Knowing Your Audience: What This Study Tells Us About Animal Advocacy
Advocating for animals is not a level playing field. It’s not as simple as showing people the truth and waiting for the penny to drop. Some people cling to their human supremacy like a teddy bear. Others are already standing at the edge of realisation, waiting for the right push. A new study from the UK makes this brutally clear: who you are, and how you see the world, affects how you respond to animal advocacy.
This is more than just academic interest. For a movement built on freeing the most oppressed beings on the planet, knowing who is most likely to listen, and who is determined to shut down, matters. It isn’t about pandering. It’s about strategy.
The Study
Nearly 500 people were recruited for an online survey. They weren’t told it was about animal rights. Half were shown footage from a so-called “free-range” egg farm: dark, crowded sheds, chickens with feathers stripped away, sickness, and bodies left among the living. The other half watched a plant-based recipe video.
Afterwards, everyone was asked what they thought about eggs: whether eating them harms chickens, whether “free-range” is more ethical than cages, whether they intended to cut down on eggs, and whether they would eat more plant-based food.
The researchers also collected information on gender, speciesist beliefs, and what’s called “social dominance orientation”, basically, whether someone prefers a hierarchical world where some groups dominate others, or an equal one.
The Results
The findings confirm what many of us already see on the ground:
▫️Confrontation works. Those who saw the farm footage were more likely to believe eggs harm chickens, more likely to reject the myth of “ethical free-range,” and more likely to intend cutting eggs from their diet.
▫️Women responded, men didn’t. Women who saw the footage showed clear shifts: more empathy for chickens, more willingness to change. Men, by contrast, barely moved. The footage simply didn’t shift their attitudes in the same way.
▫️Speciesism was the real barrier. Those with low levels of speciesist thinking, who don’t draw hard lines between species’ worth, responded to the advocacy. They recognised harm, they expressed intentions to change. But those high in speciesism? Unmoved. The video could have been of another planet for all it mattered to them.
▫️Hierarchy mindsets didn’t matter. Social dominance orientation, surprisingly, had no effect. Whether someone liked rigid hierarchies or not didn’t change how they responded to the footage.
What This Means for Advocacy
The implications are uncomfortable but important. Not everyone is reachable with the same message, or at the same time.
Women, and people already low in speciesism, show the greatest responsiveness to footage of animal exploitation. That doesn’t mean men or high-speciesism individuals can never change, it means that particular tactic isn’t what cracks their shell. For them, showing brutality head-on may bounce off their defences.
So where should the movement put its energy?
1. Work where the cracks already are. Targeting those most likely to respond, people already inclined to empathy, may seem like “preaching to the choir.” But in reality, it creates a ripple effect. People who are more open shift faster, speak louder, and normalise change within their communities.
2. Stop wasting energy pandering to the hostile. There is a temptation to design advocacy for the most resistant: the men who mock veganism as “weak,” or the staunch speciesists who see chickens as walking egg factories. But this research shows that isn’t the best return on effort. They are not the low-hanging fruit.
3. Recognise advocacy is not one-size-fits-all. Exposing brutality works powerfully for some, not at all for others. Text-based appeals, conversations, satire, or justice-framing may cut where graphic evidence doesn’t. The strategy has to adapt.
Beyond Gender and Personality
At first glance, this might look like another case of “women are more compassionate.” And yes, the numbers show that pattern here. But the deeper point is that identity and worldview shape how people justify domination.
Speciesism, the belief that some species matter more than others, is the real wall. It doesn’t just allow people to eat eggs while claiming to love animals. It actively blocks them from seeing exploitation as exploitation. High-speciesism individuals will bend reality before they bend their habits. A chicken can be featherless and dying in front of them, and they’ll still tell themselves “free-range” is fine.
This matters because too often advocacy campaigns lean into welfare language, “higher welfare,” “humane,” “cage-free”, which does nothing but reinforce speciesist beliefs. This study exposes how futile that is. Those steeped in speciesism will lap up those labels as moral cover. Those less speciesist already see through them.
In other words, welfare language strengthens the very wall we’re trying to break down. The organisations that promote welfarism such as Compassion In World Farming and The Humane League, in receipt of huge philanthropic funding for “effective advocacy”, are setting animal rights back.
The Supremacy Connection
It’s worth pausing on the finding that “social dominance orientation”, people’s preference for inequality between groups, didn’t affect outcomes. On paper, you’d expect people who like hierarchy to also like human supremacy over animals. And they often do. But here, the real dividing line wasn’t abstract hierarchy, it was speciesism itself.
That tells us something sobering. The human–animal divide isn’t just another hierarchy. It’s the original hierarchy. It doesn’t rely on political leanings about human groups. It runs deeper. It’s so entrenched that it can override other ideological positions. You can be a self-proclaimed egalitarian about human issues and still passionatly support animal slavery, and we see this in otherwise progressive people all the time. That’s the scale of the problem.
Lessons for the Movement
So what should we take from this?
▫️We can’t educate away supremacy overnight. Showing suffering works for some, but others are protected by a worldview that refuses to see animals as individuals. Speciesism numbs them against reality.
▫️We need multi-pronged advocacy. Brutality footage is essential, but not sufficient. Satire, justice framing, community building, and highlighting hypocrisy all play roles in dismantling supremacist thinking.
▫️Don’t confuse reach with impact. A campaign that racks up millions of views isn’t necessarily effective if most of those views come from people too entrenched in speciesism to budge. A smaller campaign reaching those already inclined to act can have more impact.
▫️Focus on abolition, not reform. The study makes clear that people already inclined toward compassion see through the “free-range” scam. Our role is not to offer them “better” eggs, but to strip away the idea that chickens exist for eggs at all.
Moving Forward
This is one of the first studies to explicitly test how gender and speciesism interact with advocacy effectiveness. It won’t be the last. More research will sharpen our understanding of which tactics land with which audiences. But we shouldn’t wait on endless data to act. The principles are already visible.
People most responsive to the truth should be prioritised, mobilised, and amplified. The resistant aren’t a lost cause, but they aren’t where energy should be drained. And above all, the message must stay clear: no label, no farm, no “standard” makes exploitation acceptable.
The egg industry doesn’t have a “kind” version. It has propaganda. And studies like this show just how thin that propaganda is when confronted with reality, at least for those willing to see.
The Real Divide
The biggest lesson isn’t about gender, or even speciesism. It’s about mindset. Some people, when shown suffering, respond with empathy. Others respond with defence. That divide runs deeper than statistics. It runs into what we are up against: a culture built on domination.
Animal advocacy is about shattering that culture. And knowing who is ready to see the cracks, and who will pretend the wall is still solid, helps us strike harder, and smarter.