Today for my project I decided to do a study. I wanted to see how people react when they can see themselves or a loved one in an un-livable situation that factory-farmed animals endure every day. I set up a cardboard cut out of a scene from a factory farm to mimic the cut outs that one might see at a fair. There is an empty hole and the idea is that you stick your head through that hole and someone takes a picture of you so you can see yourself in a new environment, or as a different character. I knew that I would be taking my cutout to the park where there would be a lot of children so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t choose a picture that was gruesome, out of respect for people trying to enjoy a nice day in the park 🙂
I picked a very mild stock photo that depicts the cramped living conditions of some chickens in a factory farm. I printed this photo out over many pages and stuck it to a large piece of cardboard and cut out one of the chicken’s heads so that people could stick their heads in that space. I took this to the park to see if anyone was willing to put themselves in the place of a chicken for a photo-op. After the participants saw the photo of themselves I asked them a few questions regarding their feelings of seeing themselves in this environment. The questions included: “Do you eat meat?” “Do you think these chickens have enough space to live?” “How does it make you feel to see yourself in this photo?”
In general, people were reluctant to participate. Of those who did participate, everyone was a meat-eater, most of them thought that the chickens did not have enough space, and some of them said that they hadn’t thought much about it before but will consider buying non-factory farmed meat in the future. No one said that they would stop eating meat. In a further iteration I would like to collect more data in different neighborhoods in the city and create a data visualization.
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