Why you don’t eat your pets
- Griffith Tai, University of Edinburgh
- Geography Building 226, Queen Mary University of London
More people own pets than ever, and the laws against cruelty towards them entail more punishment than ever. At the same time, the quality of life for animals traditionally eaten in Western society has worsened, and meat consumption has increased. This apparent conflict between loving animals and eating animals is called the Meat Paradox (Loughnan, Bratanova, & Puvia 2012).
The division between eaten and loved animals seems rather arbitrary: there is no categorical difference between pigs and dogs that justifies eating one and not the other. People justify this by denying positive qualities to animals they eat (Bastian, Loughnan, Haslam, & Radke 2012). I investigate how deep this denial lies.
I will test this using a cumulative self-paced reading presentation. I will compare sentences like ‘The pig is smart.’ to ones like ‘The dog is smart.’ If we deny positive qualities to some animals at a basic cognitive level, ‘The pig is smart.’ should take longer to read. If they are denied at a higher level, it should take the same amount of time. Either result would have interesting implications about the way we view some animals as different from others.
The division between eaten and loved animals seems rather arbitrary: there is no categorical difference between pigs and dogs that justifies eating one and not the other. People justify this by denying positive qualities to animals they eat (Bastian, Loughnan, Haslam, & Radke 2012). I investigate how deep this denial lies.
I will test this using a cumulative self-paced reading presentation. I will compare sentences like ‘The pig is smart.’ to ones like ‘The dog is smart.’ If we deny positive qualities to some animals at a basic cognitive level, ‘The pig is smart.’ should take longer to read. If they are denied at a higher level, it should take the same amount of time. Either result would have interesting implications about the way we view some animals as different from others.
Bastian, B., Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Radke, H. (2012). Don’t Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind to Animals Used for Human Consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(2), 247–256.
Loughnan, S., Bratanova, B., & Puvia, E. (2012). The Meat Paradox: How Are We Able to Love Animals and Love Eating Animals? In-Mind Italia,1, 15-18.