How did Animal Rising's protest impact public attitudes towards animals?
We’re very excited to announce some new research on disruptive animal rights protests that Social Change Lab has been working on over the last few months. We investigated the public opinion impacts of Animal Rising’s recent prolific protests at the Grand National horse race, by conducting a nationally representative polling just before and just after the protests. Animal Rising got huge amounts of media attention (e.g. over 60 live interviews) and we believe it was one of the most publicised animal rights protests in recent UK history. Additionally, in a Hollywood-like turn of events, their plans were leaked by an undercover journalist at the Mail on Sunday two weeks before the event!
We tried to find out whether the protests affected people’s concern for animals by asking them a number of questions (tailored to the outcomes Animal Rising told us they wanted to achieve), including:
How much did you think about animal welfare/rights issues the last 7 days?
To what extent do you disagree or agree that society has a broken relationship with animals?
To what extent do you disagree or agree that society needs to change how we treat animals used for entertainment/for food?
To what extent do you find it morally unacceptable or acceptable to use animals for entertainment/ for food?
To what extent do you support a ban on: horse-racing, factory farming, or animal testing?
We also used exclusive data about the number of sign-ups to take action with Animal Rising, their incoming donations, and media coverage to form a more holistic view of the outcomes, such as the impact on active supporters of animal rights.
You can find the full report as a PDF or a Google Doc, but we wanted to share the main findings in a synthesised format here. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d also love to hear if this research is useful for you or your organisation!
We’re also hosting a webinar to discuss these results, from 6-7pm BST on Monday 28th of August (next week!). You can sign up to the webinar here and please do share with any folks who might be interested – the more the merrier!
A tug of war between momentum and public opinion
Previous research has highlighted that disruptive protest often attracts a lot of attention, bears useful consequences but can also lead to negative impacts. The tension between simultaneous positive and negative effects was also on display in our data. On the one hand, the more people had heard about Animal Rising or the Grand National protest, the more they indicated having thought about animal welfare/rights issues in the past week (somewhat obvious some might say, but salience is perceived by experts as an important factor for political success).
Moreover, the media response to the protest on April 15, 2023 was absolutely massive with mentions of Animal Rising skyrocketing to over 400 media articles in a single day and spokespeople from Animal Rising (AR) being invited to over 60 interviews, often on mainstream media channels such as ITV or the BBC.
All this seems to have greatly benefited AR’s mobilisation efforts: Sign-ups to take action with AR already shot up when their plans for the Grand National were leaked and saw another sharp peak in the days leading up to the event. Also, direct donations to AR increased sharply in the days after the protest and reached the highest volume for the entire year so far (barring a single outlier day in February). Thus, the protest was highly successful when it came to sparking a national debate about animals and mobilising people who are sympathetic to animal advocacy.
Sign-ups to take action with Animal Rising
Direct donations to Animal Rising
However, our data suggest that the protest had negative effects on people’s attitudes towards animals. The more people had heard about AR or the protest, the less they agreed that society has a broken relationship with animals and that society needs to change how we treat animals used for entertainment. Moreover, awareness of the protest was also linked with increased agreement that it is morally acceptable to use animals for entertainment, with decreased agreement that society needs to change how we treat animals used for food, and with more negative attitudes towards vegans/veganism. To reiterate, these were specific variables that Animal Rising told us they wanted to measure, as they were outcomes Animal Rising wanted to impact. Thus, at least the immediate effects of the Grand National protest on public opinion were negative. Follow-up studies later this year will reveal whether these effects persist, are reinforced by further protest actions, or change over time.
The average public opinion impacts for the variables we measured, which had robust impacts (according to our Bayesian analysis method), can be seen summarised below in Table 1.
Interestingly, these negative effects of the protest on attitudes towards animals were limited to those people who had quite unfavourable views towards animals in the first place. For people with overall very favourable views towards animals, the protest had a positive impact. However, the latter segment is very small, whereas the former segment is much larger, which is why the overall effects were negative.
Finally, we tested whether people’s level of support for AR after the protest depended on where/how people had heard about the protest. Different news outlets have different leans and narratives, and it is known that they can strongly affect people’s impressions of a protest. Indeed, relative to hearing about it on The BBC (a reasonable reference level because it is generally assumed to be rather neutral), hearing about it on ITV was associated with lower support for AR, whereas hearing about it on The Guardian, social media, or from friends/family was associated with stronger support for AR. We statistically accounted for confounding variables, such as people’s political leanings, demographics, and their attitudes towards animals, suggesting that there was an independent effect of the news outlets on people’s support for AR.
The more people considered the reporting they saw to be favourable towards the protestors, the higher their own levels of support for AR. These two findings together highlight the significant influence the news media can have on shaping the public’s perception of disruptive protest – also seen in the academic literature.
Conclusion
In summary, our data suggest that the Grand National protests negatively affected people’s attitudes towards animals. They did so as a function of the extent to which people were aware of AR/ the protests and as a function of how favourable their attitudes towards animals were in the first place. At the same time, the protests sparked a national conversation about animal welfare and rights and greatly accelerated mobilisation for Animal Rising: People indicated thinking more about these issues as a function of how much they’d heard about AR and the protests, and there was a sharp increase in sign-ups to take action with AR and direct donations to AR. An important question is how to balance these simultaneous positive and negative outcomes, and to decide which aspects are more important in the long run. Experts for one seem to think that disruption will pay off. Clearly, more research is needed to answer this question – especially on the longer-term public opinion outcomes of disruptive protest. Watch this space as we have some upcoming work tackling this very question!
There are many more details, additional results, and contextual information in the full report (read as PDF or read as Google Doc), so make sure to check it out if this summary sparked your curiosity!
As mentioned, we’re also hosting a webinar to discuss these results, from 6-7pm BST on Monday 28th of August (next week!).