Exploring Public Support for Farmed Animal Welfare Policy and Advocacy Across 23 Countries

Intensive animal agriculture is linked to a range of environmental and public health issues, including climate change, deforestation, antibiotic resistance, and pandemic potential, as well as significant cruelty to animals (Amiot & Bastian, 2015; Anomaly, 2015; Godfray et al., 2018). Animal advocacy organizations are committed to increasing awareness of these issues to increase support for animal welfare. Because cultures vary in patterns of animal agriculture, the importance they attribute to animal welfare in general (Cembalo et al., 2016), and which animals tend to be the focus of these welfare concerns (e.g., Li et al., 2017), the most effective approaches to animal advocacy depends in part on contextual factors involving culture, norms, geography, and economics.

Varying attitudes and practices with regard to animal consumption across countries or cultures are likely related to varying levels of knowledge, concern, and support for animal welfare among citizens. This variation may in turn be related to institutional and legislative protection of animals. The general goal of this study is to examine how countries differ in their attitudes about farmed animal welfare, and what implications such differences may have for broader social policy and advocacy. We tested several possible connections between culture-based attitudes and support for farmed animal welfare.

First, if we assume that social policies tend to both shape and reflect the public’s values (Oreg & Katz-Gerro, 2006), then public support for farmed/aquatic animal welfare should be higher in countries with more progressive government policies on farmed animal welfare (World Animal Protection, 2020). This finding would establish a basic premise in animal advocacy regarding the connection between public attitudes and institutional policies.

Second, we expect that the public’s attitudes towards certain animal species will vary depending on their food status within that country. Previous research has shown that people show less concern towards animals that are categorised as food compared to animals categorised as non-food (Krings et al., 2021). However, animal consumption practices vary across cultures: for example, whereas goat meat is commonly consumed across Asia and South America, it is rarer in North America and northern Europe (Mandolesi et al., 2020). Pig meat, while common across Europe and America, is less common in some Asian countries, particularly those in which Islam is a dominant religion (Ritchie & Roser, 2017). Likewise, cow meat is less common in India because many Indians are Hindu, and cows are considered sacred and thus not eaten in Hinduism (Sarkar & Sarkar, 2016). Therefore, there is considerable cultural variation in the animals regarded as food. Given that eating animals is associated with higher cognitive dissonance (Loughnan et al., 2010), people in countries where an animal is not categorised as food may tend to show greater feeling of connection to that particular animal. At the same time, culture-based reasons for avoiding eating certain animals may also be important. For example, cow meat is generally shunned in Hinduism, which regards cows as sacred. In contrast, pig meat is forbidden in Islam because it is regarded as impure. While both religions restrict the consumption of certain animals, the underlying basis for doing so is very different, and thus it is possible that their adherents regard those animals very differently. Specifically, Hindus would be expected to show an increased feeling of personal connection to cows whereas Muslims would tend to show a decreased feeling of personal connection to pigs. Understanding how cultural and religious values are linked with attitudes about specific animals could help advocates tailor their efforts to certain species in certain regions where advocacy efforts may be most effective.

Third, we expect that consumers generally underestimate the extent of factory farming, given that this information is typically not made readily available, and that consumers are generally motivated to minimize the harm they view themselves as taking part in (Bastian & Loughnan, 2017). For example, the Sentience Institute reported that the majority of Americans believe most farmed animals are treated well before slaughter (Reese-Anthis, 2017). Similarly, research suggests that rates of farmed animals living on large factory farms may be underestimated throughout the world (Anthis & Reese-Anthis, 2019). Greater knowledge of the rates and practices of large factory farms could be important for redressing these perceptions and potentially encouraging support for animal welfare (Sparkman et al., 2022). It is thus important to know whether and in which countries consumers underestimate these rates and practices.

Fourth, we might expect higher levels of animal advocacy in more activist countries with more support for animal welfare. If we assume that animal advocacy organizations increase awareness of animal issues, and are dependent on the financial support of the public, we would expect greater support for animal welfare in countries with more such organisations. Likewise, it is likely that people are more willing to engage in activism on behalf of animals in countries where there is a high level of overall civic engagement. It is established that people with higher solidarity with animals at an individual level are more likely to intend to help animals, even where this means withdrawing human privileges (Amiot et al., 2020). However, it is less clear how such individual differences measures relate to commitment toward animals across different countries. We expected that support for, and personal commitment to, animal advocacy would be positively correlated with civic engagement in general and with the number of animal advocacy organizations observed within a country in particular.

Although many of these expectations are consistent with previous research on individual differences in attitudes towards animals (Amiot et al., 2020, Heise & Theuvsen, 2017), relatively little research has been done in large international studies to examine how culture and region shape attitudes about animal welfare (Randler et al., 2021). Moreover, attitudes about animal welfare may change quickly (Dhont et al., 2019; Grassian, 2020), and both researchers and animal welfare advocates benefit from regular updates about patterns during particular windows in time. By collecting relatively large and demographically diverse countries from four continents, this study can provide a relatively comprehensive and current snapshot of cross-cultural trends in the factors that shape support for animal welfare. This study sought to test the following specific hypotheses:

Method

To investigate these hypotheses, we used data from the animal rights organization Mercy For Animals’ 2021 Multinational Survey which examined individuals in 23 countries around the world. The Codebook describing the overall study and its measures can be found at Hopwood et al. (2023).

Results

Script, data, and full results for multilevel and regression models are provided at Hopwood et al. (2023). Table S1 in Bryant et al. (2024) provides the results from models with just the predictors of interest while Table S2 provides the results from models with covariates.

Discussion

This study aimed to explore the country-level links between (a) public support for farmed animal welfare and advocacy and (b) the robustness of animal welfare laws, the food status of different animals, the prevalence of factory farming, and the level of civic activism and of animal advocacy. As shown in the table, four out of 10 of our hypotheses were supported by the analyses, four were not, and there was mixed support for two (Table 3).

First, we observed significantly more robust farmed animal welfare laws in countries with higher support for farmed and aquatic animal welfare. This may imply that public opinions on animal welfare tend to translate into regulation of animal agriculture, that stronger animal welfare laws influence public attitudes, or both. The cross-sectional design utilized in this study cannot parse these possibilities. However, the link between animal welfare laws and countries’ public support for animal welfare is important for advocacy organizations, who must decide whether to dedicate limited resources to influencing governmental policies or individual attitudes. Institutional advocacy is generally considered more effective than individual advocacy, since it impacts a far greater number of animals (Broad, 2018). However, if public support leads to policy, it would suggest that advocacy for animals is likely to be more successful in countries where the public considers this a priority and lends support to the importance of individual advocacy to enable institutional change. Future research should focus both on determining the directionality of this effect, and more specifically on the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of animal advocacy focused on individual or public support as opposed to (or together with) institutional or legal policy.

Second, we observed mixed results with respect to personal connection to specific animals in countries where those animals are/not generally consumed. While we did observe significantly higher connection to cows in a non-cow-eating country (i.e., India) compared to cow-eating countries, we observed no significant difference in connection to pigs in non-pig-eating countries compared to pig-eating countries. The disparity between the findings on cows and pigs may be attributable to the differing religious reasons for avoiding consumption of these animals. As hypothesized, we observed significantly higher personal connection to cows among Hindus compared to non-Hindus in India, and we observed significantly lower personal connection to pigs among Muslims compared to non-Muslims in countries with large Muslim populations. While cows are regarded as holy in Hinduism, pigs are regarded as impure in Islam. Hence, while both religions avoid consumption of specific animals, different reasons underlie these avoidances, and this may explain the differing country-wise results on consideration of these animals.

We also observed no significant difference in personal connection to goats in goat-eating compared to non-goat-eating countries. Previous studies have observed that people tend to attribute higher moral status to non-food animals compared to food animals (Krings et al., 2021), but that was not reflected here on a country-level basis. One possible interpretation is that for meat products that are embedded in a given culture, familiarity with the product renders meat-animal reminders and associations morally less problematic (Benningstad & Kunst, 2020; Possidónio et al., 2022). It may be the case that a higher proportion of people from goat-eating countries live rurally in close proximity to livestock compared to people from non-goat-eating countries. In other words, a feeling of personal connection to goats may develop as a result of spending time with goats, but this went hand-in-hand with having goats as livestock, and therefore eating them. In this instance, a feeling of personal connection to an animal appears not necessarily to imply a belief that the animal ought not be eaten.

Third, we observed that the majority of countries for which data was available (18 out of 21) underestimate the proportion of animals on factory farms. Residents in all countries estimated that 50–70% of animals in their country are factory farmed, while Sentience Institute’s figures typically put the number of caged egg-laying hens at over 80%. It is worth noting that, although chickens make up a disproportionate number of farmed land animals, estimates of the percentage of caged egg-laying hens is a rather imperfect proxy for the extent of factory farming overall. Interestingly, there was not much variance in the survey estimates of factory farming, but some countries (the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany) had substantially lower rates of factory farming than others on this measure, and these are the countries which represented significant overestimates, while all of the other countries represented significant underestimates. Notably, these are among the most progressive countries with respect to animal rights; as well as scoring high on animal welfare law robustness, they are also the biggest markets for plant-based meat substitutes in Europe (Bechtold & Will, 2021).

Fourth, we found no relationship between the support for animal advocacy and the number of animal advocacy organisations per capita, nor between the level of personal commitment to animal advocacy and the Civic Activism Index. The former finding suggests that there are some countries—those with relatively high support for animal advocacy but relatively few animal advocacy organisations—where there is potential for more animal advocacy organisations. This includes China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia. These are all countries where there are relatively few animal advocacy organisations despite a relatively high level of claimed support. Advocates in these countries may be able to draw additional resources from a supportive public. The latter finding may be attributable to the relatively niche status of animal welfare as a political concern; therefore, while people in different countries may be more or less likely to engage in civic activism in general, this tendency may not translate to animal activism depending on the level of concern for animals per se.

This study was limited in several ways. First, the survey data included is the result of self-reported questionnaires administered online, which are subject to data quality concerns including demand effects as well as cultural interpretation of questions. While such concerns can never be entirely mitigated for online surveys, steps were taken to safeguard data quality including attention check questions and removing low-quality responses. Second, some of the analyses included herein may be limited in their scope—for instance, it is possible that the Civic Activism Index would be correlated with personal willingness to take part in animal advocacy if support for animal welfare was also considered, or that support for animal advocacy organisations would be correlated with the number of animal advocacy organisations per capita if GDP per capita were also considered. In general, our use of brief measures that had largely not been validated in previous work and the lack of detail with which some of important issues could be measured (e.g., variation in treatment or prevalence of agriculture pertinent to different species) limited the generalizability and nuance provided by this study.

Future research could explore these more complex relationships between survey data and other animal welfare-related data sources and could additionally explore other variables in the dataset. The survey data and external data associated with this project are all Open Access, and they can be a valuable source of information for policymakers, researchers, advocates, and public and private organisations. Future research could also consider different ways of affecting the measures in this survey—for example, the optimal way to increase support for animal welfare may be different in different countries, which again has implications for policy and advocacy.