Enjoy this preview of Animology, a podcast about the animal-related words and expressions we use every day

and how they reflect and affect our relationship with animals.

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Animology, changing the way we think and talk about animals.

So how is it that we genuinely don't want to see animals suffer and yet we bring billions of them into the world each year only to kill them.

How do we reconcile our compassion for their living selves with our voracious appetite for their

dismembered flesh. How can we feel one way and act from such a contradictory

place? Well, psychologists studying this tension have coined it the meat paradox, the

phenomenon whereby people, this is a quote, people care about animals and do not want to see

them harmed, but engage in a diet that requires

them to be killed and usually to suffer." As posited by the theory of cognitive dissonance, when faced with a conflict like this,

when our actions don't reflect our ethics, we tend to take one of two roads.

We either change our behavior to align with our beliefs or we change our

beliefs to align with our behavior. The first option is played out most apparently in

the behavior of vegetarians and

vegans who choose to stop eating the flesh of animals as well as their eggs and

milk respectively. The second is manifested in more subtle ways,

such as by changing our perception of the animals themselves.

And this is where language plays a huge role.

Research has found that the way we perceive animals is intimately tied to our ability

to eat their flesh.

For instance, according to researchers on the psychology of meat consumption.

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