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Other recent research from Furman University in the US showed that children aged seven and younger frequently don’t understand that meat and, to a lesser extent, eggs and dairy comes from animals, at the same time often classifying animals as “not OK to eat”. Another study showed that children, unlike adults, tend to value the lives of dogs and pigs as equal to nearly equal to human lives. So should we be forcing kids to eat animal products when their moral instinct is to reject them?
The authors of the new study wanted to understand at what point in life “some of the psychological processes that make moral acrobatics possible in relation to humans’ treatment of animals” develop. They note that these moral acrobatics “First … depend on categorizing animals depending on their species and second on the belief that membership of a particular species determines a living being’s moral worth.” They compared the responses of children (9–11 years old), young adults (18–21 years old), and adults (29–59 years old) to questions relating to categorising animals (as food or as pets), speciesism (assigning moral worth to different animals), animal treatment (how we should treat farmed animals compared with pets and other humans), and food evaluation (whether it is okay to eat animals and animal products).
Children, the results showed, didn’t think pigs ought to be treated any differently than humans or dogs. But young adults and adults believed that dogs and humans ought to be treated better than pigs. Adults also evaluated both eating animals and eating animal products as more morally permissible than children did. The authors state: “We can speculate that adults learn effective strategies to solve inner moral conflicts regarding animal treatment.”
“Something seems to happen in adolescence, where that early love for animals becomes more complicated and we develop more speciesism,” lead author Luke McGuire told the Guardian. “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 an aversion to animals - including farm animals - being harmed does not disappear entirely.”
He added that “the moral intelligence of children” could be taken into account more. “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.”
This echoes what was concluded by the authors of the other recent study - which we covered in Surge when it came out: that “addressing children’s eating behaviours may offer a more effective approach” for reducing the consumption of animal products “compared to attempts aimed at modifying adults’ well-entrenched diets.”
But efforts to increase plant-based diets among children are often met with outrage. Parents who raise their kids vegan are frequently lambasted in the press, while recent initiatives to introduce more plant-based meals into schools have provoked accusations of people ‘forcing’ or ‘imposing’ their agenda on children.
In light of the research into children’s moral attitudes to eating animals, these accusations appear not only hyperbolic but also completely muddled. It is only by ignoring and overriding the choices that many children would make for themselves that children come to accept eating animals as normal. My point here is not to blame parents for making choices for their children, since that is an unavoidable part of parenting. Rather, is it that the findings of these recent studies suggest that there is a cycle wherein children who view other species more equally grow into speciesist adults, who are then motivated to teach children to conform to their beliefs about other animals’ moral worth and intelligence.
Instead of avoiding children’s questions about the origins of meat, or letting them be misled with false storybook images of happy farmed animals, there could be a more concerted effort in educational settings, for example, to take their moral intuitions about animals seriously, and to let them make their own choices based on a clearer understanding that chicken nuggets or bacon or milk come from the animals they are likely to categorise as ‘not food’.
Offering them more plant-based options more frequently in schools and explaining why is a good way forward too. This is what campaigns like Feed Our Future and the Vegan Society’s Catering for Everyone seek to do. Though she doesn’t mention the moral worth of animals, the headteacher of a primary school in Lancashire explained how her school serves only vegetarian food to show students what climate action can look like: “Our children learn about the principles of sustainable development as part of the national curriculum, and are really interested in how they can contribute to better looking after our environment. We made our school lunches meat-free to demonstrate how each of us making a small change to our daily habits can have a much wider positive impact, and that reducing meat consumption is just one way to do this.”
The public conversation about the environmental impact of eating animals is becoming more honest (though there is still a lot of obfuscation of the facts). The same needs to happen with respect to the animals who are killed for food. Children’s moral rejection of eating animals isn’t initially based on its environmental impact; as the studies show, it’s based on them valuing animal lives. As a society, we should celebrate their innate compassion instead of trying to stamp it out.
We teach children to be speciesist and eat animals, and the evidence is mounting
The evidence that children don’t want to eat animals is mounting. A new study by researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Oxford has found that children make fewer moral distinctions between different species and that speciesism is learned during adolescence.Other recent research from Furman University in the US showed that children aged seven and younger frequently don’t understand that meat and, to a lesser extent, eggs and dairy comes from animals, at the same time often classifying animals as “not OK to eat”. Another study showed that children, unlike adults, tend to value the lives of dogs and pigs as equal to nearly equal to human lives. So should we be forcing kids to eat animal products when their moral instinct is to reject them?
The authors of the new study wanted to understand at what point in life “some of the psychological processes that make moral acrobatics possible in relation to humans’ treatment of animals” develop. They note that these moral acrobatics “First … depend on categorizing animals depending on their species and second on the belief that membership of a particular species determines a living being’s moral worth.” They compared the responses of children (9–11 years old), young adults (18–21 years old), and adults (29–59 years old) to questions relating to categorising animals (as food or as pets), speciesism (assigning moral worth to different animals), animal treatment (how we should treat farmed animals compared with pets and other humans), and food evaluation (whether it is okay to eat animals and animal products).
Children, the results showed, didn’t think pigs ought to be treated any differently than humans or dogs. But young adults and adults believed that dogs and humans ought to be treated better than pigs. Adults also evaluated both eating animals and eating animal products as more morally permissible than children did. The authors state: “We can speculate that adults learn effective strategies to solve inner moral conflicts regarding animal treatment.”
“Something seems to happen in adolescence, where that early love for animals becomes more complicated and we develop more speciesism,” lead author Luke McGuire told the Guardian. “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 an aversion to animals - including farm animals - being harmed does not disappear entirely.”
He added that “the moral intelligence of children” could be taken into account more. “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.”
This echoes what was concluded by the authors of the other recent study - which we covered in Surge when it came out: that “addressing children’s eating behaviours may offer a more effective approach” for reducing the consumption of animal products “compared to attempts aimed at modifying adults’ well-entrenched diets.”
But efforts to increase plant-based diets among children are often met with outrage. Parents who raise their kids vegan are frequently lambasted in the press, while recent initiatives to introduce more plant-based meals into schools have provoked accusations of people ‘forcing’ or ‘imposing’ their agenda on children.
In light of the research into children’s moral attitudes to eating animals, these accusations appear not only hyperbolic but also completely muddled. It is only by ignoring and overriding the choices that many children would make for themselves that children come to accept eating animals as normal. My point here is not to blame parents for making choices for their children, since that is an unavoidable part of parenting. Rather, is it that the findings of these recent studies suggest that there is a cycle wherein children who view other species more equally grow into speciesist adults, who are then motivated to teach children to conform to their beliefs about other animals’ moral worth and intelligence.
Instead of avoiding children’s questions about the origins of meat, or letting them be misled with false storybook images of happy farmed animals, there could be a more concerted effort in educational settings, for example, to take their moral intuitions about animals seriously, and to let them make their own choices based on a clearer understanding that chicken nuggets or bacon or milk come from the animals they are likely to categorise as ‘not food’.
Offering them more plant-based options more frequently in schools and explaining why is a good way forward too. This is what campaigns like Feed Our Future and the Vegan Society’s Catering for Everyone seek to do. Though she doesn’t mention the moral worth of animals, the headteacher of a primary school in Lancashire explained how her school serves only vegetarian food to show students what climate action can look like: “Our children learn about the principles of sustainable development as part of the national curriculum, and are really interested in how they can contribute to better looking after our environment. We made our school lunches meat-free to demonstrate how each of us making a small change to our daily habits can have a much wider positive impact, and that reducing meat consumption is just one way to do this.”
The public conversation about the environmental impact of eating animals is becoming more honest (though there is still a lot of obfuscation of the facts). The same needs to happen with respect to the animals who are killed for food. Children’s moral rejection of eating animals isn’t initially based on its environmental impact; as the studies show, it’s based on them valuing animal lives. As a society, we should celebrate their innate compassion instead of trying to stamp it out.
