The immediate issue which arises here is that we encourage children to foster these emotional connections with their favorite animals and then turn around and tell them to eat their actual living counterparts without explaining to them the connection between the two. Scholar Rachel Karniol looked at the relationship that preschool age children have to the animal characters in their favorite stories. Her study predictably found that though children are more empathic toward others who are similar to themselves, “[their] reactions to stories are… mediated by their social comprehension rather than by matching of their own affect with that of the story character” (347). With this understanding, we can infer that children have the cognitive ability to distinguish between their own experiences and others’, yet are still able to empathize with others’ situations. The study further notes that “in watching The Lion King, one understands Simba's actions on the basis of one's generic representation of humans and their relationships to other another, rather than on the basis of one's understanding of the animal kingdom” (348). This suggests that children understand animal characters in movies, television, and storybooks to represent humans and the human condition, solidifying the rationale for using anthropomorphic animals to support children’s emotional development. The study goes on to look at how children feel when they relate to these human-like animal characters’ journeys throughout their stories. It became evident that children who could understand how other children felt to be negatively affected by aversive situations would also emote empathy for animals, and if they could empathize with both other children and animals, then they would experience “arousal…when they demonstrate empathic understanding of the negative affective reactions of [the story characters]… even when the story character is a child-like animal” (355). Of course, this is not the same type of arousal we associate with sex; arousal in children, for the purposes of this paper, signifies a positive physical experience resulting from emotional stimulation. We can then deduce that children are stimulated by empathizing with human-like animal characters, which bolsters their relationships with those characters.

These intensive, positive relationships that they form are extremely important to their development, yet we continue to tell them that eating these animals in real life is acceptable and even expected. They will do as they are told because the meat tastes so good, and adults do not bother to share the fact that the meat they are eating come from the animals they love so dearly. This mixed message hard to take in and we as a society cannot continue condoning this practice onto young, impressionable children. Essentially, we are teaching children how to relate to other humans via relationships with animals and then conditioning them to ignore the previous feelings they developed and consume these other beings. These children then grow up with the notion that this symbolically male act is the norm and thus anything that which is not male is not the norm, and there is something profoundly unethical about this process.