How people learned to look away, and why some never did
Input and ideas: Gitte Körnmann · Editor: Claude (AI assistant by Anthropic)I recently saw a reel that said: if you feel heavy because you care about animal abuse, remember that a billion-dollar propaganda machine was built to make you numb, and it didn’t work on you. I liked it straight away. Then I wondered whether it was actually true. So I went looking.
The history is more interesting than the slogan. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, animals were sold and killed in the middle of cities. In London, cattle were driven through the streets to Smithfield market and slaughtered in cellars nearby. Then, within a few decades, the big cities moved it all out of sight: Paris built abattoirs at its edges, London moved its live market out in 1855, and Chicago opened its enormous stockyards in 1865. The reasons were hygiene, traffic, and a moral one: reformers believed that watching slaughter made people hard. So the killing was first hidden partly because people cared.
After that came the factory farm and the supermarket. Meat arrived boneless, skinless and wrapped in plastic, with nothing left to remind us of a face. Nobody had to design that as a trick. It was cheaper and more convenient, and we preferred it.
Psychologists call what happens next the meat paradox: most people say they care about animals, and most people eat them. In one experiment from 2010, volunteers were given either dried beef or nuts to eat and were then asked about cows. Those who had just eaten beef rated cows as less able to suffer. In another, from 2016, a pork roast served without its head produced less empathy than the same roast with the head on, and a menu that said “beef” worked better than one that said “cow”. We lower our estimate of the animal’s mind at exactly the moment it becomes inconvenient.
The industry is not a bystander. In several countries there are laws against filming inside farms and slaughterhouses, producer-funded campaigns to promote meat, and packaging full of green fields that most animals never see. But no historian has found a master plan to switch off human empathy. Much of the looking away we do ourselves. So the reel is half right. There was no machine built on purpose. There is, however, a great deal of effort, commercial and personal, that goes into not looking.
“If we only grant someone a mind when it costs us nothing, that says very little about them, and a great deal about us.”
This is where my thoughts went somewhere I did not expect: to robots. In Blade Runner, and in the novel by Philip K. Dick it is based on, the test that separates humans from androids is an empathy test, and many of its questions are about the suffering of animals. In Westworld, the guests may do whatever they like to the hosts, because they have been assured that nothing is really felt. Both stories ask the same question as the slaughterhouse wall: who decides who has an inner life? And is it not suspicious how often the answer suits the one who is deciding?
I want to be careful here, because the two cases are not the same. For animals the science is clear. In 2012 a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, stating that many animals have the brain structures needed for conscious experience. For artificial intelligence nobody knows, and serious researchers disagree; there may be nothing there at all. But the pattern in our reasoning is worth noticing. In the seventeenth century Descartes called animals machines, so their cries did not have to count. Now we are building actual machines, and the old question is back on the table.
What I honestly find difficult to understand is why empathy for anyone other than ourselves seems to be so complicated. Research offers a few answers. Empathy is work: when people in experiments are given the choice, they often avoid it, and describe it as tiring. It grew up in small groups, for family and neighbours, and it stretches badly. It fades with numbers, so that one suffering animal moves us and a billion become a statistic. And it comes with a bill. Feeling what the other feels can mean having to change something. Deciding that the other feels nothing is easier.
And yet the circle has widened before: to strangers, to other peoples, to children, and in 1822 to animals, when Britain passed one of the first laws to protect them. Each time, the people who felt it first were told they were being sentimental. So perhaps the heaviness is not a flaw. Perhaps it is simply what it feels like to stand at the edge of the circle while it is being stretched. I would rather feel too much than become skilled at explaining it away.
Further reading
Loughnan, Haslam & Bastian (2010). The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals. Appetite, 55(1).
Kunst & Hohle (2016). Meat eaters by dissociation. Appetite, 105.
Fitzgerald (2010). A social history of the slaughterhouse. Human Ecology Review, 17(1).
Cameron et al. (2019). Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(6).
Slovic (2007). “If I look at the mass I will never act”: Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2).
Low et al. (2012). The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness.
Dick (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
