Assessing Attitudes Toward Animal Welfare Among Vegetarians and Omnivores: A Pre-COVID Analysis.

"How do vegetarians compare with omnivores in their views of animal welfare?" In 2020, this simple question was made more timely by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, in this pre-COVID survey in 2019; a standardized scale (Takooshian, 1988) was updated, for an analysis of 194 surveys, to compare the views of 33 vegetarians with 161 omnivores on four brief standardized scales: animal welfare (0-10 points, a = .58), animal research (0-10, a = .56), science (0-10, a = .65), and humans' uses of animals (0-22, a = .82). As expected, vegetarians are significantly more proanimal and antivivisection across all 25 of 25 comparisons. Future post-COVID research possibilities are discussed, to probe the likely future of plantbased diets and whether the COVID pandemic impacted these attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]