Morality Under the Microscope: Fur and Animal Testing

Every year, the Gallup company measures the attitudes of U.S. adults on 16 social issues, including buying/wearing animal fur, medical testing on animals, and animal cloning. The results immediately brought to mind two questions. First, why is it that we have not made significantly more progress convincing people that buying and wearing animal fur is wrong? How frivolously cruel does a behavior need to be for more than half of people to say it is wrong? But an even bigger question is, are advocates having any impact at all on the perceived morality of these issues?

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I want to focus on buying/wearing fur and animal testing, two seemingly very different issues with surprisingly close levels of perceived morality in the U.S. For instance, in the most recently survey (2011), Gallup found that 55% think medical testing on animals is “morally acceptable,” while 38% think it is “morally wrong.” By comparison, 56% think that buying and wearing fur is morally acceptable, while 39% think it is morally wrong. It doesn’t require a deep knowledge of statistics to understand that those sets of numbers are essentially the same.

Why is moral opposition to wearing fur, which is perceived by many to be frivolous, comparable to that of medical testing on animals, which is perceived by many to be necessary? Is it a failure on the part of anti-fur activists that we have not successfully created widespread moral outrage against buying and wearing fur? I say “we” because, for many years, I helped organize grassroots efforts to end fur sales in the Seattle area. I often felt like we were spinning our wheels and now I know part of the reason why – a majority of people (56%) thinks it is acceptable to buy and wear fur.

This is discouraging, of course, but there may be an even bigger concern for animal advocates. Take a look at the chart below, which shows the perceived moral wrongness of the two issues for the past five years. Note: the chart is interactive -- hover over the trend lines to show the data for each year.

The chart above shows that slightly more people believe that buying/wearing fur is morally wrong than those believing that medical testing on animals is wrong, except for 2009 when the two were reversed. What is most interesting, however, is that the moral wrongness of the two issues track very closely together over time. I suspect that if we charted the other 14 social justice issues in the Gallup survey, we would see a similar up and down trend for most of them.

This suggests to me that changes in perceived morality are largely independent of the efforts of animal advocates. In other words, we’re not having much impact on these issues, at least when it comes to public opinion. Moral acceptability or wrongness probably changes from year to year because of the moral context of the times rather than the success or failure of advocates.

What do you think? Are advocates having an impact on public opinion? Do the Gallup survey results suggest any changes in strategy for anti-fur and anti-vivisection advocates? Add your comments below.