Conservatism and animal advocacy
Report by Fauna identifying 70 US conservative values and the 20 or so that we can leverage:
Does the movement even need to engage conservatives?
- You might argue we just need enough of the left ot push through policies. But the larger the right-of-center electorate gets and the more it is in power, the harder it will be to push through with only progressive support.
- Among the conservative electorate are the farmers, who are very important stakeholders for our movement
- The animal movement has been quite supportive of progressive topics, the rest of the left (the non-vegan part, so to speak) hasn’t returned the favor so far.
- Soon to be published research by Proveg in the Netherlands, for instance, suggests that topics like animal welfare and biodiversity are much less polarized than climate change.
- More organizations in our movement - most obviously (but not uniquely) the ones working around alternative proteins - could consider being politically neutral. This would mean, among other things, refraining from offending conservatives and from getting too involved in or taking position on progressive topics that don’t directly relate to animals.
Why conservatives don't go vegan
- Some are high in social dominance orientation
- Some are high in right wing authoritarianism
Conservative messaging for veganism
- Pro capitalist innovation in the meat space
- Environmental responsibility
- Downplaying moral disruption
- Tax money being wasted on unnecessary animal studies: https://www.whitecoatwaste.org/
- The book Dominion by Matthew Scully makes a conservative Christian case for vegetarianism
Why it might be difficult to convert cons to veg*nism
- Conflict with their friends and family
data from four different countries including the UK and found that--across countries--people who expressed greater ethnic prejudice also expressed greater speciesism, mediated by SDO (Dhont et al., 2014; Dhont et al., 2016).
Animal advo and libertarianism
- animal advo pulls in huge amounts of subsidies that keeps costs down but we could abolish those and you could get the money back and then spend more meat you want. Government subsidies basically mean the government is interfering with your consumer choices.
Reading
MacInnis, C.C. & Hodson, G. (2017). It ain't easy eating greens: Evidence of bias toward vegetarians and vegans from both source and target. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 20, 721-744
Leite, A.C., Dhont, K. & Hodson, G. (2019). Longitudinal effects of human supremacy and vegetarian threat on moral exclusion (vs. inclusion) of animals. European Journal of Social Psychology, 49, 179-189
Dhont, K., Hodson, G., Loughnan, S. & Amiot, C.E. (2019). Rethinking human-animal relations: The critical role of social psychology. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations,22, 769-784.
Dhont, K. & Hodson, G. (2014). Why do right-wing adherents engage in more animal exploitation and meat consumption? Personality and Individual Differences, 64, 12-17
Caviola, L., Everett, J.A.C. & Faber, N.S. (2019). The moral standing of animals: Towards a psychology of speciesism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116, 1011-1029.