Big Numbers Hurt Animals (still)

Several people have forwarded recent articles about animal issues, all of which feature mind-numbing statistics. So here are bits from posts in 2014 and 2016:

One of my many, many regrets is that in the years after I stopped eating animals, I would lapse into Carl Sagan mode and talk about the "billions and billions" of animals who were killed for food each year. It was only later that I realized that using big numbers was actually undermining my efforts to convince people to take a step to help animals.

This article by Scott and Paul Slovic discusses the issue in more detail. Excerpt:

How big do the numbers have to be for insensitivity to begin? Not very, it turns out. 

Consider the recent death of the Syrian child Aylan Kurdi when his family braved the choppy seas off the coast of Turkey. The image of Aylan lying face down on the beach captivated the world’s attention and even, in short order, resulted in refugee policy changes in countries as far away as the United States. But 14 Syrian children drowned in the Aegean Sea the next day. Did you notice? Did you care? 

And even 14 is much higher than necessary to desensitize us.... “Compassion fade” can occur when an incident involving a single person expands to as few as two people. 

Of course, this is a hard issue to deal with constructively, given that most people care more about and relate better to individual mammals, while the vast majority of factory-farmed animals are birds. But at the very least, we should stop talking about how many billions of animals are killed and talk more about individual stories, especially the brilliance of individual birds.

As Stalin said, "One death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic."

This Psychology Today article discusses the dynamics in detail; excerpt:

Mother Teresa once said, 'If I look at the mass I will never act.' When Stalin and Mother Teresa agree on a point, I sit up and pay attention. It turns out that the human tendency to turn away from mass suffering is well documented. Deborah Small and Paul Slovic have termed this phenomenon the collapse of compassion. It's not simply that as the number of victims goes up, people's sympathy levels off. No, when the numbers go up, the amount of sympathy people feel goes perversely down. And with it goes the willingness to donate money or time to help.

This has obvious implications for animal advocacy. Many vegans talk about how many billions and billions of animals are killed every year. But as the above article relates, this just numbs people.

Furthermore, in the face of unfathomable numbers, one burger or chicken nugget seems negligible -- indeed, less than negligible.

Obviously, if we are going to create a world where all these animals aren't killed for us to eat, we have to convince people not to eat animals. [Duh] We need to be psychologically insightful in our efforts to do this, instead of repeating facts / stories that move us. Indeed, if something is meaningful to us as long-time vegans and activists, it is almost certainly not the best way to reach someone who currently eats meat.