Communicating with a gentle touch

When advocating animal rights, we need to speak up as strongly as we can but with a soft enough body language so as not to frighten anyone off. One hint of a sneer and we’re done for! Through our face and by the tone of our voice we can show we are NOT there to win arguments, only to engage with others. By establishing these preliminaries it shows we aren’t evangelists, effectively promising there will be no sermonising.
If we can come across as nice people, talking freely and saying almost anything we want, there’s no threat. If we aren’t trying to humiliate or frighten anyone, we’ll seem trustworthy. And then we can talk our hearts out! We can show, by the way we handle this subject, that we realise how sensitive it is but make our point, all the same. We need to show that we are prepared for differences to come up, and that we can deal with them calmly. Putting people at ease is what it’s all about.
Animal rights is the most difficult of all difficult subjects. Once we start talking about it people begin to get edgy. It’s not as if we are talking about the weather, this can get very personal. We’re getting into the very heart of the moral code by which we, as a society, operate.
We can expect extreme responses. And our adversaries are likely not to be so delicate in their words about us as we are trying to be about them. They’ve had less practice. And they’ll be less familiar with the arguments, less used to having to be carful with volatile reactions. They’ll be reluctant to agree to too much because they have so much more to lose if they do (“so if you agree, why aren’t you a vegan, etc”). In terms of arguments we hold the best hand. We have the greatest advantage. We don’t need to rub it in their face.
This is not about advocating a clever strategy, it’s about being concerned for a whole sorry mess. It’s incidental that they disagree with us about animal rights and that they are almost certainly still animal eaters. Our concern for them (and of course for the animals they are eating) gives us a strong need to talk things through with them. It may be that we may have something to add to the quality of their life. They for their part have something of value to us, by helping us to understand better how they think. Vegans are always on the lookout for clues to explain the reasoning of resistant people.