Anger

When you tell some people about what’s happening to animals, they have the gall to say they don’t want to know. “Gall”, now that’s a word implying spiteful impudence. Not a trait anyone owns up to but the sort of cop-out vegans are used to. But we are perplexed by it too. Whenever eating animals come into the conversation there’s a stony silence or there’s outright avoidance, or denial or ridicule - nothing that makes very much sense. People give off such a powerful signal that they “just aren’t interested” ( as we’d say to those annoying tele-marketers who ring at dinner time). But to us it’s infuriating when people aren’t interested. It often brings out the bulldozer in vegans, and they try to break though with force.
All a complete waste of time, and damaging too, because no one’s listening.
But if we do get listened to, people often think we’re exaggerating, and so they maintain a slight disbelief in what we’re telling them. “Vegans are weird so it’s likely they’ll be lying too”. It’s a real Catch 22 for vegans, this one.
… And yet ‘this one’ is the big challenge: the art of communication as opposed to confrontation.
Shocked by their gall it’s difficult to transmute our anger into something more constructive, like writing or public speaking without showing anger. But how do we deal with our own feelings of frustrations at people’s attitudes? How do we feel when we write to the media and get rejected? How do we react to a speciesist remark, say on talk-back radio? How do we deal with being laughed at?
It’s frustration I feel when every argument I put up slides off the duck’s back. And yet that’s the reality. Public resistance comes from a low awareness mixed with deep fear that vegan food is all they’ll have to look forward to. It scares people into a negative reaction to what vegans are saying. It forces them to turn a deaf ear and continue the way they’ve always been. It’s heartbreaking to see people suffering unnecessary illnesses because they won’t see reason. And I guess it’s both the food poisoning and the animal cruelty thing that makes people feel sick and look silly, by pretending to believe that none of the cruelty to animals actually happens, or worse, that if it does happen that it isn’t cruelty at all.
Animal husbandry sounds benign in an ‘all’s-well, god’s-in-his-heaven’, sort of way. But this thinking is so far below the native intelligence of most people that they’re better off saying nothing … because there’s no other way to wriggle out of this ‘animal-thing’. It’s as if people are taking shelter in an absurd flat-earth denial of sentience, holding that the cutting down of an animal is not very different to the cutting down of a tree.