Hostility to veganism

It’s easy to forget just how aggressive otherwise-peaceful people can be when it comes to this subject. But it’s understandable. Whoever we are, vegans and non-vegans, we all react badly to being ‘in the wrong’, which is precisely what vegans often make quite clear when talking to non-vegans. It’s what vegans tend to do, because we feel we have no other option. But to be fair, putting people right is also partly to show off our vegan superiority. Even though we have watertight arguments, we put peoples’ backs up. And also, when we describe a new idea, it may be something people haven’t heard of before, and they fear what they don’t know. And that makes them react negatively.
As vegan advocates we must get past the shock of people’s aggression by understanding why it comes about in the first place. It’s more like a knee-jerk reaction. But often their bark is worse than their bite; they feel insulted by what we say but their objections are often paper thin. We have to get used to stupid reactions and pretend naivety, especially if we realise there’s nowhere else for our adversaries to go. In their attempt to speak intelligently, in response to vegan arguments, they often fail because there’s so little argument for them to use. When they foresee this and feel uncomfortable about it, there’s perhaps a mix of aggression, shame and indignation. Our adversaries can only escape by using aggression or showing indifference. They might take umbrage, they might storm off in a huff, and maybe vegans feel they’ve won the day. But in the long term we lose out to a sometimes long standing hostility to all-ideas-vegan. Unless we can soften this opposition it might mean we’ll lose them altogether.