Food-like

863: 

Tasteless vegetables and fruits plus the widespread practice of spraying chemicals on crops has made organic produce popular, especially when prices aren’t too high. I expect the same will happen with cruelty-free items. However, today, right now, these particular ‘reasons-for-buying’ aren’t strong enough to alter buying patterns and therefore farming practices.

We come back to ethics, to becoming more ‘animal conscious’. There’s a double whammy here in that people aren’t fully aware of the plight of animals nor do they realise how important their support is to the Animal Industries, just by being consumers.

            In the Animal Rights movement, if we haven’t been able to sensitise people, it’s because our heads were in the wrong place; our biggest fault is that we smell of defeat.

On the whole, and for good reason, we activists are deeply pessimistic, which is why we keep resorting to moral judgement to promote our arguments.

Perhaps we doubt the wisdom of investing so much energy into something that’s doomed to failure. Animal Rights doesn’t seem to have much hope. We keep being disappointed. But if we had a more realistic time frame for this gigantic lifestyle revolution to take place, we’d not wallow in pessimism and disappointment but simply concentrate on setting things up for future generations. Does this sound to idealistic, too altruistic?

            We all want the bad stuff to stop, and the sooner the better. And, in all honesty, we want some rewards for going vegan, for taking up the cause of animal liberation.

If only!

Perhaps altruism is the easy bit. I know a lot of selfless, hard working activists. It’s the studying of the whole range of animal issues and the subtleties of communicating them which is much harder.

            The rough game-plan might be already worked out in our heads, but it’s how we go about getting the information to sink in, in our own head, so that we have it at the ready to draw upon. We need to be quite eloquent when talking through the issues. And for that we need to do our homework. There are books to be read, videos to be watched and we might need some hands-on experience with farm animals. There’s quite a lot of work to do to familiarise ourselves with the main issues. But that’s not all.

            Emotionally we must be strong enough to take in the horror of what’s happening. Now that it’s been so well documented, it’s available for you and I to find out about it. But it’s hard to read the material and even harder to watch the visuals.

But let’s slip back to the matter of effectiveness. I suspect that some of us (more angry people) watch the footage and that stirs up ever more anger within our own heads.Once you’ve seen or read about what’s being done to farm animals, heard the arguments and gathered enough information, you form a picture, and from that you can formulate answers; when people want to know something, when they ask questions, we need to be ready with something informative or instructive to say.

            After reaching a point where we can talk about it convincingly that’s when we need to have not even a flutter of judgement in our voice. The talking can take place. I don’t mean preaching or lecturing, but letting talk be a thing of itself, where we take a more creative approach. If we can let things arise in conversation, almost unselfconsciously, it appears less threatening, less contrived, and that’s the opposite to evangelising at the first opportunity.

            Bringing people around to the idea of Animal Rights is a soft revolution. What we surely want here is a very voluntary cooperation, not a slogan-driven conversion. We aren’t the imposers of discipline nor is veganism a religious cult. This is a gradual realisation process people go through. I hope we are seen as educators and softies, who don’t use force or moral persuasion, but instead appeal to intelligent arguments and logic. It would be so easy to take the ‘high moral ground’ or use that tone of disapproval in our voice.

Take for example the inexperienced teacher who, when a student can’t understand something, accuses the student of stupidity; they don’t blame their own poor teaching. It’s the same with us. Vegans know very well that we have ‘a better way of living’ but others may not know that. How could they? I think it’s much better to tell people what they might need to know, rather than tell them what to do.

If someone decides they’d like to make this change, they’ll need to know how to make a safe transition, and that’s where useful advice comes in. It’s practical advice that’s needed, nothing more. Imagine the hurdles to a would-be vegan: how to find vegan alternatives, how to cook new dishes, how to cope with friends who aren’t vegan. Importantly, people need time to weigh things up for themselves. What they don’t need is hurry. They don’t need pushing or shoving. No one should try t hurry anyone over this very personal and private decision.

            How do you get people interested? How to get them impassioned? How, to actually like us enough to want to be like us!