Jane Goodall gets a clue
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, August/September 1996:
RIDGEFIELD, Connecticut––Vegetarianism is rapidly
gaining among the young, suggest findings by the polling firm Smith
& Co., in a market research report prepared for the Roots & Shoots
environmental education project of the Jane Goodall Institute.
The pollsters also found that attitudes of youth toward laboratory
use of animals are increasingly skeptical, while broad attacks
on zoos, aquariums, and circuses on general principle may be foredoomed
to failure because the abolitionist perspective contradicts animal
lovers’ direct experience.
The Goodall Institute, based in Ridgefield, Connecticut,
hired Smith & Co., of nearby Monroe, to survey 396 students in the
sixth, seventh, and eighth grades within 12 local school districts.
The area is reasonably representative of the U.S. as a whole in
urban/suburban/rural population balance and income level, and is
historically associated with both biomedical research and the rise of
the animal rights movement. Both Friends of Animals and U.S.