Personally, I think vegan thinking is often the default with kids. My mum always jokes about how I wanted to stop eating meat ever since I found out that meat is made of animals, when I was kindergarten aged. I know I’m not the only one like that, I hear this exact story a lot from parents.

I personally even remember asking why there were so much more female chickens and basically being told that’s just a quirk of the species. Like, I get that ‘the male babies are shredded alive because they’re not profitable’ isn’t a nice thing to tell a kid, but that just means the adult realises the horror but chooses to continue participating in it and making the child participate too.

We teach kids compassion for living things, then deliberately teach to suspend that compassion when it comes to eating. We also deliberately keep from them how their animal foods are made in order for them to continue to be ok with eating them. A lot of content for kids shows these fantasy farms where the animals are happy to be kept there, sometimes anthropomorphized to a point where the content suggests they’re consenting. Without this conditioning, I think a lot more kids would opt out of meat and sometimes other animal products.