Children start with empathy. Adults teach them excuses.
Most adults talk about “values” like they are fixed traits. Like you either have them or you do not.
Children prove that is nonsense.
When you ask children how they feel about eating animals, a lot of them do not reach for “nature” or “necessity”. They reach for fairness. They reach for consent. They reach for the simplest moral logic on Earth: I wouldn’t want that done to me.
That should stop us in our tracks.
Because it means the default setting is not “I love bacon”. The default setting is recognition, and then the slow, deliberate training out of recognition.
The study that shows the switch being flipped
A survey of 507 people in Germany aged 8 to 74 asked a blunt question: how okay is it to eat animals, and why?
The headline is not subtle:
▫️ Children aged 8 to 11 were more likely to say eating animals is not okay than okay.
▫️ Adolescents flipped the pattern. They became more likely to say it is okay.
▫️ Adults leaned harder on “naturalness” type arguments. Children leaned harder on rights-based arguments.
That is indoctrination in numbers.
Not in the conspiracy-theory sense. In the banal, everyday sense. The kind that happens at dinner tables, school canteens, birthday parties, adverts, “treats”, traditions, and the constant background message that some animals are friends and others are ingredients.
Children are not born reciting talking points about canine teeth. Someone hands them those lines. Over and over. Until they can repeat them without thinking.
Ambivalence is not apathy
One of the most revealing findings was how many people sat in the “ambivalent” middle. It was high across ages, especially in younger groups.
Ambivalence gets treated like weakness. Like indecision.
But psychologically, it often means: I see the contradiction.
If you are raising a child to use animals, you are not just handing them food. You are handing them a moral conflict and training them to live with it. The easiest way to keep the behaviour is to build a story that makes the behaviour feel normal.
That is why “it’s natural” shows up so reliably in adults.
Not because it is a discovery. Because it is a coping mechanism that society rewards.
Their future is being burned to keep this story alive
Kids are the ones who get handed the bill for what adults normalised.
Food systems are a major driver of emissions globally, and livestock is a huge part of that picture, especially through methane. That is not “politics”. That is physics.
When we centre animal products as default, we are not just teaching children that domination is normal. We are locking them into a system that makes their own future more precarious.
And then we wonder why so many young people feel overwhelmed. We built the trap and told them it was tradition.
We feed them animals, then call it “care”
Parents who mean well still do it. Constantly. They will read children’s kindness as “being fussy”. They will translate empathy into “phase”. They will treat refusal as misbehaviour.
And then, on the other side, they will panic that plant-based diets are dangerous, as if the default diet in the UK is some kind of nutritionally perfect, evidence-based masterpiece.
It is not.
The data we have on plant-based children does not show automatic disaster. It shows a predictable truth: planning matters. A large systematic review and meta-analysis (59 studies, 48,626 participants) found plant-based patterns in children were associated with higher fibre and higher intakes of several micronutrients like folate and vitamin C, and lower total and LDL cholesterol.
It also found the obvious: if you remove animal products without replacing key nutrients via fortified foods or supplementation, you can create deficiencies, particularly B12, and in vegan children, calcium intake was especially low in the pooled data.
So what does this actually mean?
It means the risk is not “plants”. The risk is neglect. And neglect is not solved by feeding animals. It is solved by competent nutrition.
Adults talk about “health”, but the subtext is permission
Watch how the conversation is framed. When children do not want to use animals, adults rarely say: “That makes sense.” They say: “But is it healthy?”
As if health is a permission slip for injustice. The honest version of that question is: “Can I keep the system and still feel like a good person?”
That is why the cultural energy goes into scaring parents away from plant-based feeding, while barely mentioning how fragile and inconsistent the standard diet already is, or how many omnivorous kids are also missing nutrients.
The meta-analysis even notes that nutrient adequacy is not a plant-based-only issue. It is a population-wide issue.
But only one side gets treated like extremism.
What children are telling us, if we bother to listen
Children are not perfect moral philosophers. But they are often morally direct in a way adults have been trained out of.
They do not start with “it’s complicated”. They start with: “Why would we do that?”
If you want to understand how indoctrination works, you do not need a lecture. You can watch it happen in real time:
▫️ A child recognises an animal as someone.
▫️ An adult tells them that recognition is inconvenient.
▫️ The child learns the approved categories: pet, pest, product.
▫️ The adult calls that learning “growing up”.
That is not maturity. That is compliance. And the tragedy is that we frame this betrayal as love.
We say we are “feeding” children. But what we are really feeding is a worldview: that other beings are property, that convenience outranks conscience, and that the kindest instincts you have should be ignored so you can fit in. Children are not born believing in species hierarchy.
We teach them.
And we can stop.