Article 21. Meat Eaters in Conversation with Vegans

[Article: From a set of articles from ‘The Place of Non-Violence and Altruism in Animal Rights’ from 2007]

“There should be no rights for animals” - this is what the non-vegan public believe. Not so the vegan activist. Each believes the other is not right. But in most parts of the world this question is never brought up because the question of rights for non-humans is never discussed.
Here in the West though it is fast emerging as ‘an issue’. Our ‘subject’ is suffering growing pains. Omnivore society doesn’t want this baby to grow up. When anyone raises the subject there’s a mixture of disinterest and disgust, disgust not at what happens to animals but at the whole range of emotions emerging. Emotions we’d rather not experience.
No other subject hots up like this one! The activist tries a bit of moral bludgeoning, the meat eater denigrates the activist ... and it’s been like this for decades. But even today there are still many people, exposed to Western media, who have resisted thinking about all this. If we bring up these ‘issues’, the omnivore is more surprised than anything else, at our even mentioning the subject. For them, using animal-food is as natural as drinking water or sleeping at night time. A meal is never seen as an act of violence. It’s incomprehensible that anyone could see it this way. Animals are as fair game as carrots. “It’s called ‘food’, dah!”. In all innocence an omnivore might stray across the vegan minefield. They may even show enough interest to ask our opinion. Then ‘BANG’ - maybe they hear something that shocks them so badly that their sky falls in. The fear of this brings on prevarication.
For those who are more familiar with the subject and know more about the advocacy of animal rights, our arguments could be quite familiar to them, so much so that they’ve built up a defence line; they have responses which are well rehearsed, which they use to put up maximum resistance. The main aim here, for the omnivore, is not to be persuaded to alter one’s eating habits - and unless omnivores are ready to give way on that one, we must expect to be avoided. They’ll take care to avoid us and our arguments like the plague.
If we were sitting here in a debate, this subject could be as interesting as it is controversial - two adversarial opposites, exploring their differences like two dogs sniffing one another’s bums. It could be as ordered as that. But in the real world, outside the debating chamber, the stereotypes, prejudices, half truths and misinformation abound. Before things can turn around and get more constructive we have to look at perception - theirs of us, ours of them. We know what being an omnivore feels like but omnivores don’t know what being a vegan feels like. We’ve grown from omnivore to vegan. That’s okay. No one’s put out by that. But for the vegan, we can’t help ourselves begrudging the omnivore their cornucopia of foods.
The problem starts because we don’t think much of those we’ve left behind; because they are there and we are here. We almost see them as enemies, which of course literally they very well could be ... enemies certainly to animals and by proxy therefore also to their advocates. But it’s because we don’t think much of them and it shows, that omnivores generally dislike vegans, even more than their more carnivorous friends do. Why? Because vegans are not people one can identify with. If we were ... etc.
Non-vegan people enquire about veganism when they want to emulate a rare attribute - that’s a big boost for vegans. Contributing back to the omnivore, we warm to them if we see their own rare attribute of being a fair-minded person. Obviously there’s got to be equality. Our identification with each other has to be in place on some level, otherwise no progress can be made, either by animal activists persuading omnivores or omnivores sticking to their guns. These two (or more) must know the other still "likes" them. No progress can be made until we stop trying to rub out each other’s arguments ... before getting to really know what they are. Ultimately how we think we radiate so it’s really down to not thinking, labelling others as whacky. Saying someone is mad is a big put down.
Since vegans are the initiators and introducers of this particular subject we’re in the business of raising a particular consciousness. Ours is a responsibility to set standards of behaviour as well as standards of attitude. If we can get our non-violence across at the outset, then we establish the rules of conversation. It puts us on a fair footing. We need to show faith in the power of logical argument and never feel the need to go on the defensive. Vegans have such a powerful argument anyway so there’s no need for us to lose advantage, not clumsily or wantonly anyway. But we might need to be a bit cunning.
We are, after all, coming from a minority viewpoint (hugely minority!), so we need to find the right opening for what we have to say. Demanding our right to speak isn’t going to do the trick. We have to let them want us to speak. We almost have to want to encourage them to take us on.
We can’t pick the fight. We can prod and kid around and fool with people’s sense of their own truth, but we can’t make them respond. It must come from them. This wish to talk about all the issues is a brave wish for any omnivore. We should respect that. (I know from personal experience that one minute with me and I’ll deliver a line they won’t be able to forget. My friends and people who read the slogans on my bike already know what I’m like. One minute is all I need).
We know that they know, that we know ... that for us it always comes back to cruelty. We know that they know, that we know however hard they try to defend animal use, however hard they try to argue that “it isn’t cruel”, that their arguments won’t hold water. We know, they know we know, that ultimately their arguments must fail. In the past they did have one central argument and it was unarguable at the time: humans need to eat animal to survive. Now that we know we don’t need to, their last argument has been exploded. They now rest their case on this one ethically contradictory premise, and it’s just not good enough for any intelligent person to rest arguments in this way. Wanton violence is never ethical. They know we know this, and from our side of the debating chamber nothing much more needs to be said.