Marginalization of animals in the context of speciesism

The aim of this study is to develop a scale that measures the speciesism – marginalization of animals and discrimination against animals- within the context of contemporary animal ethics. In order to develop the speciesism scale, literature review was undertaken on social psychology studies which focus on human-animal relations and animal ethics; and an item pool was formed to delineate the domain. Opinions were taken from people working on animal rights and from people who are experts of measurement and evaluation in psychology. The scale was designed in 7-point likert type. The experimental form was applied to the participants with another scale that measures speciesism, Social Dominance Orientation Scale and Basic Empathy Scale. By using the snowball sampling technique, participants were selected from people who represented different positions in the context of animal use. The study was conducted with 288 participants. While 24 items were included in the trial form of the scale, some of these items were eliminated as a result of the factor analyzes. The final form of the scale with 15 items had a high reliability with ᾳ=.90 points. The items of the scale were divided into three sub-dimensions: belief in human supremacy, protectionist speciesism and speciesism in language. The scores obtained from the scale were found to be positively correlated with the scores obtained from the other speciesism scale and social dominance orientation scale. The scores obtained from the scale were distributed to the groups that represented various animal use lifestyles as expected. These data were evaluated as findings showing the validity of the scale. Keywords: Speciesism, speciesism scale, animal rights, discrimination, animal ethics