Focusing on consumers

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The public stick together. They have a way of not responding to the animal-horror stories. But if vegans feel anger towards the farmers and killers and retailers of animals, we might be missing the point. We can’t persuade those who make their daily living out of animals. We’ll surely have greater success, albeit slow, with members of the general public. And not with anger but with irresistible arguments aimed at this target audience. When you consider how much damage the consumers do with their purchasing of unethical products, perhaps they should be confronted about their shopping choices, to move them towards some consciousness raising.

Consciousness is very subjective. The ordinary Joe doesn’t think of himself as an omnivore. The ordinary Jo hasn’t given much thought to where her meat or milk comes from. All they know is that there are a few people, who call themselves ‘vegans’, who feel strongly about eating animals. If you see someone you know to be a vegan walking towards you, you can cross to the other side of the street or simply ignore what they are saying. Or you can do what so many others do - out of a need to lessen their guilt, they might choose to make this into a health issue. They pretend confusion about meat and milk as being “possibly” unhealthy, thus neatly avoiding the “possibility” of the food being unethical. Most omnivores can handle doing something that’s not healthy but can’t accept that they’re doing something morally wrong. It’s very difficult for your regular nice guy to condone the killing of animals. They might concede agreement that veggies are healthier, if only to divert attention away from any talk about caging and killing.

This ‘cruelty’ aspect is hard to face if you support it by what you buy. But for other reasons, for us, this is a sensitive subject to broach. But we also know that if we can get this aspect across, we start to make the biggest impact. By emphasising empathy and sensitivity and softening of attitudes, rather than adopting a healthy diet of plants, we touch a raw nerve. Which is why we hardly ever get any of this across. People are on the defensive when they are in danger of meeting a vegan and talking animals with them.

Since this is not a police state (and we are not ‘vegan police’), we have to wait for them to see what we’ve seen. Only then might they respond to the hard facts the way we’ve done. Maybe, you and I were deeply moved by pictures of struggling animals facing death; perhaps we changed our own way of eating in response to these sorts of images, of say a terror-stricken lamb being manhandled into the killing chute or male chicks being thrown into the mincer. Maybe people are similarly moved. But more likely at the first realisation of what was about to be shown the brain sends out a warning to avoid seeing these sorts of indelible images. It’s too upsetting. And whether it’s an image or the words contained in a vegan’s arguments, we are primed to expect danger and impelled to avoid it. To cross the road. Which is why vegans often feel alienated, rejected, lonely and hardly ever experience success in their advocacy for Animal Rights.