Quarrelsome talk of slaughtering animals

If five years olds accept meat eating you can’t blame them, if a fifteen year old still accepts it you might start to worry, and if a 25 year old is still doing it … well, perhaps there’s still a chance for them to change. They might have recently become independent of their parents’ dinner table and have started to shop for food ... experimenting ... mind you, by 25 you’d have to wonder why meat eating wasn’t yet being questioned. Older carnivores are probably beyond the pail. Things have gone too far. They’re too far gone, with too many worldly pressures and commitments bearing down on them. A radical food change late in life is unlikely.
We may have little chance to persuade them because, to them, veganism is probably nonsense. If a drunk was throwing up on the footpath that's preferable to a vegan bringing up this subject in conversation. Anyone (who has a fridge full of animal foods) would find this subject disturbing. Two minutes into an ‘exposure to veganism’ they’d be so disturbed that, in their mind, they’d be rushing to their fridge for a pick-me-up (the fridge being our little kitchen drug store, full of remedies for soothing the troubled mind).

They’ve settled this matter in their own heads. They won’t voluntarily enter into conversation about it. They’ll steer away from all animal talk (or usually try to divert it to ‘pet-talk’) ... anything to stop themselves being lured into the trap of ‘talking to a vegan’.
They may like us, love us, enjoy talking with us … but not about this. Not about killing animals for food. To them this is rather like ‘the last taboo’. And if it is, then they’ll have one rule - no talking ‘animal’ with the proselytisers.

As vegans, if we attempt to barge through this barrier we can alter the basis of a whole relationship. It’s as if we were making a physical attack on them, enough to be in the ‘over the top’ category. They’ll talk about anything, reveal everything to us, trust us with any subject you care to bring up just to see where it’s going … but (with a vegan) rule supremo: there must be no mention of personal eating habits, especially if there’s a danger of discussing diets-based-on-ethics.

The hidden fear, the elephant in the room, is the great body-trampling logic of compassion. Destructively, vegans can intimidate people with it. But some vegans, who aren’t keen to go around attacking people, sometimes choose to say little.
“What? Keep silent?”.
But understatement and even non-statement can be more powerful than any amount of words.

In one way I’m advocating silence, because we are certainly the holders of 'truth-force', but it’s not ours to be profligate with. We mustn’t offend our friends when we know how easily it can be done. In one way we must wait till the world has become more enlightened.
“Wait?”
Even though time seems to be running out, what is it that’s so urgent?
“What?”
Every day the world eats meat and there are billions more deaths, billions more animals being purpose-bred to suffer. The accumulation of insult and damage that humans have inflicted on the animal populations is centred evidentially in the hell holes they call ‘farms’. And it’s all getting worse as intensification is forced on farmers by ruthless competition.

There isn’t any other solution here - we can only boycott it and call forth (bring on) more so called ‘cruelty-free’ products onto the market. But to generate the momentum we need to proselytize that idea we must talk ... and talking is the possible problem here, where we most often shoot ourselves in the foot. So, we must hold back sometimes.
It’s a complex mixture of approaches (a little teasing here, ignoring the whole matter there, sometimes a direct comment, sometimes winding up a conversation as it gets too close to ‘talking about animal rights’ - pushing forwards, pulling backwards, showing we are sensitive to present conditions. We will only be taken seriously when we can show as much sensitivity to the omnivore and we expect from them towards the animals. Our main job is to be conscious of the feelings at the time ... all the time ‘being-with’ that other person.

If (right now) we instinctively think it’s not appropriate to discuss this subject, our changing the subject will certainly bring a sigh of relief from our ‘co-conversationist’ friends. But from our own point of view opportunities can be non-opportunities, and we have to terminate discussion because we don't think it should be talked about, well, not in a half hearted or light-hearted or frivolous way.
Each approach has a time of it’s own. A variety of approaches keeps the omnivore guessing, keeps what we say interesting and not be predictable. We can say anything we want to say as long as it is fundamental to having compassion-for-animals. Obviously I'm suggesting we have empathy for people as well as animals. Our own compassionate nature stops us wanting to hurt anybody. But don't we also want to win trust, enough anyway to talk more freely? If we screw up here, at the permission-to-go-through-the-turnstiles end, it will show. What shows is ‘bad vibe’. That looks like judgement. That looks like us squaring up for a quarrel.