The number of people adopting and experimenting with vegetarian and vegan diets in the U.S. isnoteworthy. But as with any dietary modification, not everyone who tries a new diet maintains it overtime. It is important for vegan and animal advocates to identify what can lead to these difficulties andlapses and use this information to help people stick with, or return to, animal-friendly diets. Thisdocument is a step in that direction and builds upon the previously released Faunalytics reportcovering our Study of Current and Former Vegetarians and Vegans.
The Faunalytics Animal Tracker is an annual survey of U.S. adults’ attitudes and behaviors with respect to animals and animal advocates. The first survey was conducted in 2008 and included 15 core questions. A subset of five questions has been asked every year since, which means that we collect new data for each question every three years. The questions asked in 2019 were also asked in 2016, 2013, and 2010. For 2019, we presented the Animal Tracker results in a series of blogs. The first blog provided the background and methodology of the survey, a brief overview of the latest results, and a deeper dive into the responses to two of the questions. In subsequent blogs, we explored the remaining questions covered in the 2019 survey.
This experimental study was conducted on a university campus in Canada. Participants (n = 617) watched a video, answered a short survey, and were asked whether they would take one of two pledges: either to reduce meat in their diet or to stop eating meat. There were three videos: one with a meat-reduction message, one with a vegetarian message, and one control. Results showed that advocating for meat reduction led to marginally more meatless meal purchases than advocating for vegetarianism, in large part because almost four times as many people were willing to pledge to reduce as to pledge to cut out meat entirely. Neither the reduction advocacy nor vegetarian advocacy condition differed significantly from the control condition, though the trend was for reduction to perform better than control and vegetarian to perform worse. Implications for advocates and researchers are discussed.
This report is a follow-up to Faunalytics’ 2014 Study of Currentand Former Vegetarians and Vegans: Initial Findings, in whichwe shared the early results of our large-scale research intothose who do, or have, followed a vegetarian or vegan diet.Following this release, Faunalytics heard from researchers andadvocates who had further questions that they thought ourstudy might be able to answer. In response, we spent timemining the dataset to look for answers to these questions,which are presented in the following pages.
This randomized controlled trial is designed to investigate interventions that may mitigate naturalness’ role as a major barrier to clean meat acceptance in the U.S.
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