Animal Feelings: Learning Not to Care and Not to Know
By William Crain
At a recent New Jersey public hearing, the topic was a proposed bear
hunt. A small boy walked up to the microphone, said his name was Bobby,
and told the officials that shooting bears was horrible. "How would you
like it if someone shot at you? You wouldn't like it, would you?" Then
Bobby threw up his arms and said, "But you won't care what I say because
I'm only seven years old," and walked back to his seat in a dejected
Many parents and teachers have observed that young children are
fascinated by animals and care deeply about them. Recent research has
revealed that animals are so important to young children that they
routinely dream about them. In fact, 3- to 5-year-olds dream more
frequently about animals than about people or any other topic, and
animal dreams continue to be prominent at least until the age of 7
But as children grow up in the Western world they, like Bobby, find
that their deep feelings for animals aren't shared by the dominant
The rudest awakening occurs when children discover the source of the
meat they eat. In a preliminary study of urban, middle class children,
one of my undergraduate students, Alina Pavlakos, found that most
5-year-olds didn't know where meat comes from. They knew they ate meat,
but when asked, "Do you eat animals?," most said, "Nooo!,"-as if the
idea were outrageous.
Pavlakos found that children soon learn otherwise, most by the age of
6 or so. She and others also have informally observed that many children
become distraught when they learn the facts. As Jane Goodall points out,
some children want to become vegetarians at this point, but their
parents rarely permit it.
In the years that follow, our culture seems to work in many ways to
dampen children's sensitivity to animals-especially farm animals.
Sometimes our language hides the identity of animals as food. We eat
pork, not pigs; veal, not calves; meat, not flesh. The philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out that the English language more subtly
distances us from animals by referring to them with the impersonal
pronoun "it," as if they were mere objects. If a young person becomes
interested in the science of animal behavior, she will learn to avoid
the attribution of any human emotions, such as pain or happiness, to
animals. The scientific custom is to view animals impersonally.
In a tour de force, our society has managed to keep the public
largely in the dark with respect to factory farms, which produce nearly
all the meant Americans consume. Factory farms subject animals to
incredible suffering, but most adults know little about it. This, at
least, is what another undergraduate student, Srushti Vanjari, and I
have found. From December, 2005, to the present, we have distributed
questionnaires to undergraduates at different colleges and to adults in
hotel lobbies and a senior citizen center in the New York metropolitan
area. In these samples, 73 to 90% of the adults rated their knowledge of
factory farms as either slight or nonexistent (with a large majority of
these respondents rating their knowledge as nonexistent).
Admittedly, our surveys are informal, and some of my friends question
the results. They believe that the past decade has witnessed a dramatic
rise in vegetarianism as people have become aware of the mistreatment of
animals. But the most recent Harris poll, conducted in 2006, found that
only 2.3% of American adults chose a vegetarian diet-a figure that is
actually down from 2.8% in 2003.
At a time when there is so much emphasis on improving education, the
widespread adult ignorance with respect to animal suffering is stunning.
I hope educators will rise to the task of eliminating this ignorance. I
hope, for example, that educators will introduce secondary school and
college students to writers such as John Robbins, Peter Singer, and Jane
Goodall, and will encourage discussions on animal emotion and treatment.
Perhaps the day will come when the adults in our society, with their
blinders removed, will share young children's fascination and empathy
Article by William Crain is Professor of Psychology at The City College of New
York. He is the author of Reclaiming Childhood: Letting Children Be
Children in Our Achievement-Oriented Society and the editor of the
journal, Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice.
Dr. Crain advocates for the child's right to play and for the
protection of nature and animals, and is co-founder of the
Haven Farm Sanctuary in Beekman, NY, where children and adults visit
animals rescued from inhumane conditions.
Return to Articles