Podcast: The importance of research in animal advocacy

Research plays a crucial role in animal advocacy, helping to make decisions, measure impacts, and infludence policy-makers.

This month’s episode of The Informed Animal Ally discusses how research is used in animal advocacy, particularly polling, surveys, and reports. The episode expoles why collecting this kind of data is important, the ways we can use it in our advocacy work, and examples from the Vancouver Humane Society’s recent research.

Note: This written discussion has been edited for length.

Chantelle: First, Amy, I was wondering if you could share a little bit about what we’re talking about when we discuss surveys. What kinds of questions are asked and how are those answers useful when we’re talking about animal advocacy?

Amy: Yeah, there’s a lot of different data that can be gathered from surveys.

• You can learn about what people think. We kind of frame that as public opinion, but that can also take into account, for example, how people feel about the their pets.
• You can also measure public behaviour. So you can get a sense of what people are actually doing with their time and their money.
• And then you can gather demographic data. Demographic data gives more context to the polling data.

Public opinion questions

Amy: When you think about what people think, that helps you have a sense of how people are falling on a scale. And when you’re trying to shift attitude, when your goal is to change the way people think about things, then you can use that public opinion polling to get a gauge whether you’ve been successful.

You can do that on a micro scale with a small community if you’re targeting ads and trying to get a sense of what’s happening in Vancouver, or you can compare that to a national audience, you can see growth based on a campaign and measure that against an area that hasn’t had that campaign.

One example of this is a Research Co. survey that asked, would you say you’re in favor or opposed to each of the following: eating animals, using animals in rodeo, killing animals for their fur.

You can take that data to decision makers, politicians and business owners when advocating for change. And that shows what the public opinion is when it comes to a practice that harms animals.

It is the most useful data for the government because they care about what the people who vote for them think.

Public behaviour questions

Amy: Other polling data, such as public behaviours, can be useful for decision makers as well. However, it has a different effect.

An example is a survey about people’s eating habits and dietary choices, or a question about if you’ve been to the zoo in the past year.

If people are eating less meat on their own, we can bring that to a city to say, as they’re creating their food budget, they could make more accessible plant-based options available in their parks, because we have evidence that people are eating less meat and wanting more plant-based food available.

Demographic questions

Amy: When it comes to the demographic data, it really helps give context.

Particularly when you’re trying to decide what’s the most valuable audience to target, you can identify that with demographic data. You can say, okay, this is the audience that’s moving in this direction already. So there’s already some peer support.

Maybe let’s concentrate our efforts on this audience to create an overall societal shift.

Chantelle: Thank you so much for that great overview of the kinds of surveys that are helpful for animal advocacy work and how.

Chantelle: We at the Vancouver Humane Society have commissioned quite a few surveys over the past three years, and we’d like to share how they’ve been helpful for our work.

One example is the VHS commissioned a poll on plant-based eating habits and opinions in the Lower Mainland of B.C. in December, 2022.

You can hear more about this poll in depth in our episode from July, 2023, which is called Will plant-based become the norm?

A lot of things came out of this survey. First of all, it informed our advocacy work by telling us people’s biggest motivations for reducing their consumption of animal products.

The top motivator for eating less meat and animal products was personal health, and then the cost of foods and the environment were tied, and then animal well-being.

We also collected data about people’s eating habits. That told us how many servings of various animal products people are actually eating each month. For instance, most people are eating 7 to 17 servings of eggs, but they’re eating less than 4 servings of fish.

From that, we created an impact report that specifically looked at the impact an average person could make in the Lower Mainland.

We found that by switching 100 percent of their diet to plant-based foods for one year, one person could save the amount of emissions it takes to power a home for six months, and they could also save about $600 a year.

By switching just 25 percent of their diet, they could save the carbon that’s sequestered by a quarter acre of forested land, and they could also save about $156 a year.

How much can you save on your grocery bill eating plant-based? #shorts

A recent cost-benefit analysis was conducted to determine how much an individual could save if shifting all or part of their diet to plant-based. What were the results? More info: https://plantuniversity.ca/learn/plant-based-poll/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=shorts-7-cost2&utm_campaign=plantu_survey

So we were able to share the findings from that survey and the report in a plant-based advocacy campaign, which included billboards across Vancouver, a series of videos on social media, and a press release that was covered in 23 media outlets.

We also continue to use the results from that survey to inform our plant-based advocacy work and reach more people with accessible plant-based foods.

As we’ve mentioned, this area of advocacy has the potential to make a huge impact for animals.

In 2023, 859 million land animals were killed for food in Canada. If we can convince people who are eating animal products to switch even just one day a week to plant-based foods, we can save almost 123 million land animals every year, plus an estimate of more than 1.4 billion aquatic animals.

It would also make a huge difference in decreasing the demand for industrial animal agriculture, which forces more animals into a smaller space for greater output. It’s what many know as factory farming, where many of the greatest harms to animals happen on an almost unimaginable scale.

Amy: The nice thing about survey data is it takes big concepts and you can condense them to a simple phrase and assess where people are at. you can make that available to the public and they will likely have an opinion on it.

When you present that information, it gets people thinking about themselves and their habits.

Amy: The VHS commissioned three surveys on the Calgary Stampede in the past three years.

Removing rodeo and chuckwagons from the Calgary Stampede would have virtually no impact on attendance

Amy: The first survey in 2022 found that removing the rodeo and chuckwagons from the Calgary Stampede would have virtually no impact on attendance and would actually bring in some new crowds.

64 percent of Calgarians had attended or planned to attend that year, and 63 percent said they would attend without the rodeo.

24 percent of non-attendees from that year said said that they would attend if the animal events were dropped.

Bringing that forward to council helps them to see that there is a wider audience that could be reached by the Stampede.

That has effects on marketing. The Stampede is essentially a public event, and it’s a profit driven entity in that they are looking to bring in money into the city. People stay at hotels and go to the music shows.

If they can bring more people in and join the Stampede, they have incentive to do that for tourism purposes.

2024 polls show support for animal events dropped this year

Amy: In 2024, we conducted a poll gauging support in Calgary, Alberta, and across Canada.

We then monitored the Stampede and shared information with the media about animal deaths and incidents this year, which turned out to be the deadliest year of animal events since 2019 with four deaths.

That was really impactful, and we made sure to share that impact with the media.

We also ran a campaign to raise awareness about the harms caused by rodeo and chuckwagon races online.

The polling that we did after the Stampede showed a drop in support for all events amongst Canadians. A majority of the Calgarians opposed one of the five events listed in the survey in February, but that jumped to four out of five in July.

In both groups, opposition to government funding of rodeo events increased. And the increase was really sharp in Calgary, where opposition to funding rose from 51 percent to 67 percent.

So we got from half the population to two thirds opposed to government funding these rodeo events. That speaks to people making decisions based on what voters think.

These results were shared on social media in an op-ed published in the Daily Hive, as well as with city council in Calgary.

Without this data, we would not know if our campaigns were effective. The outcome has value, and not just an internal value; there’s that external value of sharing the information as well.

Amy: I’ll move on to talking about a captivity poll. In 2022, we did a poll on public opinion about animals in captivity in B.C.

The outcome was pretty remarkable. We found that 89 percent of British Columbians are opposed to the international trade of wild and exotic animals to be kept in permanent captivity in zoos and aquariums.

This was shared in media stories and a letter to the province of British Columbia calling for changes to the Controlled Alien Species Act, which allows exotic animals to be imported.

It’s amazing to think about all the animals kept in captivity solely for human entertainment, and the general population is not on board with that.

People were split fairly evenly on actually keeping animals and zoos and aquariums for entertainment and education: 49 percent in favour and 44 percent were opposed. And that really helped us inform our outreach campaign, realizing there is some thought to the education and entertainment value of animals in zoos.

While we understand the suffering animals experience doesn’t balance with the entertainment and education value, we need to shift public opinion.

We can do another poll to see if we’ve changed that once we’ve done another campaign. So it’s really nice to benchmark those things over time to see if we can shift public opinion and influence policy decisions to match the knowledge and science we have.

Chantelle: I’m really interested to see the future of public opinion on this because I think there’s a lot of messaging around zoos that they have a lot of educational value, but the evidence shows people don’t learn more from going to see animals at a zoo than they would just learning about animals from home or going for a walk through the forest.

So I think that there’s a lot of potential to help people learn about ways that they can become educated about animals and animal well-being without causing animals to suffer because they’re sitting in a cage in captivity.

Chantelle: I wanted to talk about a survey from this year, which was a poll of BC residents gauging people’s general knowledge and interests around animal topics.

This survey is really interesting because it’s going to be used to inform our work on a wider scale in the coming years to raise awareness on the care and well being of animals and also to advocate for changes that will prevent animal suffering in public policy.

Some key findings:

56.4 percent of British Columbians live with at least one companion animal.

Most British Columbians are interested in five of the topics that we asked about in our survey:

• Interacting with and protecting wildlife.
• Welfare concerns around farmed animals.
• How to care for pets, like grooming and food.
• Welfare concerns around animals in captivity in zoos and aquariums.
• How to train pets – that’s not necessarily just trick training, it’s really things that influence the well-being of companion animals on a day to day basis, like how can we desensitize an animal to the sound of fireworks that really stresses them out, or how can we make it easier for them to go through care items like grooming or to have a positive experience of a walk outside.

We found that 12 percent of people were flexitarian, 9 percent were vegetarian, and 2 percent were vegan.

We asked about what actions folks have taken for animals in the past six months, and we found that almost half of people who were surveyed had taken at least one of the actions that we listed.

The top ones were things like reading or watching news information about animals, donating to animal organizations, or signing petitions.

And we also asked about which resources people consider useful when they’re learning about a new topic. The top answers were websites, YouTube, and TV news stories.

That survey is going to help us understand current public behaviours around animal welfare and attitudes around animal well-being. It’ll determine the most popular topics surrounding animal well-being and advocacy so that we can share information about those. And it will also determine the most effective platforms where we can reach people regarding animal topics.

Amy: I wanted to share qualitative studies and non-public polling.

We’ve partnered with research institutions to do interviews with people who accessed care for their pets in a time of an emergency, post-COVID. We looked at financial impacts on low income individuals.

Another survey or study that we did was looking at people who work in the trauma-informed sector and getting a sense of how they operate in that sector and what their attitudes are towards burnout.

We interviewed people in the shelter sector, animal enforcement and leadership in those and looked at what the differences were and then put together a report.

Out of that research we created a training program on trauma-informed care in the animal service sector. The training program is free for anyone to take online to look at how to make the work that they do more trauma-informed.

We’re advocating for more trauma informed care of people, which we know will have a positive impact on the animals that people care for. So even though it’s not a quick study, it takes longer, the sort of depth of that allows for a much more thorough understanding of the sector and what was needed to create some pretty significant shifts in our own sector and community.

We also did a cost-benefit analysis using financial data and municipal purchasing to assess how we could improve the systems where municipalities are purchasing food.

So are there cheaper products that they could replace one for another, that could be as simple as replacing dairy milk with oat milk; replacing beef products with beans and lentils.

The financial benefit of that is huge. And so if we’re looking at a public body accountable to citizens for being financially responsible, we can demonstrate that plant-based products do make a significant impact when it comes to the waste stream, the impact on the environment and the financial choices.

So those types of studies, maybe it’s qualitative research, maybe it’s an economic analysis can also have a huge impact when it comes to changing policies.

Chantelle: Yeah, absolutely. One of the major themes I’m noticing as you’re speaking is there’s lots of different avenues to advocate for a better world for animals.

People are not always going to listen to concerns about animal well-being and their experiences. That doesn’t always make an impact with policy-makers. But talking about the financial impacts, the environmental impacts, can reach decision-makers.

We’ve also talked briefly on this show about the concept of One Health, One Welfare. That’s the interconnectedness of all these pieces; the well-being of humans, animals, the environment impact each other.

For instance, more trauma-informed services for people with companion animals has a really positive impact on the actual lives of those companion animals as well.

Amy: It’s so important to make sure with surveys we’re getting accurate data that’s as unbiased as possible in terms of how we’re asking the questions.

Obviously, we know people themselves are biased and that’s the whole point, but when we use this information to speak with decision-makers, we want those to be well-informed recommendations and make sure we’re also sharing accurate information with the public.

When we’re conducting surveys about public opinion or behaviour, we use reputable companies like Research Co. and Angus Reid Institute to help with that. And when we’re working with public institutions like universities, we’re making sure that the process is going through an entire evaluation within the university that meets their standards.