The rate of animal slaughter is rising due to an exponential increase in the global demand for meat. Tackling such a world challenge is difficult. Yet this was the very problem our educational approach aimed at addressing by focusing on a large-scale issue of high urgency affecting animals, humans, and the environment. At the outset of our article, we posed three interrelated questions; how teachers and learners might engage with potentially uncomfortable realities to appraise the issue of animal food production and consumption; how to consider the rights and experiences of nonhumans within a disciplinary area that focuses primarily on humans and whether and how activism might be used to augment teaching experiences (without losing critical rigor).
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Through a combination of film, scholarly literature, and discussion, we addressed the affected ignorance of the topic with engaged scholarship as a form of academic activism. We used a critical animal studies perspective to challenge the socially-sanctioned speciesism4 resting on 'the justifications and cost-benefit analysis provided by the [food] industry' and 'the physical and psychological distance created between the consumers and the sites of animal slaughter.' As the uncomfortable truth of what lies behind sanitized packaged animal products in our supermarket isles is hidden, change is only possible if the issues are acknowledged or the implications well understood. When discussing animals in the food industry, animal interests are often lagging behind environmental or human health reasons despite it being the animals who are foremost and directly affected. Our main contribution to business education is presenting the pedagogical approach of fierce compassion.
The three layers of fierce compassion comprise courageously witnessing, inquiring with empathy, and prompting positive action. It was interesting, then, that despite some strong viewpoints emerging in the classroom, no negative issues were reported in the end-of-course feedback. Indeed, our overall experience suggests that discomfort was pedagogically functional as this stimulated critical reflection and, for some, new thinking and care.