CHOICE INFLUENCE
"Consumers should be able choose their food based on their own dietary preferences and nutritional needs and without being unduly influenced by any one group's personal agenda," she wrote in an email.
"We do not feel that Farm Sanctuary's campaign is reasonable, as the campaign's ultimate goal would be to eradicate poultry and pork from consumers' diets."
Thomas Super of the National Chicken Council said efforts to link farm animals with household pets was part of a strategy to create a "meat-free society."
He also contended that the farmers and companies involved in raising chickens have a vested interest in ensuring they are healthy and well treated.
While The Someone Project will encompass several species of farm animals, pigs are likely to be one of the prime subjects, given the breadth of past studies of their intelligence and behaviour. Some researchers say pigs' cognitive abilities are superior to 3-year-old children, as well as to dogs and cats.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has a section on its website entitled The Hidden Lives of Pigs which depicts them as social, playful and protective animals with a vocabulary of more than 20 different oinks, grunts and squeaks.
"Pigs are known to dream, recognize their own names, learn tricks like sitting for a treat, and lead social lives of a complexity previously observed only in primates," the website says. "Like humans, pigs enjoy listening to music, playing with soccer balls, and getting massages."
The website recounts news stories of pigs saving the lives of imperilled humans and saving themselves by jumping off trucks bound for slaughterhouses.
Bob Martin, a food systems expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, said he developed an appreciation of pigs' emotional complexity while serving recently as executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.
"Pigs in gestation crates show a lot of signs of depression," he said. "When I went to a farm operation in Iowa where pigs were not confined, they came running up to greet the farmer like they were dogs. They wanted to interact with him."
MEAT-EATERS
Bernard Rollin, a Colorado State University professor who teaches both philosophy and animal science, said he expected increasing numbers of meat-eaters to join the ranks of those demanding changes in the way pigs are housed at many large facilities.
"You have to have ideological blindness to think these animals are not intelligent," Rollin said. "I hope we go back to an agriculture that works more with the animals' biological and psychological needs and nature rather than against them."
"The trouble is, we're used to seeing them as herds," he said. "You see 1,000 cows or pigs and think, 'Oh, they're all the same.' But there are actually huge individual differences."
According to Farm Sanctuary, cows become excited over intellectual challenges, chickens can navigate mazes and anticipate the future, and sheep can remember the faces of dozens of individual humans and other sheep for more than two years.
There is existing research suggesting that campaigns such as The Someone Project may make headway in influencing consumers.
In one recent study examining doubts that people might have about eating meat, University of British Columbia psychologists Matthew Ruby and Steven Heine concluded that the animal's level of intelligence was the foremost concern.
Another recent study by university researchers from Australia and Britain concluded that many meat-eaters experience moral conflict if reminded of the intelligence of the animals they are consuming.
"Although most people do not mind eating meat, they do not like thinking of animals they eat as having possessed minds," the researchers wrote in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.