1 Introduction
Conservative estimates indicate that humans eat approximately 65 billion land-based animals annually (FAO 2020a), and that wild-caught fishing and aquaculture entail the death of nearly a trillion (and quite possibly more) fish per year.1 The enormity of this scale of animal consumption is unprecedented in human society. Yet, most people are unaware of the scale of animal farming, trawling, and slaughter or the brutalities it involves as these activities take place away from public view, typically in windowless concentrated animal feeding operations or in gigantic trawler nets in the middle of the ocean (Bisgould 2011, 162–163). Media coverage discussing the phenomena, even in affluent countries with the highest levels of animal consumption per capita, is sparse with national governments also remaining silent on farmed animal suffering (Arcari 2017, 77–82). In fact, meat, dairy, and animal-based food lobbies enjoy elevated levels of political influence (Kemmerer 2006), and legislation may also exist in certain jurisdictions to illegalise whistleblowing or undercover investigations in these spaces.2 All of these forces combine to minimise public awareness of the scale of these industries and the torturous conditions in which animals are raised, slaughtered, and otherwise processed.
However, the harms of animal-based farming and trawling as well as animal-based diets are not localised to farmed animal bodies. Numerous studies have concluded that adopting a plant-based diet is the single most effective choice one can make not only to reduce farmed animal suffering, but also
This chapter accepts the evidence against animal-based diets and proceeds from the premise that a global shift toward plant-based diets is required to remedy these harms. It adds to the scholarly voices calling for such a transformation by advancing the argument that a critical component to bring about this shift is to reach human children in the Global North, who grow up in societies and cultures where diets are centred on animal products, and eating meat and drinking milk are the norm (hereafter “children”) (Chiles and Fitzgerald 2018), with alternative messaging about animals that educates them about the multiple harms of animal-based diets and the need for a plant-based society.5
Part one of this chapter sets out why education is important for catalysing this shift toward plant-based or vegan diets (hereinafter “plant-based”) rather than relying on other pathways for change, such as legal reform. Part two establishes why such education must concentrate on children rather than adults. Part three situates the plant-based diet messaging to children as part of a broader “critical humane”, i.e., a critical animal pedagogies, education agenda. Drawing from Pedersen and other scholars, the discussion here identifies why a critical version of humane education for children about animals holds more promise to elicit transformational change toward widespread plant-based eating than traditional iterations of humane education.
The argument below does not make the claim that all human beings on the planet need to immediately adopt a plant-based diet or that plant-based agriculture avoids animal death and is otherwise benign. There are those living in conditions of poverty or geographic areas that may make a diet completely free of any animal products unrealistic in the present (Walker, Keane and Burke 2010).7 Furthermore, how to best generate a system of plant-based agriculture that minimises harm to animals, farmworkers and other humans, and plants
2 Why Education?
Many legal scholars have commented on the glacial pace by which social change is effected through law and the unlikelihood that it will become the catalyst for social transformation on a particular issue.8 Although law shapes culture and sometimes inaugurates transformative social change through instituting new legal prohibitions or lifting old ones,9 the legal system is fundamentally conservative, with judges following not only legal precedent and existing legislation but also prevailing cultural norms and social opinion on which such precedent or legislation is based. In cases where courts prohibit or authorise something new they know is controversial, judges have been known to reference changed social opinion to help justify departure from legal precedent.10 Moreover, legislative change occurs when political will, typically tracking public opinion, emerges. To date, although other social movements directed at combating systemic injustices and long-standing cultural norms have enjoyed success in these venues, the courts and legislatures have heretofore proven ineffective pathways for meaningful change for the overwhelming majority of animals. The common law originated as and remains a deeply anthropocentric legal order.11
This state of affairs shows little sign of changing despite increased adult public awareness in recent years regarding animal agriculture’s multiple
It is challenging to see how the common law or international law, with their indelible anthropocentric and colonial imprints, can respond to present-day climate catastrophes, pandemic crises, and other global emergencies without major conceptual transformation and integration of alternative valuations. Current crises are fundamentally occasioned by colonial human exceptionalism grounded in private property logics that treat most of the world’s inhabitants (nonhuman and not) as naturalised and ongoing “resources” or “labour” to exploit.17 Indeed, if the threats of irreversible climate change or another global pandemic are not enough to spark policy action or legislative debate about the need to revamp food systems to transition away from animal-based agriculture, it is not clear that anything will. Instead of looking to law as a primary venue to bring about the needed plant-based solutions, a necessary (albeit still long-term) pathway to such transformation is educational intervention. However, for Western education to serve as a catalyst to create the public opinion that can ultimately facilitate a change in legislative will, regulatory oversight, and judicial convictions to hold animal agriculture more responsible, it needs to reject its own humanist and anthropocentric formation and focus on children.
3 Why Children?
It would be erroneous to suggest that adults cannot adopt new ways of thinking or new habits or that behavioural change in adults has not contributed to major social transformations in securing human rights or other social shifts in values and norms. However, there is an abundance of literature that demonstrates that while we can change our behaviour as adults, it is not simple to do so, and that those who set out to change long-standing habits, no matter the specific behaviour, overwhelmingly fail.18
This is why turning to children’s education makes sense as a top priority in public awareness campaigns whether conducted through formal educational curricular interventions or more informal pathways. Young children already identify with animals. Indeed, their world is full of animals, and there is some evidence that children do not demonstrate human exceptionalist thinking at the levels that adults do (Wilks et al. 2021). At some point, though, children start adopting the human exceptionalist values of adults and the institutions that surround them. Indeed, schools are part of a larger anthropocentric cultural apparatus where children learn to normalise human instrumentalisation
If taught early enough, such education can be introduced before children’s habits and views about eating are entrenched or are easier to shift. Children can receive alternative messaging to the species scripts they typically receive from their parents, books, toys, television, advertising, schools, and other educators about who animals are and how humans should relate to them.22 Presently, as mentioned above, they are enculturated into dominant humanist norms that suggest simultaneously that it is good to love and care for nonhuman animals, but that most are disposable or dispensable resources, such that it is legitimate to eat, kill, cage, confine, or even abandon animals as a routine practice of daily living or when circumstances warrant it (Cole and Stewart 2014). Alternative messaging would relay information not only about animals’ needs and relationships, the harms experienced in captivity, and human interdependence with animals, but also why animals matter as beings in their own right, and why “compassion” for animals includes not simply being “kind” to them, but not eating, wearing, or using them either (except in exceptional situations involving imminent harm and death).23 Children have the ability to absorb age-appropriate information, reflect on such information, and make
This education can be delivered through existing pathways such as schools, books, apps, television and other visual media, as well as through conversations with parents. There are many existing models of humane education programmes offered by not-for-profit organisations that can be expanded to reach a wider number of households and school classrooms.24 The author is presently unaware of any longitudinal study that has demonstrated the benefits of humane education programmes by following children who have been exposed to structured interventions into their adult years to gauge attitudinal and practice-based increase in compassion for animals (and possibly other vulnerable groups). However, more truncated data sets do show such results over a shorter timespan.25 Additionally, general educational literature already shows that what children learn in elementary years in schools can shape the outlooks they have as adults, especially when those school-based messages are sustained in later years and reaffirmed at home.26 We already know that the not-so-silent curriculum in Western schools already encodes human supremacy as natural and legitimate, likely sedimenting an outlook that children carry into their futures (Pedersen 2009, VIII; Rowe 2011).
Further confirmation about the difference that such early education can make in how children think about farmed animals comes, in particular, from observing industry investment in using educational channels to promote their products and a favourable view of animal agriculture to children. Consider, for example, the curriculum designed by Dairy Australia, which includes free nutrition lesson plans available through Dairy Farmers of Canada, free classroom resources about the beef industry through Alberta Beef, and other “educational” programming offered free to schools27 or which are child-centred (Cole and Stewart 2014; Linné and Pedersen 2016). That an industry which spends heavily on marketing research and public relations management
None of this suggests that such advocacy, especially changing school curricula and educator attitudes, will be simple or straightforward or even that educational objectives travel a linear path between instructor, materials, and learner (Pedersen 2012). Education, as Pedersen explains, is “not outside ideology”, and it is optimistic to see it is a corrective for anthropocentrism’s hold on society (Pedersen 2010, 245). Indeed, given the controlling or at least strongly influential role of parents in the lives of children, advocacy efforts will still need to be directed at adults even if the uptake is limited for reasons discussed in the previous section. It is reasonable to expect that the material impact of “humane” education that takes an animal rights perspective, particularly about the ethics of meat, eggs, and dairy, may be overwhelmed in these childhood years by parental, other social, and institutional, counter-narratives. However, children grow up and start thinking more independently of parental influences (Sorensen, Cook and Dodge 2017, 699). They will also be able to make their own meals and exercise other choices as they mature. Given existing literature addressing how messages received in childhood can influence our adult behaviour,28 it seems reasonable to conclude that animal-rights oriented humane education directed at children today will yield tangible anti-anthropocentric outcomes in the future.
What of the further objection that such targeting of children is ethically unacceptable given their vulnerable status and marginalised social position in an anthropocentric order that privileges a paradigmatic type of human (one that is not a child)? This is an important concern that should not be dismissed. However, at the same time we know that children are already targeted by formal education, which can be problematic not merely for teaching children to subordinate animals and thus reinforcing the larger anthropocentric culture, but for suppressing children’s agency and exalting adult authority vis-à-vis children in general. Animal rights-oriented humane education must be mindful of this power imbalance between human adults and children and integrate a child-as-learner-centred ethos (Rowe 2011). This is why the scope of such education must be more responsive to the concept of alterity in general.
4
In this section, I set out the specific type of educational intervention into children’s lives that has the potential to encourage an increase in plant-based consumption in the future and how the content of this more critically oriented approach differs from conventional understandings of “humane education”. I also explain why such differentiation is necessary. Put simply, humane education as a concept has liberal and colonial roots (Feuerstein 2019; Boggs 2013, 24–25, 135–36.), that impede its anti-anthropocentric potential, as I explain below. In order to avoid the residual anthropocentric effects of these roots that marginalise animals and children, as well as other groups who cannot approximate liberal and imperial ideas of what it means to be human, this section endorses Helena Pedersen’s call for “critical animal pedagogies”, understood as a more critically situated iteration of humane education, as a conceptual home for plant-based messaging.
4.1 The Liberal and Imperial Pillars of “Humane Education”
As Anna Feuerstein discusses in The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture, humane education is a product of liberalism and colonialism (2019). Feuerstein documents how humane education programmes were developed by the earliest British animal protection organisations at a time when anti-cruelty statutes started to emerge in England in the nineteenth century concomitant with the rise of broader liberal political cultures. In this Victoria era, Feuerstein shows how animal protection organisations strategically pitched their education messaging to the public to conform to anthropocentric expectations of the larger liberal order (ibid., 63). Adults and children alike were instructed to be kind to animals in order to conform to expectations of (and perform their identities as) aspiring bourgeois liberal subjects (ibid., 64, 75). Such campaigns and the formal state programming that also took placed married with pre-existing Lockean liberal mindsets. These mindsets demanded conformity to intersecting hierarchies all resting on an anthropocentric foundation that prized reason and cognition and decried bodily associations that were associated with animals. Kindness to animals demonstrated civilised regulation of the self (ibid., 67, 70, 75).
Such messaging occurred against a general backdrop where education was a vehicle to encourage human Others regarded as closer to bodily associations and thus animals to become more “human” through appropriate self-regulation and the expression of idealised liberal traits (ibid., 136). Children’s education, in particular, championed this message as a way of inculcating liberal ideals
In the subsequent Victoria era, as Feuerstein notes, humane messaging had to fit into this liberal narrative that encouraged empathy for animals only insofar as such sentiments were seen to benefit social cohesion in the laissez-faire pursuit of private property, a category in which animals were firmly placed (ibid., 139–40). In the later Victorian period, humane messaging—targeted at domestic populations, namely: 1) children, to learn anthropocentric, patriarchal, and bourgeois liberal social mores; and 2) so-called lower orders of societies to respect a deeply class-based social order—also married with rising social and political narratives regarding the need for British imperialism and empire-building abroad (ibid., 144–46). Liberalism was the justificatory backdrop for British imperialism with educational efforts in colonies directed at inculcating “European civilized rationality” in colonial subjects.29 Governmental educational messaging about animals that the British promoted in the colonies fit into these efforts. The colonial educational goal of teaching kindness toward animals was aligned now with the modernist project of exploiting all animalised labour (animals, human Others, the Earth) (Feuerstein 2019, 144–46).
We can understand the adaptation of humane education to fit within colonial and imperial narratives as articulated by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and other animal advocacy organisations as a deliberate political strategy of its time, much like present-day animal welfare messages that do not ask people to confront underlying anthropocentric and imperial premises. However, the reality remains that humane education, like all liberal education, is rooted in anthropocentric and imperial history.
4.2
4.2.1 A Basic Stance: Anti-Exploitation
It is possible, of course, to teach children about kindness and compassion to animals outside of these liberal and imperial parameters. If we canvass contemporary definitions and understandings of humane education in advocacy organisations today, even where organisations adopt welfarist orientations toward animals, we can observe that the definitions espouse these values without promoting patriarchal and imperial values. Contemporary humane education for children does not promote self-regulation in the service of private property or otherwise suggest that children are not fully human or civilised because they are children. Today’s messaging is more directly related to protecting animals: contemporary welfarist animal organisations define “humane education” as education that is directed at instilling a kindness ethic and compassion toward animals (World Animal Net 2017). Some organisations attending to interspecies education go further to emphasise the creation of compassionate communities and an anti-violent society in general, taking specific care to include nonhuman animals in their definitions.30
Scholarly literature defines humane education as “an attempt to develop altruism and a sense of compassion in a world where all other pressures are in opposition to it.” (Milburn 1989, 179; quoted in Thompson and Gullone 2003, 77). Scholars note that the meaning of humane education has evolved over time, and that it “not only includes human-animal interactions but also broader humanistic, environmental, and social justice frameworks and guardianship of the earth, or sustainability” (Jalongo 2014, 5). Such scholarship does not insist on a non-welfarist position. It seems possible, then, to locate messaging about the harms of animal-based diets and the need for a plant-based society within an overall welfarist approach by emphasising, say, the need to reduce animal consumption to achieve “sustainable” diets and treating farmed animals “well” to better express “guardianship” of the earth. And given the more tempered nature of this message over one that articulates an anti-exploitation message against farming animals or consuming their by-products at all, this
At the same time that advocacy can focus on making inroads into formal educational spaces for children with this more palatable message, advocates also need to find ways to advance a more critical message, i.e., one that challenges the logic of human exceptionalism and supremacy that is so central to rationales for eating animals at the levels humans do in the Global North and is also vital to the normalisation of other animal use that entails (extreme) suffering. Some present-day humane education programming has surmounted welfarist ideology to mark a more “radical” animal rights-oriented departure point than its historical antecedents in re-shaping human-animal relationships. For example, in the humane education programmes delivered by the US-based Farm Sanctuary, children are taught about the interests and needs of farmed animals independent of human purposes for them, and the value of bringing animals to a sanctuary environment where they can be cared for and lead happier lives in the company of other animal friends and family (Farm Sanctuary 2021). Similarly, all the activities on Petakids.com impart an animal rights message to children. Consider, for example, the colouring activity telling children that “orcas belong in the wild” (PETA Kids, 2017). The PETA.kids website is extensive and is part of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the largest animal protection organisation in the world. The scope for PETA.kids to reach children is promising. However, as some animal studies scholars have noted, PETA’s overall messaging about gender and race and how the stratifications they give rise to relate to the exploitation of animals could be substantially improved (Deckha 2008; Gaarder 2011; Kim 2015). As I explain in the next section, it is important to integrate into animal advocacy directed at children a more intersectional understanding of animal exploitation.
With this promotion of a radical re-evaluation of who animals are and why they deserve to lead lives free from suffering where they may actually experience kinship and joy, such alterity-affirming education aligns with and may be seen as an example of what Pedersen denotes as “critical animal pedagogies” (Pedersen 2019). Pedersen is clear that specific educational interventions that
Instead of including educational activities that bring animals into the classroom or involve visits to animal farms and zoos or forests to “relate” with animals, or authorising pedagogies that fail to take a position against animal testing and other instrumentalisation in the name of “pluralism” and not “moralising”, Pedersen insists that to qualify as anti-anthropocentric, pedagogical activities must “disentangle animals from the demands we make on them” (ibid., 9). One approach she offers is to interrogate the “human behavior, institutions, and thought regimes that have made our appropriation of animals possible” (ibid., 8). This could include pedagogical strategies that educate students about the pitfalls of humanism in age-appropriate ways (Pedersen 2019). Teaching here could also combine an anti-exploitation message with a contestation of human exceptionalist mindsets through activities inviting reflection on how animals experience confinement and killing, critical discourse analysis of industry materials, watching critical documentaries about animal confinement, and discussing differences in responses to different animals (Dinker and Pedersen 2016).
Such classroom activities would give child learners insight into not only why compassion requires a certain anti-exploitation response, but also why it is
4.2.2 Contextualising the Basic Message to Offer a Broader Critique
We can regard the above examples of critical animal pedagogies as rights-oriented “humane” programming from farmed animal sanctuaries as essential ingredients for “critical humane education”. Both provide a basic animal alterity-affirming message through their anti-exploitation narratives emphasising animals’ individual and relational needs and preferences that implicitly challenge the larger anthropocentric human exceptionalist culture. Such education, whether occurring implicitly in present-day rights-oriented “humane” education offered by animal rights organisations or farmed animal sanctuaries or arising explicitly through deliberate “critical animal pedagogies” to scrutinise and counter the pro-exploitation messages that children hear about animals in schools, are thus a marked improvement from conventional welfarist humane education.
Yet, a critical perspective about how animals are exploited and dominated is just the starting point for critical animal pedagogies. As Pedersen and Dinkers have argued, animal rights or other anti-exploitation messaging must also address how views about animals relate to a broader array of social problems and injustices (Dinker and Pedersen 2016). They call this “species-inclusive intersectionality education” (ibid.). It is this further content that can amplify the critical education that children receive about animals so that the key message about, say, compassion for animals in an anti-exploitation frame pitched to a junior elementary classroom, is situated in a larger context that
What would such contextualisation look like? A first point of contextualisation would be for humane education programmes to address the prominent marginalising tropes of “animal” and “animality”. Doing so can help inform children as to how such terms create a logic around animalisation that serves as a foundation for the Othering of animals as well as nonhuman others perceived as “different” (Jackson 2020; Lupinacci and Happel Parkins 2016), or too close to animals such as children themselves (Harju and Rouse 2017). The tropes of animal and animality animate social forces such as adultism, sexism, racism, and ableism, mistakenly believed to operate separately from each other with only occasional interaction or intersection (Bennett 2020; Deckha 2013). Yet, as many scholars attest, in modernist Western epistemologies, the animal is indelibly a part of the conceptual logic that shores up liberal humanism to explain which bodies are not seen as civilised or grievable or deemed not to matter (Burton and Mawani 2020; Kim 2017; Glick 2013; Lopez and Gillespie 2015). Students can learn this circumscribed nature of a purported universal human or humanity (Dinker and Pedersen 2016).
Pedersen and Dinker have suggested the following for this type of intersectional intervention: introducing students to cultural and religious variation in how humans regard animals, studying comparative histories of social movements, teaching how the use of animal names and terms have resulted in violence against humans, and conducting critical media literacy exercises (ibid.). For very young children, such ideas can be integrated at basic levels when prompting children to draw circles of care and discussing why respect and kindness are important and why we often exclude categories of humans and animals in relation to these concepts.33 It is possible to teach
A further benefit of this multi-layered contextualisation is that children learn how to counter colonial mindsets as part of their critical thinking about animals. The prevailing view, somewhat of a perverse colonial holdover, is that caring about animals or placing animals as subjects deserving of justice, is a Western, Eurocentric, or white practice.34 It is important to dispel this notion as inaccurate, show its origins in civilisation myths that powered imperialism, and help children see the traditions of caring for animals in many cultures and even in Western traditions before the ascent of modernist epistemologies and a sharp sense of human exceptionalism (Deckha 2013, 520–22).
A related benefit of this multilayered analysis is to counter the zero-sum thinking that can infect equity-seeking social movements (Kim 2015; Ko 2019; Deckha 2020). It is often assumed that bringing forth animal issues to discuss alongside human rights issues is problematic because attention to animals undermines or displaces attention to marginalised humans, perhaps especially vis-à-vis racialised subjects who have been so thoroughly animalised by European and white ideologies (Deckha 2017; Gillespie 2018; Klein 2019). Achieving justice is assumed in this constricted conceptual logic to be a zero-sum game. Seeing animalisation as a trans-species vector of abjection is to understand synergy in structure and architecture of inequalities and thus the need for a shared path toward meaningful redress (Bennett 2020; Deckha 2012b, 538–39). Teaching children this multi-layered analysis about multiple differences can help generate thoughtful analysis about the need to see the exploitation of animals as a linked social justice issue rather than simply accept arguments about culture and tradition in relation to animals, arguments that invariably come up when issues of human-animal relations, and especially the question of eating animals, are at stake.
4.2.3 Emphasising Gendered and Heteronormative Associations with Eating Animals
In addition to introducing critical thinking about entwined alterity and differences stemming from species differentiations between humans and animals, a heightened message about gender alterity and the harms of sexism and heteronormativity, themselves interrelated (Rifkin 2011, 7–8), should be
5 Conclusion
Having established that reaching children is important to the goal of transitioning to a plant-based society, the pressing question remains of how to popularise alterity education through critical animal pedagogies so that they are integrated into school curricula. We know we need to reach children with alternative messaging, but the gateway of school curricula is guarded by the adults in charge who will, in all likelihood, oppose such information as a radical ideology. An urgent task for animal advocacy is to consider how to deliver this education outside of schools until such a time when governments, schools, and parents may be willing to integrate such perspectives. What types of popular cultural and social media interventions might work to build a plant-based movement among children?
Between 0.97 and 2.7 trillion wild fish are slaughtered annually through commercial fishing, and between 37 and 120 billion fish are slaughtered annually through aquaculture (Mood 2010, 71; Mood and Brooke 2012, 1). The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated global fishing slaughter to be 179 million tonnes in 2018 (FAO 2020b, 2).
See Kingery 2012. For recent developments on this front in Canada, a country which previously did not have any “ag-gag” legislation, see Lazare 2020. Outstanding bills include Ontario’s Bill 156, Security from Trespass and Protecting Food Safety Act. A constitutional challenge is in the works by Animal Justice. See Animal Justice 2020.
There is debate about how to account for the GHG emissions of animal agriculture, and thus some estimate that animal agriculture is responsible for 14% of GHG emissions while others hold it responsible for 51% of the world’s GHG; the latter figure elevates it to the leading catalyst behind climate change (Safran Foer 2019, 95–96, 227–232).
For an argument that the best diets for humans nutritionally and ethically is raw veganism, see Alvaro 2020.
For examples of scholars who advocate veganism as the solution to animal death and suffering as well as climate change and food insecurity, see Kemmerer 2019.
I focus on organised formal schools in this article in discussing curriculum reform not to privilege formal education as more desirable to alternative schooling, but as a shorthand for education for children in general. For more on the value of alternative education to children, see Lees and Noddings 2016.
Of course, structural change needs to occur to make fully plant-based diets easily accessible to all in terms of supply rather than continue to subsidise and normalise animal-based foodways. In conversations about accessibility of plants, it is important not to presume that vegan diets are more costly than non-vegan diets (even in the face of massive food subsidies to animal-foods corporations in North America and Europe) and to recall that most of the world cannot afford to eat animals and subsist largely on plant-based diets (Chiles and Fitzgerald 2018, 4; Lundström 2019, 127).
See, e.g., Smart 1989; Meth 1981; Ocheje 2018.
See the discussion of the judicial decisions against the British Slave Trade in Almiron 2019.
See, e.g., in the Canadian context, Canada (Attorney General) v Bedford, 2013 SCC 72, [2013] 3 SCR 1101 (on authorising more liberal parameters for sex work); Carter v Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, [2015] 1 SCR 331 (on authorising assisted death in certain situations).
See Fox 2004; Braverman 2018, 140; Deckha 2012a; Grear 2015.
See Arcari 2020, 31–41; Wilks and Phillips 2017. On recognition of animal interests in the legal system, see Fernandez 2019.
For a discussion on how animal agriculture is portrayed in climate change literature in Australia, see Arcari 2017. Canada’s Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change has limited content on the animal agriculture industry and focuses on implementing new technology to “reduce emissions from livestock and crop production” rather than reducing meat and animal product consumption (ECCC 2016, 22–23).
For example, up until its most recent 2019 iteration that was based on independent research, meat and dairy industry lobbyists heavily influenced Canada’s Food Guide (Crowe 2019). An Access to Information request by the Globe and Mail revealed that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada government officials lobbied Health Canada to advocate on behalf of the meat and dairy industry while it was developing the new food guide (Hui 2017).
The Canadian Federal Government announced a $77.5 million “Emergency Processing Fund” for Canadian food processors in May 2020 (PMO 2020). The Cargill Slaughterhouse in Alberta was the site of one of the largest COVID-19 outbreaks in Canada, see Baum, Tait and Grant 2020. Animal Agriculture was deemed a critical infrastructure for the COVID-19 pandemic (Public Safety Canada 2020).
See, e.g., Greenfield 2020. The Guardian is the only mainstream news outlet that has offered a series of articles on the problems with intensive farming as revealed by the COVID-19 crisis in its Animals Farmed series. See the Guardian 2020.
See Wadiwel 2015, 159; Belcourt 2014, 3–4; Arcari 2017, 44–45.
See, e.g., Kwasnicka et al. 2016, 277–78, 290; Prochaska, DiClemente and Norcross 1992; French et al. 2014; Bastian 2019.
See, e.g., Joy 2011; Sanchez-Sabate, Badilla-Briones and Sabaté 2019; Rothgerber 2020; Malek, Umberger and Goddard 2019.
See Dowsett et al. 2018, 281; Rothgerber 2013, 364–65, 371. See also Gorvett 2020.
For example, a 2014 study found that 84% of surveyed vegetarians/vegans reverted back to eating meat (Humane Research Council 2014; Humane Research Council 2015).
For a review of literature about the role of animals in education and the lives of children, see Bone 2013.
For example, Kathryn Gillespie describes how children are taught from a young age that the purpose of cows is to produce milk for humans, which normalises the practice, in her book The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (2018, 148–49). For a discussion on how the way humans are taught to treat animals is integral to the liberal human identity, see Boggs 2013. For a discussion of an alternative method of education that challenges anthropocentrism, see Lupinacci and Happel-Parkins 2016.
Examples of available humane education curriculum and resources include BC SPCA 2017; HEART 2020; HSI 2019; Institute for Humane Education 2016; PETA Kids 2016.
See, e.g., Aguirre and Orihuela 2014; Bryant and Dillard 2020; Dilmac, Kulaksizoglu and Eksi 2007; Nicoll, Trifone and Samuels 2008; Samuels, Meers and Normando 2016.
For a discussion of research on how a child’s education, home life, and other interactions impact their development, see Melson 2001.
See Dairy Australia 2020; Dairy Farmers of Canada 2019; Alberta Beef 2020; Dinker and Pedersen 2016; Linné and Pedersen 2016.
See, e.g., Damerell, Howe and Milner-Gulland 2013.
Ibid., 144. See also Samera’s case study of Egypt in this regard (Esmeir 2012).
For example, the Institute for Humane Education has the following mission statement: “IHE educates people to create a world in which all humans, animals, and nature can thrive.” Its model recognises the interconnected issues of “human rights, environmental preservation, and animal protection” (Institute for Humane Education 2021).
It is important to consider that such integration should be more seamless than obvious. Meena Alagappan, the Director of HEART (Humane Education Advocates Reaching Teachers), has stated “that to expand the reach of humane education I think it is really important that it be blended into the standard subjects, aligned to mandated educational standards (so it is seen as an enhancement and not a burden or add-on for already overwhelmed teachers), and infused into mainstream educational pedagogies (like, for example, social and emotional learning which is widely embraced in the US).” (Maneesha Deckha, personal communication to Author, September 9, 2020).
Combining such classroom activities with the veganisation of schools and other educational centres is a critical step toward unsettling the normal messages that children absorb regarding the naturalness, normalness, and necessity of eating animals and consuming other byproducts (Rowe 2011). For specific strategies to promote veganisation see Dinker and Pedersen 2016.
HEART has developed a social justice curriculum for very young children that incorporates such discussions, but it does not take a critical position about animal use industries. See HEART 2019.
See Bailey 2007; Harris 2009.
For scholarship discussing this symbiosis in relation to species, see Bailey 2007; Adams 1990; Deckha 2012.
For a report on Indigenous child poverty in Canada, see Beedie, Macdonald and Wilson 2019. For an overview of urban poverty in the Global South, see Mitlin and Satterthwaite 2012.
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