BREAKING BAD: Public opinion of Animal Rising’s protest of Grand National horse race
Animal Rising’s protest at the 2023 Grand National horse race simultaneously had strong positive and negative effects. On the one hand, it made people think more about animal welfare/rights issues, made many people sign up to take action with Animal Rising, and generated extraordinary levels of personal donations to them. On the other hand, the protest had negative effects on several measures that reflect people’s attitudes towards animals and the need to change how society treats animals.
SOCIAL CHANGE LAB: Animal Rising (AR) disrupted the 2023 Grand National (GN), the biggest horse racing event in the UK, causing a delayed start to the race and kickstarting a national conversation about society’s relationship with animals…
By its nature, disruptive protest is unpopular. When the US Civil Rights movement was active in the 1960s, approval ratings for Martin Luther King were extremely low. Despite this, civil disobedience has been a vital ingredient for social movements to draw attention to the issues they are fighting for… Heightened salience of an issue leads to more people thinking and learning about it. More information and knowledge, at least in the case of climate change, has been shown to lead to increased support for the cause.
A debated question is the extent to which non-violent disruptive tactics have negative effects on public opinion, thereby undermining the goal of activists to bring more people on side. Here, we studied the public opinion impacts of disruptive tactics in the context of AR’s protest of the GN horse race. The protest received considerable media coverage; it was discussed on all the major news outlets in the UK. While some news articles focused solely on the protest itself, many others touched on animal welfare issues, on whether traditions such as the GN are justifiable etc. AR spokespersons were invited to more than 60 interviews on national TV giving them a chance to communicate their perspective/message.
Our results showed that the more people had heard about AR or the GN protest, the more they indicated having thought about animal welfare/rights issues. The protest thus successfully sparked a national conversation about animal welfare/rights issues. However, the results point to negative attitudinal effects on several key issues that animal rights activists are interested in. The evidence suggests that the GN protest led to people agreeing less that society has a broken relationship with animals, to people agreeing less that society needs to change how we treat animals used for entertainment and food, and to people deeming it more morally acceptable to use animals for entertainment. These negative effects contrast with previous studies on disruptive climate protest finding no negative effects on people’s attitudes towards climate change policies.
There are several possible reasons for this difference: 1) Animal welfare/rights enjoys much lower levels of support from the public than the climate crisis. This may be because these issues are not (yet) very salient; whereas climate change has been debated intensively for years, the same cannot be said for animal welfare/rights. As such, disruptive protests are more likely to lead to negative effects on public opinion, as recently predicted in an expert survey. 2) Differences in awareness/knowledge. The Sentience Institute (2017) reported that about 58% of people think that farm animals are treated humanely and 75% think the meat that they eat comes from humane manufacturers (CIWF report on factory farming). Thus, people often tend to think that animal welfare is not as bad as it is in reality – and therefore do not agree that animal welfare/rights protest is warranted. 3) Novelty: There simply has not been any high-profile disruptive direct action by animal rights activists in recent years.
Therefore, negative effects might be exacerbated in this particular protest and might be different in future protests when people have digested the initial shock. Related to the last point, the present study only measures the immediate effects of the protest on public opinion. Only further research can tell what the longer-term impacts are. One reasonable theory of change is that one first needs to get attention for an issue in order to get people thinking and talking about it; only after that, can one reasonably hope to win them over. As we have argued above, disruptive tactics are uniquely effective at garnering media attention and sparking a national debate.
In this perspective, animal rights issues might follow a similar trajectory to climate issues, where public support grew progressively, putting increasing pressure on governments and corporations to take action. We will do further research this year to put this idea to the test. One facilitating factor is that people generally feel affection for animals and generally have the ability to feel compassion for them, at least for live animals they experience in real life. Previous evidence suggests that many Brits are also willing to pay more for higher welfare meat.
A conceptual obstacle seems to be to connect the meat (or other animal product) on people’s plates with the animal itself. Most people are against hurting animals but eat meat (which hurts animals), the meat paradox. The meat paradox is striking because it seems obvious that people know that the meat they eat comes from an animal that, if they saw it alive, they would not want to harm. Such
discrepancies between people’s beliefs and their behaviours are known to create a type of mental discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. People have a strong tendency to avoid or resolve cognitive dissonance by aligning their beliefs and behaviours. This can be achieved by changing one’s beliefs, changing one’s behaviour, or by obscuring the contradiction between the two.
It seems that in the case of the meat paradox, it is mostly the third strategy. Since people typically do not want to give up the belief that they love animals and don’t want to hurt them, and they don’t want to give up consuming animal products, it is the only way to decrease cognitive dissonance. Obscuring the contradiction can be done, for example, by conceptualising the animals people eat as food, not as living creatures, thereby suppressing one’s moral concern for them. It seems quite likely that most people will remain reluctant to change their eating habits and that it will take a lot for them to substantially deviate from them. Whether and to which extent relentless disruptive protest can push a large number of people towards easing their meat paradox related cognitive dissonance by giving up or reducing their consumption of animal products, remains to be seen.
In conclusion, the present study suggests that Animal Rising’s protest at the 2023 Grand National horse race simultaneously had strong positive and negative effects. On the one hand, it made people think more about animal welfare/rights issues, made many people sign up to take action with Animal Rising, and generated extraordinary levels of personal donations to them. On the other hand, the protest had negative effects on several measures that reflect people’s attitudes towards animals and the need to change how society treats animals. Thus, disruptive animal rights protests, at least in
the short term, can lead to negative impacts on public opinion, but at the same time attract a great deal of attention, lead to an increased number of activists joining a movement and start a national conversation about a neglected issue. Future studies could usefully investigate whether in the longer-term, the positive effects can combine to eventually positively affect public opinion, enable behavioural change, and put pressure on policymakers. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: