Most current animal advocacy focuses on adults. By raising awareness and deploying rational and emotional appeals, animal advocates go to great lengths to change attitudes and behaviors in grown-ups. Our attitudes and behaviors, however, don`t just fall out of the sky. What we think about animals and how we treat them (and why we think we are justified in doing so) is mostly the result of a long process of learning and habituation, which starts early on in life. Yet, comparatively little activist effort goes into reaching out to children and adolescents during this formative period.

This lamentable situation isn`t helped by the fact that the educational system (from kindergarten to school to university) is lagging far behind the social consensus regarding the moral and legal status of animals. At least in progressive countries, animals are now officially considered sentient individuals who deserve moral and legal protection in their own right. Still, this crucial insight is largely ignored in curricula or textbooks. And again, little activist effort aims at transforming what educational institutions teach young people about animals.

As a consequence, given an environment in which harming, killing and instrumentalizing animals is ubiquitous and widely considered normal, natural and necessary, socialization can run its course largely unchallenged. This raises important questions for animal advocacy: Why not also address the effect rather than only the cause? Why allow for socialization to be almost completed before putting animals on the agenda? Why try only to undo what has gone wrong rather than making sure that things don`t go wrong in the first place?

This presentation seeks to highlight the importance of placing greater emphasis on outreach to young people in animal advocacy. To this end, it provides a rough sketch of the current situation; spells out the central arguments for educating children about animal protection; addresses some of the challenges facing this approach; and presents the concept of an educational network as a first step toward acknowledging this largely neglected aspect of animal rights activism.