Since kids love animals, they are socialized not to identify the animal that they’re eating. Children’s books lead them to believe that farmed animals live happily and can freely move about. That these animals go on to become the burgers and nuggets they eat is virtually never mentioned. A 2021 study found 30-40% of American kids aged 4 to 7 think common animal products, like bacon, hotdogs, hamburgers, shrimp, and even chicken nuggets, come from plants.
KENNY TORRELLA: The children’s movie Chicken Run is one of the darker and more subversive films made for kids: The story follows a flock of lovable, though quite miserable, chickens who conspire to escape a farm before their impending slaughter. Despite the grim subject matter, it’s charming and entertaining, fully earning its 97 percent critic’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The script reads like it was written by PETA, yet it was a box office hit and remains the highest-grossing stop-motion animated movie ever made.
Next week, Netflix is releasing a sequel — Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget — with the same theme but updated to reflect our increasingly dystopian animal farming system. This time around, instead of escaping a farm, the same chickens are breaking into one to rescue one of their flock members (which also happens to be the strategy of some animal rights activists).
The film feels like a pointed critique of the factory farm industry’s use of deceptive marketing to convince the public that animals are treated far better than they really are, what’s known as “humanewashing.” It’s a heavy message packaged in an entertaining, if formulaic, children’s movie, and it’s a radical departure from how animal farming is typically depicted in children’s literature and film…
In the mid-2000s, author and illustrator Ruby Roth was teaching art to elementary school kids. Roth was, and still is, a vegan, and sometimes students would ask her about what she was eating. She looked for a children’s book that explained her belief system and showed the reality of animal factory farming in a way children could understand, but she couldn’t find one, so she eventually made her own: That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals… Roth said she was accused of scaring and brainwashing children. Child psychologists on the Today show, she recalled, discussed the supposed danger of reading her book to kids.
“The most fascinating part of the whole outrage was that by calling my book controversial, it seemed to me we were admitting that what we do to animals is too scary to talk about,” Roth said. “So to me, that said we want to be willfully ignorant and impose that ignorance on our children”…
It’s easy to dismiss Roth as someone who’s pushing her ideology onto kids, but I’d argue the default message society sends kids about animal farming is worse — in that it’s a total fabrication. Kids love animals, yet children’s books lead them to believe that farmed animals live happily and can freely move about. That these animals go on to become the burgers and nuggets kids eat is virtually never mentioned.
“Children are socialized not to identify the animal that they’re eating,” said Anastassiya Andrianova, an associate professor of English at North Dakota State University who researches how animal farming is portrayed in children’s literature. “Not only is the animal absent when they’re presented on a plate as meat, but even the way that our language functions, it camouflages and mystifies that link.” Pig meat is called “pork,” “bacon” and “sausage,” while cow’s meat is “beef” and cow’s milk is just “milk.”
In reality, 99 percent of the 9.7 billion land animals raised for food in the US every year live in brutish conditions on factory farms, where they’re mutilated without pain relief, crammed together in warehouses, and forced to wallow in their own waste…
When children are shown the reality of these conditions, some can sense something is wrong. Mercy for Animals, a farm animal welfare nonprofit I worked at prior to Vox, created a video in which children are shown pictures of hens and pigs in tiny cages, a standard farming practice. “They’re dirty and trapped,” a 4-year-old says. “It’s not good to treat any animal like that,” says a 7-year-old…
One study of Australian parents, for example, found that the majority falsely tell their children that animals are “killed carefully and without cruelty.” Thirty to forty percent of American kids aged 4 to 7 think common animal products, like bacon, hotdogs, hamburgers, shrimp, and even chicken nuggets, come from plants, a 2021 study found.
As children age, their natural love for animals tends to be tamped down. Kids are taught that “becoming an adult requires you to sort of leave behind your attachment and fondness for animals,” Andrianova said. The relationship morphs from one of kinship to one of hierarchy, with humans on top. Animals are “like us, and yet they’re separate from us in ways that we need to justify because we need to justify using animals for labor, consumption, clothing, and other kinds of technological means,” she added. “This paradox is at the very core of who we are as humans.”
Not every piece of children’s media that takes place on a farm needs to be the next Chicken Run or That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals. But it’s reasonable to hope that kids should be informed enough to at least understand chicken nuggets come from chickens, to have a sense of what turning animals into meat entails, and to have the ability to follow their moral instincts and have some say in what they eat. The same goes for adults. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that consumers so easily fall for meat industry advertising that makes farms look like the version they internalized from children’s literature. SOURCE…
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