Meat consumption is rising. Could this animal cruelty video slow it down?

Factory farming is a particularly wicked problem to solve.

It’s a moral atrocity, involving the confinement and slaughter of hundreds of billions of animals globally each year. It’s a blight on the environment. It’s terrible for slaughterhouse workers, many of whom suffer from PTSD, anxiety, or depression. Yet factory farming produces something almost everyone wants and that has become culturally, economically, and politically entrenched: cheap meat, milk, and eggs.

Despite strong public concern for cruelty to farmed animals and large swathes of Americans telling pollsters that they’re trying to cut back on meat, we keep eating more of it. And research has shown that it’s nearly impossible to persuade most people otherwise. But a new study, which hasn’t yet been published and is currently under review at an academic journal, might complicate that consensus.

In the experiment, University of Toronto professors Lisa Kramer and Peter Landry recruited 1,149 students and separated them into two groups. One group watched a 16-minute clip from the harrowing animal rights documentary Dominion about the treatment of pigs in meat production, while a control group watched a video about the role mushrooms play in forest ecosystems.

In surveys taken before the study, immediately after watching the video, and a week later, participants were asked to choose a protein — bacon, chicken, steak, tofu, or none — to add to a meal.

Before watching the video, 90.1 percent of students chose meat in their meal; a week after watching the video, 77.9 percent did — a 12.2 percent decline. Demand for pork, specifically, fell more sharply.

“Turns out, it’s harder to order meat after watching Dominion,” Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford University’s Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, wrote in a blog about the study. “And it’s especially harder to order pork after watching the segment on pigs.” (Green didn’t work on the study but did provide the authors feedback on its design.)

Plenty of researchers have shown videos similar to Dominion to study participants and found little to no effect. So what made this one different? Kramer and Landry say it could simply be the high-quality nature of the film.

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