Awareness Is Not the Problem. Property Law Is.

We keep thinking that if only people knew, they would change. That cruelty persists because the public is ignorant, misinformed, or insufficiently nudged. This story is comforting, especially for institutions that profit from animal use, because it turns a systemic injustice into a communication problem. But the evidence now points somewhere far more uncomfortable. People already reject what is done to animals. They respond when they are confronted with it. They search, they care, they even intend to change. What stops that concern becoming mass, durable action is not a lack of empathy. It is a legal and economic system that treats animals as property and food as a commodity, and then designs every part of daily life around that assumption.

Wildlife trade, factory farming, routine mutilations, gassing, grinding, shackling. None of this happens because individuals woke up wanting to be cruel. It happens because animals are classified as resources and industries are organised to extract value from their bodies at scale. Once you accept that premise, the rest follows. Normalisation, subsidies, advertising, political protection, and laws that carve out exemptions so that what would be criminal if done to a dog is “standard practice” if done to a pig. The question is not why people fail to change after watching a documentary or seeing a campaign. The question is why we keep pretending that a property system can be fixed with better messaging.

Start with what people actually think. Large majorities in the United States say that common farming practices are unacceptable. Not controversial edge cases, but the core mechanics of the industry. Battery cages, gestation crates, crowded sheds, tail docking, de-beaking, castration without pain relief, killing male chicks. Opposition sits consistently in the 70% to 85% range across political affiliation, income, age, and region. Differences exist, but they are differences in degree, not in direction. This is not a fringe moral view. This is mainstream rejection of what is routinely done behind closed doors.

Yet those same practices continue, protected by laws that exempt “commonly accepted” agricultural methods from cruelty statutes. Common to whom is left conveniently vague. Common to the industry that profits, or common to the public that would shut it down if they were asked directly. Polling now makes that ambiguity impossible to ignore. These practices persist not because society endorses them, but because the legal framework treats animal use as legitimate by default and then shields it from scrutiny.

Now look at behaviour change research. Meta-analyses covering tens of thousands of participants find that standard interventions produce small effects on reducing animal product consumption. Nudges, social norms messaging, persuasive leaflets, even documentaries. The average impact is modest. Choice architecture shows promise, but it is under-studied and easily reversed when commercial incentives push in the opposite direction. This is usually presented as evidence that “getting people to change is hard”. What it actually shows is that individual behaviour is being measured inside a hostile environment that constantly steers people back toward animal products through price, placement, cultural signalling, and availability.

When people are directly confronted with the reality behind meat, they do not shrug. In UK studies, pairing pork with images of pigs being stunned before slaughter triggers strong moral emotions. Compassion for the animal. Anger and disgust toward the humans causing the harm. Guilt and shame about personal participation. Those emotions increase willingness to reduce consumption. The barrier is not indifference. The barrier is that enjoyment of meat and social normalisation kick in immediately afterwards, producing justifications that allow people to carry on. It is how cognitive dissonance operates when an exploitative system is presented as normal, necessary, and inevitable.

The same pattern appears with media. Popular documentaries drive large spikes in searches for plant-based diets and for practical ways to change what people eat. Health-framed films in particular push people to look for recipes, restaurants, and alternatives. Intention is not the problem. Follow-through is where the system tightens its grip. Price, convenience, habit, family pressure, limited access, and a food landscape dominated by animal products make short-term motivation expensive to act on and easy to abandon. When the environment is stacked against change, awareness campaigns will always look weak, no matter how emotionally powerful they are.

This is where the narrative usually collapses into two bad options. Either we blame individuals for not trying hard enough, or we declare personal change irrelevant and focus only on policy. Both are wrong, and both let institutions off the hook.

Individual action matters because systems are made of people, markets respond to demand, and social norms shift through visible behaviour. Every person who refuses to participate in exploitation weakens the cultural story that animal use is natural, normal, and necessary. That refusal is not symbolic. It is material. It changes purchasing patterns, family habits, workplace catering, and what children grow up seeing as ordinary. It also creates the social base that makes political change possible rather than hypothetical.

At the same time, pretending that individuals can dismantle an industrial exploitation economy through personal virtue alone is dishonest. When governments subsidise animal agriculture, when advertising budgets dwarf advocacy budgets, when public institutions buy animal products by default, and when cruelty is legally protected as “standard practice”, personal choice is operating inside a rigged game. That is not an excuse for inaction. It is an explanation for why moral concern does not automatically translate into mass behavioural shift.

The antimicrobial resistance crisis shows the same structural pattern. Decades of awareness campaigns telling people to use antibiotics responsibly have not solved the problem. Not because people are ignorant, but because their decisions are shaped by access to healthcare, economic pressure, agricultural practices, and policy choices. Farmers use antibiotics prophylactically because industrial farming creates disease-prone conditions. Patients hoard medication because clinics are distant or unaffordable. Doctors overprescribe because systems reward speed and patient satisfaction over long consultations. Information alone cannot override structural incentives that push behaviour in the opposite direction.

Animal agriculture sits at the intersection of all of this. It is a major driver of antibiotic use, environmental degradation, and zoonotic risk, yet it remains politically protected because animals are legally treated as commodities. Communication strategies that ignore that foundation end up blaming the public for failing to overcome barriers that were deliberately built.

This is why the welfare framing keeps failing. Campaigns that focus on making cages bigger or gas chambers “more humane” accept the premise that animals exist to be used, and then argue over the terms of that use. They train the public to think in terms of acceptable cruelty rather than unjust exploitation. Worse, they allow industries to market incremental changes as moral progress while the underlying violence remains intact.

The data tells a different story. People already reject the worst practices. They already feel moral conflict when confronted with what animal use requires. They already search for alternatives when they are exposed to plant-based messaging. What they do not have is a food system, a legal system, and a political system that make rejecting animal exploitation the easy, default option.

Abolition is the only position that matches both the evidence and the ethics. If other animals are not ours to use, then the goal is not better cages, cleaner slaughter, or more transparent packaging. The goal is to dismantle industries built on turning sentient beings into products and to replace them with food systems that do not require ownership, confinement, and killing as their business model.

That requires structural change. Ending agricultural exemptions in cruelty laws. Redirecting subsidies away from animal production and into plant-based food systems. Mandating plant-based options in public institutions. Regulating marketing that targets children. Investing in supply chains that make animal-free food cheaper and more accessible than animal products, not the other way around. None of this will happen without political pressure, and political pressure does not appear out of nowhere. It is created by people who refuse to comply quietly with injustice.

So no, individual change is not pointless. It is necessary and it is meaningful. But it is not sufficient, and it was never meant to be. Personal refusal weakens the moral legitimacy of exploitation and builds the cultural conditions for policy change. Policy change removes the structural barriers that keep dragging people back into participation. These are not competing strategies. They are mutually reinforcing parts of the same movement.

The comfortable lie is that we just need better campaigns. The harder truth is that we are asking compassion to survive inside a system designed to monetise bodies. As long as animals are legally property, violence against them will be organised, normalised, and defended, no matter how many people say they oppose it.

The public is not the obstacle. The property status of animals is. Until that changes, awareness will keep rising, outrage will keep spiking, and exploitation will keep grinding on, protected by law and profit. Ending that contradiction is not a messaging challenge. It is a justice challenge, and it demands more than tweaks. It demands abolition.