in adolescence, a groundbreaking study has found.

In general, the children said farm animals and human beings should be treated the same and found eating animals less morally acceptable than both sets of adults. The findings suggest that “speciesism” – a moral hierarchy that gives different value to different animals – is learned during adolescence, according to the study.

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The report says an important aspect of the human mind is “moral acrobatics”: people can hold ethical values that contradict each other and employ moral double standards. But the origins of moral acrobatics relating to animals is poorly understood and the researchers say this new study provides some of the first evidence examining the differences in how children and adults think about animal treatment.

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Among other tasks, participants in the study were presented with pictures including a farm animal and companion animals and asked to categorise them as “food”, “pet” or “object”. They were asked how animals were treated, and how they should be treated.

Children did not judge all animals to be equal. They concluded, in fact, that dogs ought to be treated better than pigs – but also that pigs ought not to be treated differently from humans.

The two sets of adult groups said pigs ought to be treated less well than dogs, while humans and dogs ought to be treated the same.

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“Something seems to happen in adolescence, where that early love for animals becomes more complicated and we develop more speciesism,” said McGuire. “It’s important to note that even adults in our study thought eating meat was less morally acceptable than eating animal products like milk. So aversion to animals – including farm animals – being harmed does not disappear entirely.”

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McGuire said that while adjusting attitudes was a natural part of growing up, the “moral intelligence of children” could be valuable.

He said: “If we want people to move towards more plant-based diets for environmental reasons, we have to disrupt the current system somewhere. For example, if children ate more plant-based food in schools, that might be more in line with their moral values, and might reduce the normalisation towards adult values that we identify in this study.”

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