Narrative frames

• It is easier to induce vomiting that virtue
• If you frame factory farming not as "evil" but as "contaminated," "diseased," and "grotesque," you are no longer asking the consumer to be a better person. You are triggering their instinct to survive.
• You're not attacking them, you're attacking food.
• Frame the factory farm not as a "farm," but as a "Biohazard Risk Zone."
• Not a vegan org: "Consumer Safety Watchdog" or a "Food Quality Whistleblower."

The behavioural immune system

The BIS is a set of psychological processes designed to detect and avoid pathogen threats in the environment before contact occurs.

Triggered by:

• Bodily Fluids: Pus, blood, mucus, feces, and other secretions that historically transmit disease.
• Signs of Infection: Lesions, tumors, discoloration, asymmetry, and festering wounds.
• Unnatural/Strange Biology: Mutated forms, rapid growth, erratic movement, and violation of the body envelope. This uncanny valley triggers disgust because it signals genetic mutation.

Unnatural issues with chicken

• White Striping: Fat deposits running through the muscle, looking like stretch marks. This indicates muscle necrosis and fat replacement.
• Woody Breast: The meat becomes hard, pale, and crunchy/chewy instead of tender. This is fibrosis—scar tissue replacing muscle.
• Spaghetti Meat: The muscle fibers tear apart, looking like mushy pasta or string.

Consistent with the 4 N's

We're attacking the "Nice" and "Natural" pillars.

The human mind operates on the "Law of Contagion": once an object has been in contact with a contaminant (e.g., feces), it remains contaminated in the mind regardless of cleaning, cooking, or sterilization.

Fecal soup: As much as half of supermarket chicken in the UK and US shows signs of evidence of feces.

Case studies

• Lean textured beef added to mince, aka "pink slime". ABC ran a campaign about it an eventually like 80% of the public became aware of the issue.
• Horse meat scandal
• The right wing media loves the "pus and hormones in milk" narrative

Weaponising pandemic risk

• Factory farmed animals cause pandemics and zoonotic disease
• Dhont et al., 2021 in a small-ish, non representative sample found that people generally didn't blame factory farming much for the pandemic, and when exposed to narratives around that, they often responded more with support for temporary reactive measures like stockpiling masks rather than actually tackling the problem. So it might inspire reactance. This was despite framing the factory farming - pandemic link as a scientific article.

Weaponising animal disease

Factory farmed animals cause pandemics and zoonotic disease

Challenges of these campaigns

• People look away
  • On the tube people can look at their phones
• Highly emotional appeals can be seen as emotionally manipulative

Ideas

• ATT argue to push hope as well as threat: are we pushing hope?
• Chicken issues: they degrade protein quality. Poor quality protein!
• Show the product, not just the chicken on the farm: consumers already disassociate food and animal
• Do we have different strategies for different demographics?

Links

• Ultra processed animals, Coller
• Sustain

Can we identify non standard celebrities that have spoken out against factory farming rather than veggie veganism?

Is it outrage or disgust?

Try and tweak creatives for different segments: older demographics Vs younger

Worried that we're explicitly not building in CTAs

Beware that the campaign doesn't get linked to

TFL: actually kinda excited about somewhat spicy tube adverts as long as you can back claims.