The blunt instrument

The idea of Animal Liberation rescuing and liberating animals is right, and what it communicates, about the horrors of the animals’ lives in captivity, is right. And it is right to condemn those people who still continue supporting the animal industries. It’s right but does it work? Who’s left? No one is left. Everyone in the community is condemned. And no one can take it seriously. It might make us feel good but it won’t work – the arsonist will continue to light fires because they’re still angry at society and the meat eating community will not be bullied into giving up their meat eating.
Vegans can be seen to be and very often are bullies. Even amongst one another we have vegan police types, who aren’t backward in coming forward, in their criticisms of their not-quite-high-enough-reaching colleagues. So, overall, the ability of the Animal Rights Movement to carry theory into practice hasn’t worked very well, and I’d suggest that this is because we are still using the blunt instrument of judgement. And as yet, we haven’t even touched on the importance of communicating with ‘the enemy’.
We’ve found over the years that for all our judging and condemning it hasn’t worked quite as smoothly as we expected. There hasn’t been a mass-conversion and our communication failure can be put down to the highly unattractive judgements we’ve been making, using harsh words, noisy protests and plenty of invective. My point is that any amount of outrage, especially from a small group of people, is ineffective. It’s just too easy for people to ignore. Hence for the vast mass of people they can remain blissfully unscathed by protesters’ judgements. Without the support of the law and indeed the opinion of the vast majority of ordinary people, our protest and judgement appear to be simply the sad, mad ravings of a bunch of weirdos. Animal activists are deliciously ignorable.