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Abstract

From a young age, children are deeply curious about animals. Stable patterns exist in the types of
attitudes children display towards different kinds of animals: they love pets, value animals that are
beautiful, and fear snakes and spiders (Borgi & Cirulli, 2015, https://doi.org/
10.2752/089279315X14129350721939). Until recently, we’ve known little about what children think
about the moral standing of animals, particularly relative to other entities, including humans. In
this review, we synthesize the literature examining children’s perceptions of the moral worth of
animals. We present factors about the animal, and factors about the judge (the child), shown to
impact children’s evaluations of animal moral worth. Based on current evidence, we make the
claim that children grant animals a high moral standing early on in childhood, but that this
decreases during late childhood, throughout adolescence, and into adulthood. We provide some
suggestions for the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that might drive these differences, and
make recommendations for the field going forward.