Eating meat has to be normalized just like any other cultural phenomena, so it has a large part in perpetuating patriarchal norms. Perhaps one of the biggest and most successful tools in the process of normalizing the meat lifestyle, and therefore in preserving its cultural acceptance in our society, is the use of advertisements. Advertising is omnipresent; it is almost impossible to escape to constant bombardment of images in our daily lives so, naturally, it makes sense that companies who produce meat products would use this to their great advantage. Paul M. Connell looked at the use of animals in advertising in order to study how anthropomorphism is used in advertising and found “that animals are more likely to be portrayed anthropomorphically (vs. nonanthropomorphically) in advertisements for nondurable goods… than for other product categories such as nondurables and services” and that “enhancing any animal’s physical similarity to humans by anthropomorphizing it would lead to more positive reactions to it” (461-2). This suggests that anthropomorphic animals are more likely to be used in advertising for perishable goods, meaning food, than for other non-food items, and the advertisements are more successful when the animals look explicitly humanistic. For example, every day we are besieged with advertisements which promise that bacon is one of the most delicious and savored meat products available to us, and these more often than not are accompanied by images of happy, healthy pigs. As critic Cathy Glenn argues, advertisements suggest a “[capability] of creating an alternative reality in which animals are constructed as able to ‘speak’ for themselves in order to tell consumers that they are content and happily consent to being used as resources” (67). These images are intentionally constructed to lead consumers to stop thinking about the process by which the product gets to their table, to believe that the animal was eager to be slaughtered and used for our gluttonous enjoyment; thus the consideration for and treatment of the animal itself do not even come up as blips on our moral radars.

Scholars Jennifer Lerner and Linda Kalof studied the symbolism of animals in advertising and how the images affect consumers by looking at various television commercials and analyzing the allegorical functions of the animals in those commercials. They describe six general categories that animal images are used for: “animals as loved ones (e.g., a member of a family), as symbols (representation of logos or ideas), as tools (using animals for human use or consumption), as allegories, as nuisances, and animals in nature” (565). Within the category devoted to the idea of animals as tools for human use and consumption, animals are generally sorted into two further subcategories: animals who are to be loved as family members and animals who are destined to be food or workers. Lerner and Kalof suggest that “only particular animals may be used [for food or work], reinforcing the standard Western divisions between pet and farm animals” (577). Clearly, there are crucial consequences for the species’ life chances who fall into the latter subcategory. This type of separation in advertising conveys the problematic message that it is not only acceptable to consume or use animals for human bidding, but also specifically normal, while also promoting an ethical separation of humans and animals:

[A]n animal’s baseline physical similarity to humans is an important determinant of how people react to it…Indeed, previous research has indicated that people morally disengage from species commonly consumed as food when contemplating their consciousness. (465)

By creating this nonchalant and pragmatic image of humans’ dominion over animals, these ads allow the viewer to disconnect emotionally from animals and then confirms the adequacy of the consumption of animals as products. This contrived and explicit system places some animals above others, while still firmly placing humans above all other nonhuman animals, and this is the most powerful feature in the advertising agenda.