Hello FAST Academy, and welcome to the first module of this course. 

In today's module, we are going to cover the five uses of research in animal advocacy — today I'm going to give you a framework for understanding how to both use and potentially conduct research in your work. So let's jump right into it. 

Here are the five uses of research: The first use of research, animal advocacy, is external legitimacy. The second is internal decision making. The third is capacity building. The fourth is catalyzing action. And if I scooch out of the way here, we can see that the fifth one is identifying problems. 

I know that this seems very theoretical. We're going to go in depth into each one with a couple of examples to help you understand exactly what these uses of research can do for you. 

So shall we start with external legitimacy. This is the first use of research, and we use it to demonstrate that our movement is driven by logic as well as empathy. This research needs to convey credibility and a lack of bias. This type of research is often very important just for getting ourselves credible in the mainstream. There are many negative stereotypes about the animal protection movement, many of which have to do with a lack of logic or being too emotional and things like that—the idea of like a tree hugging hippie and all that stuff. And while there's nothing wrong with the tree hugging hippie, we do want to make sure that we appear to be driven by facts and science just as much as empathy, which we are. So that is an important way that we can use this type of research. 

Here are two examples of this. The first both of these are from the Faunalytics library. The first is an overview of chicken consciousness, sentience and other ways that chickens are internally more complicated than they might appear. This can be used to demonstrate that, essentially, chickens are worthy of dignity, the same way a cat or dog might be. In my opinion, meeting a chicken will do just the same type of thing if you go to a farmed animal sanctuary. But this type of science can also pull that trick, especially for people who are driven by logic and need to see the science in order to believe it. The second one is a type of study we've all seen a million times. This is the research showing that animal agriculture is driving climate change and other forms of environmental degradation. This research is used to essentially show that combating factory farming is a benefit for climate change, as well as animal protection, basically showing that the reasons we're doing what we're doing are, like I mentioned, driven by logic. So if you are using research for external legitimacy to make yourself seem more credible and legitimate as an individual or as an organization, it is critical that we stress peer review and a lack of bias. It's often good if the research that you're showing is done by somebody who is not in the movement or who is not vegan or vegetarian themselves. 

This is a really good way of showing that people who don't necessarily agree with us and everything agree with us on this specific issue, or agree with us that fishes can feel pain, or that beef is bad for the environment, or chicken feed is a driver of deforestation, or whatever, whatever the cause happens to be. If we show that it comes from outside the movement, people might be more likely to believe it, and finally, never, ever, ever exaggerate. If we're trying to be credible and legitimate, we need to stick to the exact facts as they are. Don't round up numbers. Don't overplay your hand. If something is the second leading cause of something, don't say it's the first. If something causes 86% or something, don't round up to 90%. These types of errors can harm legitimacy and harm credibility. So I always say credibility takes a long time to build, but it takes a very short amount of time to be lost. So please don't overplay your hand when you're trying to be credible, especially when you're talking to somebody outside of the movement. 

Okay, so let's move on to the second use of research, internal decision making. I think this might be the use of research that is most exciting to many organizations out there. This is used to choose campaign targets, set priorities and inform theories of change. When engaging with this research, advocates should be open to changing strategies based on the results. Sometimes we call this “tactic flexible.” If you're trying to reach an end goal of saving chicken or cow or fishes lives or whatever you might be, it might be necessary to change your tactic in order to get to that goal, based on what the research says. 

If we all do this, we might have to be willing to acknowledge past mistakes, pick ourselves up and then move on. That's what we need to be able to do as a movement. I'll give you an example. This is a real data point that came from one of our studies: for people who have already reduced their animal product consumption, which of the following was considered most important for that decision? Which of the following tactics was most likely to have done so? I'll let you think for a moment about your answer. . .  and then the answer is a book. So it turns out that of people who are already reducing animal product consumption, a book was the most likely to have done so compared to these other ones. This might indicate that books could be a very important source of change, although this is correlational data, not causational, also just something to keep in mind if you're interested, here is the full list where you can see book is number one, a challenge is number two, classroom education number three, all the way down to celebrity. This data indicates that celebrity endorsements may not be quite as effective as other forms of interventions, so organizations need to be able to keep this in mind and change strategies if they're using a less effective intervention. 

So this study that I'm referring to is called “Planting Seeds, The Impact of Diet and Different Advocacy Tactics”. It covers so many different types of advocacy and so many ways that the diet changes. I strongly recommend that all advocates read this study. I consider this to be a foundational text in the field of animal advocacy. So whatever intervention you're working on, there's probably some information in here about it that could benefit. This is available on the Faunalytics website, of course. 
So here is another example: which of these groups is most likely to support meatless Mondays at a local school. I'll let you think of the answer right now. . . and the answer is C people concerned about climate change. So here is the whole data. We can see that there's a huge difference between people concerning climate change and people who are not, whereas the difference between people with and without companion intervals is still there, but it's not quite as big as the difference with climate change. 

So what does this mean? If you're working on the Meatless Monday campaign or some sort of similar diet change campaign in an institutional setting, this would affect what target audience you would be working with, maybe if you have the choice of a couple different school districts, you would think about these demographic factors when making that decision. You might also consider how you would craft your messages and outreach.

These results come from our study “Different Strokes for Different Folks: Comparing U.S. Groups’ Openness to Pro-Animal Actions”, which looked at, I believe, 18 different pro animal actions across many different demographics. While this data is specific to the US. I do think it is really important for any advocate to keep in mind. I recommend you read the entire study. 

Okay, so that's use two. Now let's move on to use three, which is capacity building. This one is not quite as glamorous, but it is just as important as the others. So with this use it is, we are assessing the state of the movement, identifying barriers, opportunities, risks and areas for collaboration. For this use, we must be ready to have difficult conversations and ready to tackle any potential weaknesses. 

So this can be difficult to imagine, so let's jump into a couple of examples. This was a study
“Joining Forces”, looking at opportunities for collaboration between the animal protection movement and the environmental movement. We're trying to find ways that we could collaborate going forward, building up the capacity of the overall movement. This is one of the findings from the study: It found the types of animal advocacy organizations that environmentalists are most open to collaborating with.

Another one is called “Creating a More Equitable Movement: Compensation In the Farm Animal Advocacy Sector”, this one is building capacity by identifying pay gaps and the average pay paid trends in the farm animal advocacy movement in order to increase pay so that all advocates are less likely to leave the movement. Because advocate retention is a problem to consider very heavily. Unfortunately, we did find that there is a pay gap of about 15% between marginalized and non marginalized individuals within the farm animal advocacy movement in the United States. So this should indicate to movement leaders especially that we need to take pay seriously, and we need to take DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, extremely seriously, both from an ethical perspective and from a strategic perspective, because this is more likely to Increase advocate retention. 

So these examples are all ways that we can build the capacity of the movement, make the entire movement stronger, basically making ourselves more sustainable, more long-reaching, better to the individuals within the movement, more collaborative, everything like that. 

Okay, let's move on to the fourth use of research, which is catalyzing action. So to catalyze action, we are helping non animal audiences connect animal topics to other ceiling issues and then act on them. This spurs decision makers and people in creating tangible change. So if you've ever seen a news headline that says something like ‘90% of people in Asia don't support the use of gestation rates for farmed animals’ or something like that, this is an example of research used to catalyze action. You're basically trying to get stakeholders outside of the movement to take this more seriously by demonstrating that there is a need for action right now. This research tends to not be theoretical. It tends to be very actionable, specific, and practical. 

It could be research into the effectiveness of non animal techniques in lab research, as opposed to animal testing, basically trying to indicate that animal testing is not as effective as these other more ethical methods, showing stakeholders. We're not just arguing that this is ethical. We are arguing that this is better, that people support this. It's more sustainable. Whatever the argument happens to be, we are showing the data to make that case. I think this is the type of research that tends to be covered in the media the most. 

So, for example, we did a study last year in 2023 about how animal agriculture is under-reported in mainstream media coverage of climate change. So what percentage? Again, answer silently, what percentage of climate articles mention animal agriculture? The answer is just 7%. Just 7% mention it, even fewer mention it as a cause of climate change. This is the type of finding that can spur people to make different decisions. So, for example, this article got a ton of media coverage. Here are a little here's a little collage of six different publications. This is just a small selection that covered this finding. And this was essentially a way to get the mainstream media to think about this: if the animal agriculture industry is responsible for 20% or so of overall emissions, direct emissions, that is not including indirect emissions from land use, then why is the mainstream coverage so low? This type of thing is what allowed Sentient, formerly Sentient Media, who was our partner on this study, to present this data at climate change conferences in the United States to get journals to think about this more severely.

I will make one more point about catalyzing action. This is the most common type of research that organizations can do themselves. It is very common for animal advocacy organizations to partner with a small firm with a polling organization conduct a poll of their region or country and then show lawmakers or corporations that a majority of people actually want X thing to happen, like a band gestation grades, or a plant based program. Something like that. So if you're curious, in the next lesson, I'll talk to you about how to engage with the Faunalytics website. This is the type of thing that organizations can do themselves. 

Okay, now we're on to use five which is identifying problems. So here we're trying to flag key barriers species and regions to address, and we're looking for neglected areas ripe for impact. So this one's relatively self explanatory, but we're basically trying to figure out where, what type of animal, where in the world needs the most help. So for example, this is another one of our resources: Where are the most farmed animals being slaughtered? And we can see very clearly: China, Brazil and the United States.

This indicates pretty clearly that these are three key areas that are in need of the most animal advocacy organizations. Another example includes our animal product impact scales, which is one of our most popular resources that we have. We can see exactly which animal products would, if replaced by an alternative, save the most animal lives per category. This is a small screenshot of the entire report that we have, I really recommend you read this if you're working on food systems and consumption habits. So for example, if you're trying to save the most chicken lives, our research has shown that chicken shreds and ground can save the most animals. Is that most chickens as compared to something like chicken nuggets, same with seafood, fish eggs and other categories as well that we have.

So those are the five uses. I'll duck out the way one more time. These are the five uses of research. I'll just go over them one more time. External legitimacy, internal decision making, capacity building, catalyzing action and identifying problems. 

So overall, what's the middle of this? The point is we need to be thinking clearly as advocates about what this usage is trying to do. Are we trying to convince somebody of something as in catalyzing action? Are we trying to make ourselves seem more professional with external legitimacy? And by understanding what we're trying to do here, we can also understand how we can better use this research to get the intended results that we're looking for. If you ever have questions about this, beyond what's covered in this presentation, you can always reach out to me. 

I included my contact information in the third module, but in the meantime, I would like all of you to reflect on what are the primary purposes of research in your line of advocacy. It's likely that a few of these are going to be more salient and more purposeful for you than others. Take a few minutes to reflect on which are the uses of research that I use the most? And after you've come up with the answer to that, think to yourself, What does this imply for how I should use advocacy? 

Thank you very much, and I will see you in the next module.