Humane Thinking, from HRC

Bernard Unti is an historian of the human-animal bond and the senior policy adviser and special assistant to the CEO of The Humane Society of the United States. He recently took the time to answer some questions for me about some of his research and the role that historical research has had and can have for the animal protection movement.

We’re getting ready to launch year five of HRC’s Animal Tracker annual survey of the public opinions and behavior of adults in the U.S. This year’s survey, which will field in March, addresses opinions toward various social movements, who people trust to provide information about animal welfare, opinions about the adequacy of animal protection laws, attitudes toward the importance of animal welfare in various situations, and the frequency with which people discuss animal protection issues. We asked the exact same questions in 2008 and 2009 and will be able to analyze changes over time. When the results are available in April, we’ll also refresh the Animal Tracker graphing tool so that the results will be easy to access and interpret.

A report recently issued by the national Institute of Medicine is resulting in major changes in whether and how chimpanzees are used for research in the United States (one of only two countries in the world that permit the use of chimps at all).

The most exciting project this new year, is the release of our latest study examining how easy it is for the average person to read and understand animal advocacy literature. Specifically, HRC partnered with VegFund and FARM to evaluate the readability of the most widely distributed vegan outreach pamphlets.

In a previous blog series, I explored how denial works to allow humans to become willing participants and bystanders in the suffering of animals. Much of the discussion centered on how employees and subordinates learn to acquiesce to requests from superiors and how the average person learns to ignore the violence inherent in everyday and normalized uses of animals (food, clothing, entertainment, etc.). What I did not thoroughly explore was how those with more economic and social privilege in their careers could engage in types of animal exploitation that are atypical on animals who are often beloved in our culture. This is precisely what animal experimenters are engaged in and a question I have, that leaves many animal advocates baffled, is “How do they do it?”