There is a strange contradiction at the heart of animal farming. Most people say they care about animals. Most people also participate in a system that confines, mutilates and kills them.
So what happens when you remove the distance between those two things?
What happens when people are actually shown what their choices involve?
A new study published in Scientific Reports offers an answer. People change their behaviour. Researchers Lisa Kramer and Peter Landry showed university students a 16-minute segment from the documentary Dominion. The footage focused predominantly on pigs used in industrial farming. Participants chose a meal before watching the video, immediately afterwards, and again one week later. The results were substantial.
Immediately after watching Dominion, demand for meals containing meat fell by 27%. One week later, it was still 13.5% lower than before the video. Meanwhile, demand for meatless meals increased by 252.7% immediately afterwards and remained 121.8% higher one week later.
That is not a change in someone’s answer to an opinion poll. It is a change in what they actually chose to eat.
They Were Not Told What To Do
Perhaps the most interesting part of the experiment is what the researchers did not do. The Dominion segment contained no discussion of changing diets. Participants were not told to stop eating pigs. They were not asked to eat plant-based food. They were not given instructions about what the morally correct choice supposedly was.
They were simply shown what happens to pigs. The researchers deliberately left participants to make the connection between what they had seen and what they subsequently chose for themselves. And many of them did.
Animal agriculture survives partly through separation. You see bacon. You do not see the pig. You see a packet on a supermarket shelf. You do not see confinement, fear, injury or slaughter.
The product is presented at the end of a long process designed to make the individual whose body became that product disappear. Dominion puts them back into the picture.
Apparently, that can change behaviour.
The Effect Was Strongest When The Victim Was Visible
Because the footage focused on pigs, the largest change concerned pork. Demand for pork fell 45.2% immediately after the video and was still 30.1% lower a week later. But something else happened too. Demand for other types of meat also fell. Chicken and beef were not the subject of the footage, yet demand for other meat fell by 24% immediately afterwards and remained 10.6% lower one week later. That suggests people were not merely thinking:
“I don’t want to eat pigs anymore.”
Some appear to have made a broader connection. If this is what happens to pigs, perhaps the problem does not begin and end with pigs. That is potentially important for animal advocacy. Showing what happens to one group of animals may cause people to question the system more generally.
At the same time, the especially large reduction in pork suggests specificity matters too. If you want someone to question eating pigs, show them pigs. If you want them to question chickens, show them chickens. Animals should not have to remain abstractions.
But Doesn’t Graphic Advocacy Just Upset People?
One of the most common objections to showing people animal exploitation is that it is too upsetting.
People feel sad.
They feel disgusted.
They feel uncomfortable.
That is treated as evidence that advocates should stop showing it. But discomfort is not automatically a failure.
Sometimes discomfort is the entirely appropriate response to discovering that your behaviour is contributing to something you find morally disturbing.
Participants reported particularly high levels of sadness and disgust after watching the Dominion footage. Yet when the researchers examined which emotional responses actually predicted switching away from meat, only shame was significantly associated with doing so. That does not mean advocates should simply try to shame people. It does mean the assumption that negative emotions are inherently counterproductive deserves scrutiny.
If someone feels bad because they have just discovered that their actions are contributing to something they believe is wrong, eliminating that discomfort without changing the behaviour may simply restore the contradiction. Sometimes feeling uncomfortable is the beginning of taking something seriously.
Most People Kept Watching
There is another revealing detail.
After 11 minutes, participants watching Dominio were explicitly given the option to stop. Most chose to continue.
Those who stopped would avoid the section containing footage of slaughter. Those who continued watched the remaining 5 minutes. This is important because advocates are frequently told that people will simply turn away from difficult footage. Some will. But not everyone does. The bigger challenge may be getting them to start watching in the first place. The researchers themselves highlight this problem. People have a documented tendency to avoid information about industrial animal farming. That avoidance makes sense.
If you suspect that learning more about something might force you to reconsider your behaviour, ignorance is comfortable. Knowing creates responsibility.
Sixteen Minutes Changed Behaviour
There are limitations.
The participants were university students. The study followed them for only one week. We cannot assume the same effect would occur among every age group, or that every behavioural change would last indefinitely. The researchers explicitly acknowledge this.
But the result remains striking.
Previous experimental research has often found little or no observable effect from advocacy videos, or effects that disappear quickly.
This one was different.
Sixteen minutes.
No instruction to stop eating animals.
No dietary appeal.
Just information about what happens to pigs. And afterwards, people were less likely to choose animals for their meal.
Perhaps the lesson is not that people need to be told more forcefully what to do. Perhaps they need to be allowed to see clearly what they are already doing.
Because when the animal behind the product stops being invisible, the decision suddenly looks very different.