A few years ago, I visited a dog meat farm in Southeast Asia.
It was a big farm with several long barns.
In each of the barns, there were rows of concrete pens.
Each pen had concrete walls
and every time I peered into one of the pens,
I saw the same thing.
Dozens of dogs crammed tightly inside.
Their tails cut off,
their teeth cut out.
There were slats on the floor that the dogs defecated and urinated through.
And there were dogs with open wounds,
sores
and lacerations.
Every time I looked in, the dogs would all stare at me,
their eyes wide with fear
and their bodies
visibly cowering.
I remember standing in one of these barns, thinking to myself:
"How could anyone do this to them?
What sort of person can cause so much pain and suffering to these animals,
just so they can eat them?
And why do good people allow this to happen,
and even pay for it to happen?"
This is something we have all felt before,
seeing videos of dogs being farmed for food.
Except that story I just told wasn't entirely true...
I mean, everything in the story was true,
except it wasn't a dog farm in Asia.
It was a pig farm in the UK.
So what has now changed?
We see stories such as this one,
where a man was sentenced to a year in jail,
and ordered to have a mental health evaluation,
because he macerated baby ducks with a lawn mower.
And we think to ourselves:
"What sort of person could do such a thing?"
And yet, every year, around 7 billion males chicks are killed as soon as they are born,
often,
by being macerated.
So why is there an outcry when a man macerates nine ducklings,
but not when we macerate billions of chicks?
These are examples of cognitive dissonance,
a psychological concept coined by Leon Festinger in the 1950s.
Cognitive dissonance describes the discomfort people feel
when someone's behaviours and values contradict each other,
and the subsequent attempt that they make to try and ensure that their values are consistent in their own mind.
Dissonance becomes most evident when it threatens our belief that
we are kind,
ethical
and competent.
And so, when confronted with dissonance, the person has two choices:
either change their behaviour
or attempt to justify it.
And so, in the case of what we do to animals,
we can either go vegan
or try and justify continuing to pay
for someone else to kill animals.
This concept has an even more specific name:
the meat paradox.
The paradox of attempting to reconcile with ourselves
the fact that we say we are against animal cruelty,
but pay for animals to be mutilated and killed needlessly.
A great example of this came from a 2010 study
that randomly gave college students either beef jerky or nuts to eat,
and then asked to judge the intellectual and cognitive capabilities
of certain animals and their moral importance.
The results found that those who had been given the beef jerky
deemed cows to have a lower intellectual ability
and also a "diminished mental capacity"
to experience things,
such as suffering and pain.
And overall they expressed less moral concern for animals in general,
especially when compared to those who had eaten the nuts.
When it comes to the meat paradox,
our brains are constantly working to rationalise our behaviours.
Even to the point where our subconscious view of animals fluctuates
based on whether or not we have just eaten animal products.
Social psychologist Hank Rothgerber summarises this by saying:
"We live in an era, at least in the western world,
where there's more and more evidence,
more and more arguments, and more and more books
about how eating meat is bad...
So what I'm looking at is, how do people rationalise that,
and still feel like they're a good person?"
But how did that make you feel then,
hearing the suggestion that being a good person
is at odds with the action of eating animal products?
Ultimately our cognitive dissonance doesn't reveal us to be bad people.
The opposite, in fact.
Our dissonance reveals that we are good people
who assign moral worth to others
and recognise the need to respect that moral worth.
However, companies target our cognitive imperfections
by presenting us with pictures and adverts of happy animals,
or by using euphemisms to disguise from us the reality of
who we are eating.
All of a sudden a slaughtered baby calf becomes veal,
or the flesh of a pig, who was gassed to death, becomes bacon.
We often say eating animal products is a personal choice
but is causing harm to animals really us showcasing our personal choice
and being in control of our actions?
Or is it in fact a contradiction of our desire to not cause harm to other
and a symbol of how deep our dissonance runs?
Most of us would never want to hurt an animal,
let alone pull a blade across their throat needlessly.
So maybe it's time for us to acknowledge the inconsistency of our values and actions.
Maybe it's time for us to connect how live,
with the suffering that it causes.
Maybe it's time for us to turn our dissonance
into harmony.
Not just cognitive harmony for us,
but to life of harmony for them,
the non-human animals
who are the victims
of our paradox.