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” - a word implying spiteful impudence. This isn’t a trait anyone owns up to. But it’s a see no evil-speak no evil sort of cop-out vegans are used to … and perplexed by. 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 might say to tele-marketers who phone). But to a vegan activist it’s infuriating. When people aren’t interested it brings out the bulldozer in us. We might try to ‘break though’ with force.
All of which is a complete waste of time of course. It achieves the reverse of what we want. It’s a free country. No one has to listen. But even if some do listen, they often think we’re exaggerating. They listen but have a slight disbelief in what we’re telling them. (my diet: unhealthy? maybe there’s animal cruelty, but only maybe). If vegans can get angry about animals we seem just ‘too weird’, and if weird then it’s likely we might be lying too. It’s a Catch 22 for vegans, this one. If we talk about the subject too softly we don’t get heard, if too forcefully we are simply avoided.
For vegans this is the challenge: the art of communication as opposed to confrontation.
We don’t actually need to show anger if we can channel something more constructive, communicating by writing or public speaking, but whatever we do how do we deal with the 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?
When every argument we put slides off the duck’s back it’s frustrating, 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 reacting unintelligently. It forces them to continue with the way things have always been, which usually means ignoring any possibility that our food is poisoned and trying not to feel guilty about animal cruelty.
Animal husbandry has to seem benign in a ‘God’s-in-his-heaven’ sort of way, but no one can wriggle out of this ‘animal-thing’. To try to deny it is flat-earth – saying that animals aren’t sentient and don’t feel pain or that the cutting down an animal is no different to cutting down of a tree. It’s far too silly to get angry about.