The judgement trap

Just about everyone knows how vegans view the world but how do vegans view themselves? Perhaps we think being vegan is pretty much how everyone should be, morally speaking and health wise, but the danger is that vegans will seem as though they’re looking down from a height, perhaps boastfully, as if we are better than others. And if we think that way we might feel entitled to judge others who don’t think that way. And if we can’t get people to agree with us voluntarily we may use value judgement as a weapon against their complaisance. If we resort to this sort of moral force, it can be seen as a subtle form of violence or aggression. It’s as if we are violating the freedom of choice, when that choice is regarded by almost everyone, the law included, as acceptable.
From an outsider’s point of view there’s something about a holier-than-thou person that is distinctly unattractive and needing to be ‘brought down to size’. Anyone who thinks themselves better, whether cleverer, wealthier, better looking or more righteous, is unattractive, simply because they seem so self satisfied.
If vegans refuse to be judgemental it changes everything. They have a quality which others can admire, mainly because it isn’t in their face. And that counts for a lot, despite it seeming to us as being too passive. Vegans often feels that if they aren’t up front that they’re being apologetic about being vegans. We’re more used to the stridency of putting our arguments into circulation, causing a disturbance to attract attention, laying it on the line. But that’s been done, and it hasn’t had enough of the right sort of impact to build momentum amongst the general population. Animal rights has a reputation of exposing the truth but no acceptable currency in the public’s mind, and we have to ask why. Is it perhaps that the vegan extreme is more than people can take on board? And are we giving people a ready made excuse to avoid the truth we present by letting them think badly of us as judgmental evangelicals?
For us there are two positions to think about here: can we afford to be a benign presence and yet still an activist who isn’t a threat or an embarrassment to others? And can our self image be acceptable to us as a vegan activist who knows our own strengths and doesn’t need to prove our self by using judgement? We are surely stronger all round, to us and to others, if we have a completely non-violent image. As low as we might be on society’s ladder, we must know that our vegan principle is an inner strength. It doesn’t let us down, it is there to support us when we don’t seem to be making an impact, and it can only dissolve if we have to boast about it. In other words we remain positive and strong as long as we never think of others as being ‘below’ us.

Exploding the myths

Vegans will always have their work cut out, persuading people to change radically. But for us it’s not just about persuading reluctant people, it’s surely also about caring for them and being useful to them as they are, even if they don’t appear to listen to what we say. Underneath all our anger and frustration and aggressive thoughts towards our adversaries, we have a job to do, to break the myths people are attached to and help them see things as they really are, and go on from that point, always keeping it simple and clear.
We need to stress the same things over and over, until the penny drops – that some home truths are not as true as people believe. Many people still believe meat (and therefore animal farming) is essential for human survival, and that testing drugs on animals is the only way to have safe pharmaceuticals. People are so locked into these beliefs that we, as vegans, need to explain a different view of safety and survival, all the time emphasising compassion and the reliability of instinct. We have to persuade them to do what instinctively they know they should be doing, always within a context of non-violence.
But whatever we can get across we have to make sure we aren’t preaching, just advising. We are all hypersensitive to being criticised or being judged.

World problems

There are plenty of other idea-schools contending for attention on the great issues of the day - global warming, environment, world hunger, animal welfare, and each is significant so none of them can be sidelined. Are we overwhelmed by the extent of world problems, each of which need to be solved, one by one? Do we say, “Too hard, too hard” or “Another day, another day”? Is there a feeling today that we won’t find the answers we need? Are we reluctant to go beyond our mindsets to find answers? Is it all too big and too difficult? If we do think this way, nothing will change and we’ll head straight for our own destruction.
We can’t expect politicians to fix things for us. We need to lead the way and make our own step forward. Small changes won’t help. Radical changes may help.

Stepping out

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice goes looking for something. She finds a bottle inviting her to drink. She follows the instruction, she takes the risk and steps into the unknown. She enters another world, and her first instinct is to make friends with the beings she meets there, but they don’t reciprocate because they accept their own dimension and can’t change (their superficial nature). They don’t see the point of befriending Alice or taking her advice. They see no way to improve their life by following her example, which may be a metaphor for human obstinacy towards taking notice of obvious answers.
In our world all the opportunities for change exist, changes for our own benefit and for other’s. So what prevents us stepping out from what we’re used to? What stops us following the “drink me” instructions and entering a radically new world to find a new slant on our problems? I guess we’re reluctant because the other dimension seems unrealistic, incomprehensible or even ridiculous. But for people like vegans, we are forced to take something from beyond the familiar dimension (in this case, step away from our familiar violent world) and then apply what we find there, to our whole life. To us there must be some obvious answers, we look beyond the present world which we know is fundamentally flawed. And we find a simple principle of non-violence which seems highly significant. But to non-vegans, who haven’t looked that far, it isn’t such a universal principle. It doesn’t appear significant enough to apply it universally. And there the great difference lies.
No one wants to waste time on trivial matters and veganism may seem utterly trivial in the greater scheme of things to non-vegans. So, vegans need to communicate why vegan principle is linked to the universality of non-violence, and therefore why it is so important. Although we know what we’ve found has transformed our own lives, for others nothing like that has happened to them, nothing has been transformed and there remains a belief that no one simple principle is capable of making transformatory changes.
Vegan arguments, logic and statistics can help to convince but we need to translate everything into a language that can be understood by anyone. We have to continually return to basics, to emphasise the importance of not being cruel to weak beings or destructive or wasteful. That anti-bullying, anti-exploitative principle, combined with the example of our own behaviour, is what we have to convince with.

Self focus

An obstacle to success might be self obsession. So we put some energy into things outside self interest. Maybe we do charity work, become an environmentalist or a vegetarian. But the bottom line is how much self focus there is in what we do - my development, my road to enlightenment, my happiness. It shouldn’t rest there, and perhaps that’s what veganism tries to point out. To be fully rounded, to see beyond self-improvement, we need compassion, namely the ability to ‘be with’ another’s problems, to represent another’s interests as if they were one’s own. It requires a particular type of self discipline - thinking about others before thinking about ourselves. And that, by including animals, brings us back to vegan principles.
If we decide to become a vegan we have to see it not as a restriction but a liberation – it’s not just about abstaining from eating certain foods, it’s about developing something better. Food-wise it means healthier food, ethics-wise it means compassion. The route to success is having responsibility to do the right thing and having enough energy to keep it up. With good nutrition and clear conscience we can make resolutions that we know we can keep.

Lambs to the slaughter

Today is Australia Day or Invasion Day, call it what you will. It’s a day where celebrations often take the form of roasting meat over flames in the tradition of the Great Ozzie BBQ. A popular victim of these celebrations is sheep meat (well, in fact a lamb that has been executed at a very young age because it’s flesh is tender when cooked) and humans like the taste of cooked young flesh. This very salivating thought makes Australia Day a day to-be-looked-forward-to.

Australia Day is celebrated by a back-to-nature fire ritual, roasting lambs over open flames. It’s a disgusting habit but ‘everybody does it’. ‘Nobody’ has to think about it, since they’ve always done it – eaten lambs and other baby animals – and they like doing it, and have done it so often they can’t stop. They’re addicted to the taste and excited by the smell of it cooking.

And this is just one of the many ugly habits that have become part of our life, which now we can’t contemplate giving up.

What troubles some of us is our own lack of self-discipline. We can’t give up smoking, can’t kick the bottle, can’t stop eating those cutlets, and if we meet people who’ve kicked their addictions it makes us feel twice as bad. We might call them ‘the self-improved’, and when ‘they’ don’t seem likeable as people, we dislike them and it’s likely we’ll come to dislike the whole idea of ‘self improvement’.

But that’s not to say we don’t want any sort of self-improvement - improving our circumstances brings certain advantages. We’d all become self-improved if it meant becoming famous, rich or well thought of. But why waste time on being disciplined about not eating animals, especially if it only means saving lambs from being executed!

Their eyes glaze over

Vegans are familiar with that look. Often too polite to tell us, but to themselves it’s “I don’t have to listen to this crap”. Most people are alert to the lead-up vegans use to get to a point across. Subtle means whereby we edge round to talking animal stuff, but to the listener it’s not difficult to spot – when someone mentions something that will establish the difference between one viewpoint and another. “…but should we be eating animals?” That question in its many guises is often weedled into a conversation, sometimes thrust at unsuspecting listeners, rather like a Jehovah’s Witness introducing themselves as representitives of ‘The Lord Jesus Christ’. One knows what’s coming. We suss them, ignore them, shut the door and forget they ever knocked.
Certain things we learn to ignore. My grandparents lived on a train line, and when I was young I sometimes stayed with them and the noise of steam engines passing the window was deafening, but after a while I could sleep at night as they roared past. This switch-off ability is the same one that’s used to avoid hearing what we don’t want to hear, in this case what a vegan might be saying.
So, for us, trying to get our message across, is infuriating. All we see is a blank look, a resistance. We try to get through it but often fail … and what happens next is understandable but may be the reason why we are having so little impact on people, because we are not as battle-hardened as we could be.
It’s so frustrating that so many people simply tune out …so, we become exasperated … we try to barge past their defences …go for the jugular … dig right into people’s guilt or fear, in the hope we’ll bring them around by force. If only!
Health talk and fear of personal illness works on some level, but it doesn’t magically lead to a respect for vegan principles or an enthusiasm for animal liberation. Trying to change people’s attitudes by making them feel guilty or afraid is a sure fire way to make them run. It’s a tactic that might have worked a hundred years ago (if there had been vegans around then, which there weren’t) but it won’t work today … because there is such an overwhelming number of omnivores, amongst whom, especially the young, few seem to be suffering from the foods they’re eating. Nor are there many who seem to be consumed by guilt. No fun living with guilt! For them, things seem to be working and …if it works why fix it? People identify with their peers and people with attractive personalities, and with what they do. It’s easy NOT to identify with animal activists, who sometimes seem ‘frustrated’, ‘exasperated’ and the ‘aggressive type’. Amongst any group of people, of any age, the norm is still meat eating, with no particular problem with animal food or in switching off compassion when food’s on. What they do have a problem with is confrontation, especially over moral issues, where their own ethical values and self-discipline are being questioned. Free-willed people don’t take kindly to being told what to do or what to eat.

Hearing no evil

When vegans say “change to plant-based food” it’s about the most troubling advice anyone could be given because, on the one hand it sounds right but, on the other it goes against the grain. Veganism touches the most sensitive nerve in our body, personal survival. We’d rather live the life we know than risk a journey into the unknown.
However much vegans promise good times ahead, however fit and energetic and calm-minded they seem, basic survival instinct nearly always kicks in. It rules our head, overrides logic, compassion, the lot. At this crucial point between stage three and stage four (thinking about it and thinking about doing it), it’s only will power keeping our minds clear enough to weigh our options - ideally, theoretically, the vegan regime seems right but in practice it means leaving part of our present life behind. Going vegan is like our second weaning.
People do hear what we say but they don’t process it, for fear of how it might affect them. When they purposely forget what they hear, it’s like tuning out the radio or closing the book. We avoid unpleasant information, and it’s easy to avoid because most others do.
Any time vegans are successful in getting others to listen, we assume more willingness on their part than they may feel. We think we are communicating something valuable to them, they, on the other hand, simply hear a vegan speech. And they know they don’t have to listen to it, so they glaze over. It’s like when the ads come on TV and we switch our attention to something else.
Because the information is about animal suffering the whole experience of listening can be unpleasant. That’s why it’s our job to use imagination, to gauge how much unpleasant stuff we can let out and balance it by the uplifting aspects of vegan principle.

Why people resist

(Friday's blog missed)
The theory and practice of veganism are at odds here. Ideally and logically our arguments are very clear and attractive … to us. But the perception of them by others can be quite different. A communication wall exists between how we see it and the way others do. The logic goes something like this: we have, within vegan principles, the most inspiring statement of non-violence anyone can make, just by the sort of food we choose to eat and therefore the philosophical statement we choose to make. At every meal we prove that we’re no longer in league with the animal industries, and that qualifies us to say something groundbreaking about food and about ethics. But that’s not the same thing as having something universally interesting to impart or being invited to speak about it - what we have on offer may not be the currency that other people are keen to have. So, it isn’t just a case of announcing the arrival of a unique eating regime and automatically inspiring the meat eaters to roll over. Ideal conditions we don’t have. People are not queuing up to hear what we have to say.
So, we have to keep returning to the drawing board to ask ourselves what it is we are really dealing with? It’s not just stubbornness. It’s not only that people don’t want to be told what to do by us. It’s probably much more to do with the difficulty people are having in admitting to themselves that they are eating particular foods three times a day which ethically they should not be eating. And none of us should have been eating them, ever, at the rate of about a thousand meals per year, for every year we’ve lived. In other words no one wants to admit they’ve been wrong for so long. To restore the balance, to make things right, we’re not just suggesting that people change an occasional token item on their shopping list, but forgo favourite foods (as well as other commodities) for the sake of a higher principle, and move on into another world of plant based foods and non-animal clothing. And never look back.
Put that way it seems like a massive undertaking. For people to agree with this might seem unlikely, however the argument logically holds up. The principles vegans suggest are the best ones to live by can serve us well. Immediately they overturn an addiction to dangerous foods, and as with any addictive substance getting ‘clean’ is always going to be attractive. It’s as exciting as breathing fresh air after almost suffocating. And yet we tend to stick what is familiar. Our resistance is solid. It’s reinforced everyday in the media, in food shops, in advertising, in the nutrition advice we’re given and just by the common usage of these foods. It’s doubly reinforced by the fact that no one speaks against animal foods or farm animal treatment even though they purport to be our spiritual or educational advisers, and that’s because they are users themselves.

Solo exploring

Each of us may feel highly inspired, and perhaps we think we don’t care if no one else understands, but in the end we will have to care enough to condense it into one single thread from which all our ideas will spring: veganism, animal rights, non-aggression, health and happiness, each one stemming from the idea of working with Nature rather than against it. The human race has been struggling to dominate Nature for a long time, and this is the cause of so many of our most serious problems. We need to find a way of going back to a more natural lifestyle. We don’t have to revert to primitive living, but just find a way to use our present sophisticated human systems and base them on vegan principles of harmlessness. Working out how to do things this way is likely to be what future discovery is all about, and the more we discover the more we will want to communicate it to others.
To do that requires a morale strong enough to overcome the odds against us. As people have found out who have pursued non-violent methods, including those who’ve become vegans, there isn’t much support from family or friends or the general public or in fact from vegan colleagues. So much of it has to be worked out on our own. Those of us who’ve decided to devote our time and energy to promoting animal rights have taken on this sort of challenge with a will. There are still very few pro-active vegans in number and they are widely dispersed. Rather like foreign ambassadors, we may be feeling very alone, unsupported, vulnerable and at times depressed by this surprising lack of support. And yet what we’ve been inspired by is of such importance that, come what may, it is essential to maintain momentum. Animal Rights is no contemplative order. It isn’t based on prayer or wishful thinking but on an active search for solutions and a search for break throughs of attitude. It isn’t only about doing one’s duty to help animals or trying to convert people but about making the hard work we’ve taken on enjoyable; deriving pleasure and satisfaction from a new non-violence in everything we do. And from that our solo explorations can take on a momentum of their own.

Transition stages

Feeling part of the Animal Rights Movement is just the beginning of the advantages a vegan lifestyle offers. It also helps us to develop the skills we need to communicate compassion, trust and a certain lightness of being, which makes people less afraid of us. And if people don’t fear that we’ll do a Jeckyl and Hyde on them - friendly one minute, hostile the next - it’s our ingrained non-violence that they see. As long as we can maintain that ‘working trust’ with people, we are helping them get ever closer to stage 3, where they were once hostile but are now open to suggestion, and willing to take this subject seriously.

Stage 4 is the first stage of being vegan, remembering how it was to be non vegan. It’s the start of knowing that it works for us and wanting to share that with others. And it’s perhaps the first time of realising how difficult it is to talk about this subject. It’s at this point we gather together some new and convincing arguments – the ones with which we aim to change the world single handed!

Passionate talking

If vegan activists are in the business of talking about animals it all adds up to a great personal challenge, which can become, in itself, our main reason-to-be. The whole animal rights thing has to be one of the greatest challenges we can possibly face, whether we are struggling to change our eating habits or struggling to get the vegan message across. Unless we can deal with these struggles and find them meaningful we’ll never be able to discuss this subject with people who are still oblivious to it. The subject is broad, its implications touch every branch of life if only because the human condition is always darkened by our resorting to violence to solve our problems. There is hardly anything we do involving others, that is not in some way improved by considering non-violence.
If we try to make Animal Rights/Veganism just an ethics or health issue we will be selling it cheaply. It is all that, but so much more. It opens the inner human eye to another world in which we can find peace of mind. Vegans are, after all, developing a compassionate instinct which sends a sense of body health and clarity of thinking shimmering through our very soul. But all in all, this subject gives us the chance to enjoy serious conversations which have nutritional, environmental and ethical implications, that are always more interesting than discussing the latest house prices.

Hurting animals

By representing Animal Rights we have to step aside from being personally right about animal cruelty and animal food in order to stress the importance of mature empathy for people, which in turn ignites people’s empathy for animals according to do unto others what you’d have done to yourself . If we can apply this to fellow humans why not to animals too? By taking the emphasis away from our own self development and by being consistent, we bring our arguments down to a very simple comparison, between the empathy we naturally show any dog or cuddly cat or horse and our feelings for other animals. For the companions at home, the last thing we’d want to do is hurt them, because we know them as individuals and know each one to have their own strong personality. Animal Rights is all about these strong empathetic bonds we have between ourselves and ‘the creatures’ and it’s likely none of us could purposely de-individualise any animal, and certainly not to help us end its life.
When I was young I was hiking in the country overnight. In the evening I found a pigeon which had eaten poisoned bait. I looked after it overnight but it was in such obvious pain the next day I took a knife to its throat. I often think of that bird, at the moment when I had to end its life and I hope it understood why I did it. But for an animal to face the knife without their being any compassionate reason to kill it, must be like any victim facing their murderer. And yet billions of such animals face their murderers each day. Present is no kindly vet to ease the trauma, no anaesthetics, just the machinery of death and humans forcing them forwards to their execution. To think how one animal will suffer like this, let alone billions of them, is unimaginable. Humans love animals as they do children. We have a strong sense of empathy for animals. Even trees being deforested are less empathised with than animals, but humans are good at pretending. They pretend they can feel empathy because they love their dogs and cats, and that allows them to exclude farm animals who they condemn to death row and for whose bodies and by products they provide a market.

Explosive material

What we say must, in part, be attractive. And then the punter will be able to bear the weight of all the other important things we’re telling them. Maybe this is the first time these things have ever entered their heads – the possibility of a totally plant-based food regime which involves no cruelty to animals. Whatever business we have with other people, kids or adults, we are but ghosts in their world of independent thought – it’s they who eventually decide to join a growing number of impassioned animal activists, when they are ready.
This subject is so emotionally charged, so deeply connected with daily habits, that any talk of ‘animals’ can make people feel immediately embarrassed for being in the wrong. Although proud of being sensitive, cool, intelligent and likeable, what vegans are saying can explode a few self-myths and puncture self image, by alluding to double standards. As vegans, we need to show support and mix it into the information we provide. Vegans aren’t supposed to be shame merchants. And we shouldn’t try to boost our ego with an inflated sense of our own specialness.

Winning the un-won

It’s relatively easy to convince the few who are already beginning to take us seriously, who are at ‘stage two’, but the vast majority of people on this planet are nowhere near there yet. And it’s these people who most need to be contacted. Not to change them by force but to understand their fears and the ignorance behind their thinking. We have to discover the cause of their obstinacy. We have to try to unearth their deep set collective prejudices. Only when someone is ready to let go of their resistance and admit there’s a case to answer, will they be approaching stage 2, where we can then be freer to speak.
If we, as vegans, are asked a question we may have our reply off pat We may be so sure our answer is accurate that we forget how it might sound to the questioner. Before we answer questions we have to ask ourselves how someone is going to feel when we tell them what they asked about, but which they’ll probably not want to hear about? In answering, it’s easy to twist the knife, to remonstrate, to garnish our answers with a little barb of guilt. And that usually works in our favour for about ten seconds, until they realise they’re being lectured, which is when their reaction usually kicks in – a reaction designed to protect their lifestyle.
This is why whatever we want to say should be halved. Surely the trick in talking animal rights is not only NOT to twist the knife but to tread carefully over the red hot coals we’ve slipped under their feet. If they feel offended then we must say less than intended … even to the point of ‘throwing away’ a line or two, just to keep things on an even keel. The best way to hold people’s attention is to deliver some of what we want to say and then pull back in time to avoid them turning off. If that means putting our case more casually than we’d like, even subliminally, then it might be more effective that way. We can’t afford to forget how justified people want to feel, how much they want to disagree with our basic premise and how much they want to stop listening. We’re trying to inhibit each of these reactions whilst passing across useful information.

Hostility to veganism

It’s easy to forget just how aggressive otherwise-peaceful people can be when it comes to this subject. But it’s understandable. Whoever we are, vegans and non-vegans, we all react badly to being ‘in the wrong’, which is precisely what vegans often make quite clear when talking to non-vegans. It’s what vegans tend to do, because we feel we have no other option. But to be fair, putting people right is also partly to show off our vegan superiority. Even though we have watertight arguments, we put peoples’ backs up. And also, when we describe a new idea, it may be something people haven’t heard of before, and they fear what they don’t know. And that makes them react negatively.
As vegan advocates we must get past the shock of people’s aggression by understanding why it comes about in the first place. It’s more like a knee-jerk reaction. But often their bark is worse than their bite; they feel insulted by what we say but their objections are often paper thin. We have to get used to stupid reactions and pretend naivety, especially if we realise there’s nowhere else for our adversaries to go. In their attempt to speak intelligently, in response to vegan arguments, they often fail because there’s so little argument for them to use. When they foresee this and feel uncomfortable about it, there’s perhaps a mix of aggression, shame and indignation. Our adversaries can only escape by using aggression or showing indifference. They might take umbrage, they might storm off in a huff, and maybe vegans feel they’ve won the day. But in the long term we lose out to a sometimes long standing hostility to all-ideas-vegan. Unless we can soften this opposition it might mean we’ll lose them altogether.

Ambassadors for animals

Being vegan and going public is a bit like being on a diplomatic mission in a foreign country or working as a lawyer representing a client – by following the sort of instructions ‘the animals themselves’ would approve (if they could instruct us!). If animals could speak their feelings they would surely tell us the best way to act in their interests. They wouldn’t recommend showing hostile feelings (despite their having suffered from cruel treatment on farms or vivisection labs). Since they know humans better than humans know themselves, having seen the very worst of them for so long, they know how to survive. They would advise us to work on our fellow humans in a slow and steady way.
Although vegans, being humans themselves, aren’t under the same sort of threat from ‘the human danger’ as domesticated animals are, we are up against them all the same. We can learn a lot from animals who know not to draw attention to themselves. That’s how vegans should be when talking with the hard rump of resistant meat eaters - for a time we must wait, as animals do, and encourage dialogue by letting them have their say, if only because we need to earn enough brownie points for them to allow us in. Then we can give it our best shot and perhaps make our mark.
Why be so indulgent towards these people? Because they constitute 95% of our population most of whom we eventually need on side. Make no mistake - they aren’t compliant on this subject of ours. They love their animal foods and they love their leather shoes. Like cornered rats, they instinctively do NOT like the position we vegans have taken.

Being well informed

Eventually vegans need grounding in matters of ethics, nutrition and environment. If vegans can read up on this, we’re more likely to be able to speak intelligently about animal rights. However, let’s not kid ourselves, we have a difficult position to hold because we are bound to deliver threatening ideas that seem improbable to say the least (“What, no more animal products at all?”). So, this is all the more reason why we need to appear well informed and approachable.
This is a complicated subject which can easily tie us up in knots. If we aren’t sure of what we’re saying it makes us defensive. If we get rattled it’s because we’re trying to avoid looking foolish? And so vegans, who are unable to defend their position or answer a simple enquiry, have got to be able to deal with being put on the spot - it’s not easy to admit that we don’t know something which we’re expected to know. But just by admitting that, we earn credibility for being honest. There’s no fooling anyone out there. If we don’t know something or we get something wrong, and then fall back on emotional and subjective replies, we lose credibility. Because we don’t want to let the side down or because, personally, we don’t want to appear vulnerable to criticism, we’re likely to use moral confrontation. Certainly the cruelty angle is the strongest suit to play but we should hold back on it if we can, just as we would by holding back our trump cards. It is after all so confronting, especially if we attack people with such slogans as ‘meat is murder’. It is strategically better to use slogans only in the last resort.
Whatever we feel inside, there’s no reason for it to show through, even if we’re talking with red necked, vegan-hating carnivores. Whatever we feel inside, about the person we’re with, if we can maintain a neutral exterior and listen without reacting, and keep our talk calm, we’ll get the respect and the go-ahead to speak more fully. And then, once we’re allowed to voice our opinion, we have a better chance to reach people.

The vegan bulldozer

When meeting people who are not eager to hear what we have to say, it’s easy to blow it. But if we are affable enough we can bulldoze them - some chutzpah can work as long as we maintain a sense of humour and some familiarity, (this after all is a serious yet intimate subject). We don’t have to be best buddies with everyone, we just need to build mutual respect and emphasise the need for equality of status. If we’re open to their views, it’s more likely they’ll try to listen to what we have to say.
‘Out there’ there is genuine interest. People want to know what we eat, they want to know what a vegan diet is, even what our views are. They might ask provocative questions, and for this they’ll put up with a bit of cheek, even to the point where we can send them up for eating ‘dead animals’, but . . . there’s a hairsbreadth between friendly chat and us making value-judgements of them. Maybe vegans feel, out of loyalty to the animals, that we should be deadly serious and confront people where ever we can – as if to show how deeply we feel. But once we get heavy we stop them identifying with us and they begin to lose interest in what we’re saying. Passing on information laden with judgement (and statistics) is dull. It’s confronting. And even worse when we change the ‘temperature’ by withdrawing something that shouldn’t be withdrawn. The spat becomes unfriendly and that’s only justified if someone is hurtful or rude. If we go to all the effort to establish a connection it shouldn’t be broken lightly.
Even if we can’t be buddies we do have to work from a position of equality. We can’t afford to lose anyone to inferiority or superiority – that would be such a wasted opportunity. We must be seen to respect all views as valid (even the wrong ones!) until proven otherwise. Serious conversation is still only a discussion in which everyone must feel free to disagree or concede. It isn’t a competition or an excuse to spark bad feelings, and for our part we must try never to withdraw on someone or leave another person behind. However far apart our views may be our feelings for each other shouldn’t be compromised. By keeping the human to human connection open we remain simply two individuals chatting. Or it might be a vegan speaking to a room full of strangers, but as long as some level of affection is maintained the interaction is alive. It’s a sort of professionalism setting the standard for our relationships and the reputation of the cause we represent.
The best teachers at school never lose sight of their responsibility to the students in their care. They might stand no nonsense from their students but they never withdraw their affection for them. And that’s how it should be with the Animal Rights activist: everything we say, unpopular, grim or otherwise, must be presented without zealotry. If we’re asked to explain something, we need answers. And if we don’t know something there has to be an intention to find out and feed back. We break our own rules when we hide behind our lack of expertise by becoming emotional and start raving on about cruelty, as if no one knew it existed. On one level people are very well informed – most adults know more or less what’s going on out there - but what they don’t know are the details. And presumably we do, otherwise we wouldn’t be so keen to talk about it. So, in their eyes we should have some useful information to impart. And that’s why we should be prepared.

Being friendly and not pushy

Animal liberation/ vegetarianism is a subject people discuss amongst themselves in order to build a resistance to it. They develop a stock response. They tar us all with the same brush, and regard most of us as pushy, especially the ‘dangerous extremist vegans’. In our society, the more the term ‘vegan’ is known about, the more frequently we are bagged. Already today, most people are familiar enough with our ideas to be bolting their doors to us before we’ve even had the chance to introduce our arguments.
But not everyone is like this, especially those with a gentler disposition and more open minds, mainly younger generation people. Not having made so many independent food choices they’re not as likely to be locked into defensive attitudes. However, all non-vegans, whether extremist or otherwise, are keen on survival! They may not believe a vegan diet is altogether healthy or safe, and they’re not sure they can rely on our information about plant-based diets. This is why our initial contacts are so critical, and why we have to come across as well informed and concerned about people’s safety, and appear to have high personal standards as well as panache and sensitivity. But above all, why we need to be friendly people.

Clash of opposites

Here are the same levels of acceptance put another way:
Stage 1 - the sun is hot, the water cool, who gives a stuff about …”What did you say? Animals? You want me to think about … what?” With an attitude like that it’s probably not a good time to be talking about animal rights.
Stage 2, where a person might not agree, but admits this is a serious issue.
Stage 3, listening, re-thinking long-held habits and learning new ones
Stage 4, agreement and trialling the diet
Stage 5, moving towards being ‘vegan’
Stage 6, becoming a political activist and going public.

The Danger Zone
At stage 6, the political vegan encounters difficulties - with ‘stage one’ people we can fall into the trap of reacting badly when they respond negatively - we meet people who don’t normally talk about ethics or the philosophical issues concerning animals, especially with people like us. They avoid talking about anything remotely connected with animals. They purposely don’t ask us to speak about animals or veganism, and therefore we don’t have the right to speak about it, and if we suddenly bring it up we’ll be labelled as ill mannered, pushy or just plain weird.
With ‘stage one’ people we have to break down the mistrust and dislike that precedes us, by showing an interest, getting to know them, establishing some real trust. It’s useless to go ‘crashing their party’ by forcing them to listen to serious and potentially confronting issues.
If there is a spark of interest or even a question, then we’re in business. (That is, unless they’re just being polite and there’s no real interest at all). It’s so rare to find an unguarded, intelligent question, that it might put us on the spot, where we have to try responding intelligently, which means answering without using the occasion as an excuse to launch into things we haven’t been asked.
We have a lot we want to say but we don’t often get the chance, and find putting out tiny scraps of information frustrating. We may have become so used to assuming people are either insensitive or purposely closed down on the subject, that we expect the worst. We get exasperated. We force our arguments - we try to put a foot in the door, and then to our immense surprise find it closed in our face. The doorkeeper is defensive, privacy violated, instinctive response, ‘once bitten twice shy’ … the door closed on us for ever.

Persuasion

We’re in a tricky position as self-appointed advocates for animals, because we assume the right to talk about them on account of the fact that we don’t eat them. That’s a strong position to be in but it doesn’t give us the right to advise people what to eat or expect them to agree with us. Or even to listen to what we have to say.

How we go about persuading suggests various stages of acceptance, theirs of us and then ours of ourselves.
1. We need to be invited to speak on this subject
2. We need to earn the listener’s respect and interest
3. We need to be convincing and go easy on the moralising

4. We ourselves need to agree with vegan principles
5. Put them into practice
6. Become an activist, communicating, educating, informing and being sensitive to people’s problems regarding their food addictions and their relationship with animals.


Starting at stage 5
Some practising vegans might choose not to be activists. Even if vegan food is the best food for them to eat, it doesn’t mean to say Animal Rights is a realistic cause for them to promote. It may be seen as a hopeless case, and becoming an activist a waste of time - better to leave ‘politics’ to others. If ‘home vegans’ speak about it at all it’s mostly to the people they know.

Stage 6
If we decide to go further and attempt to persuade people, to protest, demonstrate or get into direct action, we first of all would need to believe the cause is worth promoting, and despite the seeming lack of interest amongst people, we need to be optimists, both seeing the urgency of change as well as seeing what is already happening in people’s attitudes. It’s a mixture of people’s concerns with the sort of foods they’re eating and a concern for the animals being used for food. If those twin concerns are pointing to a need for personal change then, with some of that high energy (from our vegan diet) we should be able to direct our activism into inspiring these people.
We have to keep our feet on the ground however. We have to realise how unaware 95% of people still are about the level of animal cruelty and the dangers in eating animal foods. From most of them we can expect negative reactions. They can range from indifference to passionate resistance. And so if that’s the way things are today, we might have to get used to that, by recognising the different levels of acceptance.

Holding the interest

If the days of the soap box are dead we may need to communicate in a more intimate way, even on a one to one level, introducing our animal issues during an intelligent conversation. So, when talking casually-almost, this subject of animal use might come up, and the fact that vegans do significant things that others don’t do, may provoke an interest.
“You’re a vegan then?”
“Yes”
“Why?”
“It’s what I feel passionately about”
As soon as the significance of that mixes with what is already known about veganism, interest may fade. As soon as it sinks in, that we are supporters of animal liberation, it may be all rather overwhelming. They might regret the casual question they’ve asked. And so their next comment may be designed to stop us in our tracks:
They change the subject.
Or they might go the other way, and try to provoke us,
“You’re what?”
Or gingerly, they might engage us
“y….e .. s, go on …”
This last response, if sincere, is so rare that it usually takes us by surprise … but we need to be ready for it. Be prepared to say what we stand for and why. But that brings us to effectiveness - how do we say what we want to say casually enough, informing enough and without confronting? How do we answer in such a way that leaves the other person interested, informed but not put off?

Going public

When activists start hurling abuse in public it works wonders, in the short term. It unifies our fellow protesters, it makes us feel good, and sometimes it’s brave - if we look scary enough it might strike fear into people’s hearts. But unless we are willing to continually escalate the violence of this sort of protest it loses its power and eventually fizzles out. Big talk and threats can only promise what can’t be delivered.
Whilst not wishing to sound obnoxious about it, the aim of any animal rights protest should be to please and win over. Our main aim should be to set an example that others can identify with. The sort of people we are, warts and all, are people simply trying to live non-violently. If any one is moving towards veganism, even if only in their thoughts, they are beginning to identify with the people they see who seem to be gravitating towards a non-violent way of thinking and pulling away from ‘hard nose’ attitudes.
If we are already established vegans we may, at some stage, want to ‘go public’. We may want to make a huge fuss to prevent veganism being misrepresented and to stop us being so easily ignored. But the general public will ignore us completely given half a chance. Any excuse will do when it comes to avoiding the dreaded animal rights advocate.
It’s made all the more difficult for us because we can’t catch people’s attention. We no longer bump into people on street corners and converse with them on serious matters. There are no passers-by to talk to, nowhere we can ‘address the public’. Most people lead such private lives – we go from home to car to work to car to home, so we live in a cocoon. No one meets the stranger, and so no new ideas circulate unless through the sanitised media. In the main, people no longer go searching for new or radical ideas because no one wants any extra aggravation on top of the pressures facing them already. So, how in the first place do vegans make a connection and then prove we genuinely want to inform and, when there are differences of opinion, bridge the gulf in a non-threatening way? How do we convince people we only want to help improve their lives? Perhaps we do it simply by our manner.

Pushing home our ideas

Firstly we have to accept that in many ways we, as vegans, have become strangers in our own land. We’ve taken on a different culture linked with a different sensitivity. So we have to emphasise that we aren’t trying to draw attention to ourselves or show that we’re better than anyone else, we are just experimenters. We’re the ones working on the difficult initial transitional stages of a switch-over. We’re introducing a new idea to people, using life-saving ideas that will assist human development in the future. But however grand our plan, however optimistic, we can’t be standing on street corners shouting about it. We don’t need the crazy tag! We simply need to be low key providers of ideas to improve the quality of people’s lives, and thereby save animals. We are trying to persuade people to listen to us because there’s a link between our issues and all the other main issues facing humanity. These animal issues point very logically to the initial and very repairable problems our society has. Humans are on the brink of a realisation that the universe is powered by a sense of love that rests on a bed of non-violence. At this root point we have to decide how we go, so it’s not global warming or environmental protection or disease or diet we need to fix first, but the whole question of our attitude to harmlessness. If we can survive without gratuitous violence, the human race may sail on into a very bright future. With non-violence as our rule no. 1, we’ll be better able to tackle the other great problems facing us.
So, this is what vegans (or at least some of us) are trying to persuade others to seriously think about - the possibility of maintaining a productive society without the use of domination and animal enslavement and without fighting violence with more violence. We may see no other way of stopping the atrocities against animals but that’s the great challenge, to find subtler and more persuasive ways of reaching the passive consumer. We may feel compelled to use abuse to demonstrate how angry and determined we are. But whether we are shouting ‘meat is murder’ or ‘death to Israel’, it’s just another ugly violence. It’s in our voice and in our attitude; we show how we have given up on finding a non-violent solution to the human condition.

Awake!

Vegans are like the alarm clock which people resent, which wakes them out of sleep and makes them face up to the day. But a little later they may be glad to have been woken up. In the short term vegans have an unpopular job, jolting people into a new awareness, but we needn’t be more unpopular than necessary.
It’s not a straight forward job at the best of times, especially if we seem to smell sweet but still wear heavy boots. Pushy vegans are as out of date as old time preachers. Communicating animal rights today has to be a subtle process. How do we bring animal rights to people’s attention, bearing in mind we are waking them, even alarming them? How do we get them eating vegan food and thinking about animals, when they don’t want to? Not by finger wagging, that’s for sure. Nor by disapproval or making judgements about their values.
I suggest the principles we’re promoting should be coaxed along by the attraction of the foods themselves and by the attractiveness of our own personalities - then there is something for them to identify with. And that might need imagination on our part. For a start, we have to kill off the absurd notion that strictly disciplined vegans live on a diet of lettuce leaves. We need to show off how delicious vegan foods are and promote the attractiveness of a vegan lifestyle. That’s a job in itself and it hardly leaves us much time for nursing our own feelings of alienation.

The silence

Are we concerned about the way people are being kept quiet? Today information doesn’t have to be prohibited or censored, there just has to be a silence surrounding the scandal. Indeed the silence is so complete about animal exploitation that even the most outrageous aspects go unreported. People are ‘protected’ from knowing the truth - that animals are being attacked on a massive scale, everyday and everywhere. And because the media is weak, there are no channels of communication, to keep ordinary people informed. The impression given is that nothing bad is actually happening. It might seem incredible that educated and otherwise well informed people think this way, but how is anyone supposed to be sure who to believe? I suspect it’s the ordinary people, informed or otherwise, who’ll be most outraged when they eventually learn what’s going on. Once they realise they’ve been ‘protected from information’ they will almost certainly look around for a brave journalist, who can reveal the scale of animal cruelty and report what’s going on. And from the report a scandal could appear.
Here are some possibilities, some ‘coulds’.
A scandal could stimulate an enquiry, which could take on a momentum of its own. A cover up of facts is something, once rolling, the media could lap up. Although animal cruelty might constitute the scandal, it’s more likely that the scale of the cover up could be the bigger story. It might start with uncovering the disastrous health consequences of animal food, but because of the added cruelty factor, it could prove too much to sweep under the carpet, and out of this could come a determination to clean up the mess, once and for all. To keep us all in the dark over our food and the sorts of places our foods come from, is something people would not want to pass on to future generations. For their kids to be ‘information protected’ would be as frightening as the animal cruelty – people would have to come to the conclusion that humans can’t be trusted around animals. On realising this we could see the animal industries go bust quite quickly, and then alternative approaches would be taken up. And that’s where vegans would have to ‘be available’ with some useful information to help with practical transitions. At this point the last thing vegans would need to be was angry.
Instead of feeling angry at people’s behaviour now, vegans need to look ahead, to be in the best position to alert people. Inform them, answer their questions and provide practical assistance. Vegans might want it all to happen now, but in reality it will come to a head later. So, many things have to happen before our brave and talented journalist could sell the story. We can’t hurry the process too much just as we can’t go up to people and shake them, much as we’d like to. So, how do we set the approach roads so that those who are interested will feel safe? And other people, who might be hostile, given the best chance to understand what is happening? If we seem helpful we’ll be listened to. If we appear angry we’ll frighten people away.

Angry?

What is it vegans are really angry about? Is it about other people or about our selves? If it’s about our own ineffectiveness to persuade people to change, then somehow we must keep our sadness and outrage in check and channel our anger into something constructive, especially since only a small percentage of the brain is being used when we’re angry, and that may be why animal activists aren’t as effective as we’d like.
Anger should be used as a springboard to better understand the precise problem we have with our fellow humans. I suppose it’s the disappointment we feel, that people can have such double standards - if nice friendly farmers and kindly men and women can be so indifferent to what happens to animals. They seem to feel such a lack of protectiveness towards them, as if they are not quite ‘civilised’.
It may be that reluctantly we have to admit that the very people we live with are much weaker than we thought. They either don’t have the sensitivity or they haven’t thought through their actions properly. Either way it doesn’t bode well for the future, and it’s understandable that we get angry. And then what? Anger isn’t the most useful emotion to have, perhaps it’s a hedge against something worse. If it goes deeper, towards hopelessness, and we’re likely to get depressed we may not be capable of being useful to the animals. If our despair can be a driving force for us, that’s different. The we realise how so many people have let themselves be duped and that gets us nearer to the scale of the problem we face. If we can see how whole populations have been corrupted (by a need for animal foods) and have given over their power of choice to others, we’re getting closer to the heart of the problem. And if we can see that people are now immune to the truth of how things are we’ll better understand why they continue to spend their money on food and clothing of animal origin. Anger and despair if felt can be used to focus on this slippery problem where people are far more deeply involved in the animal trade that we think. It comes down to this, that by giving support to the suppliers people have given them permission to ‘stop at nothing’ and the wrongness of that brings us to the horror that is our society’s attitude to animal use. For vegans who don’t share this attitude it makes us angry but hopefully we aren’t consumed by it. Instead our anger should be turned into an even greater determination to see this whole thing through, despite the odds against us. We can be inspired by someone like Pythagoras, for what he did thousands of years ago, when he courageously made a stand against state sponsored violence to animals. And now, all this time on, when we haven’t got to risk our lives to speak our minds, we have perhaps more reason to speak up, since indifference and cruelty is worse and the silence surrounding it is more profound.