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 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. By establishing these preliminaries it shows we aren’t evangelists. That we effectively promise no sermonising.
If we can come across as nice people, talking freely and saying almost anything we want, daringly but with a ring of humour, there’s no threat. When we’re not trying to humiliate or frighten anyone, we’re then seen as trustworthy in our signals. We are what we seem. 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, by making our point, but as we make points it’s as if we’re scoring points, then we get a competition going, who’s more right, etc. To avoid this, I think one ought to show that we are prepared for differences to come up, and that we can deal with them calmly. Without using emotional explosives. Our job is surely to put people at ease when telling them what it’s all about.
Animal Rights is the most difficult subject. Once we start talking about it people begin to get edgy. It’s not as if we are talking about the weather. This all can get very close to personal in an instant. In the raising of one eyebrow we set off a fuse wire to the full scale explosion we have ahead for them. When we get personal we touch raw nerves, one’s ‘coolness’ depending on the very heart of moral code, by which we all ought to operate.
Animal Rights is very full-on, as subjects go, because of this personal/ego element screaming at the insulting direction vegan-talk takes. We can expect extreme responses. And our adversaries are likely not to be so delicate in their words about us as we’re trying to be about them. They may have had less practice, or be less familiar with ‘the arguments’, or less used to having to be careful about wandering into war zones, renowned for volatility. Experienced or not, they’ll be reluctant to agree to too much because so much more to lose. If they agree, (“so, why aren’t you a vegan then?”). That’s a bombshell!.
I suppose we have to learn to be gentle, no need to be otherwise because, in terms of arguments, we hold the best hand. We have the greatest advantage. We don’t need to rub it in anyone’s face. And this is not about advocating clever strategy, it’s about being concerned for everyone involved in the whole sorry mess. It’s incidental if someone agrees or disagrees with us about animal rights. It’s actually none of our business if someone is still eating animals. Our concern is for them (and of course for the animals they’re eating). We hope they become vegan as quickly as possible. And when they do that they talk things through with others. It may be we have something to add to the quality of people’s lives … but they, for their part, have something of value to us too, by helping us understand how they think. We are, after all initiating the debate and we need a lot of practice. We can’t afford to queer our pitch by not communicating gently