Dr Sam Illingworth reads his poem The Decline of Animal Rights. Poem 12. This collaboration is the first in a series of ideaXme collaborations with scientists, innovators and artists who move the human story forward. Watch the video here.
The ideaXme creator series is found here: https://radioideaxme.com/creator-series/
Sam Illingworth
His work and research focus on using poetry and games to develop dialogue between different audiences.
Poem | The Decline of Animal Rights
This poem is inspired by recent research, which has found that children differ dramatically from adults in their moral views on animals. Speciesism is defined as the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals. Speciesism is so commonplace that most people don’t think to question it except in cases where the type or degree of discrimination is unusual in their culture. As such, many humans exploit nonhuman animals in the course of everyday life in a variety of ways. Across many societies, nonhuman animals are consumed as food, used for clothing, killed for entertainment, and exploited for work. But where do these attitudes come from, and how might they be challenged? In this new study, researchers surveyed 479 people, all living in England, from across three different age groups: 9-11, 18-21 and 29-59. The two adult groups were found to have relatively similar views with relation to animal rights, thereby suggesting that attitudes to animals typically change between the ages of 11 and 18, i.e. that speciesism is likely learned during adolescence. As well as showing less speciesism, this study also found that children are less likely to categorize farm animals as food than pets, think farm animals ought to be treated better, and consider eating meat and animal products to be less morally acceptable than their adult counterparts. These findings imply that there are key age-related differences in our moral view of animal worth, pointing to socially constructed development. The study also highlights the need for more open dialogue at a younger age to help explore (and learn from) the moral intelligence of children with regards to our treatment of nonhuman animals.
Video credits: Video footage from Canva.
Voice over for ideaXme introduction: Neil Koenig former Senior BBC producer and journalist and current ideaXme board advisor and guest interviewer.
Music for ideaXme introduction: Music: Space Heroes by MaxKoMusic | https://maxkomusic.com/ Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…
Research on which the poem is based: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1…
Links to Dr. Illingworth’s audio podcast and social media:
Find all of his poems in this series (and further information relating to credits): https://thepoetryofscience.scienceblo…
Twitter: https://twitter.com/samillingworth?re…
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/consiliencej…
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