Teachers not zealots

The best teachers at school never lose sight of their responsibility to the students in their care. They might stand no nonsense from their students but they never withdraw their affection from them. And that’s how it should be with the Animal Rights activist: everything we say, unpopular, grim or otherwise, must be presented without being the zealot. If we’re asked to explain something, we need to have answers. And if we don’t know something there has to be an intention to find out and feed back. We can easily break our own rules. If suddenly we’re hit by a question or a comment we can’t answer, and then hide it by becoming emotional and using things like shame and guilt to ‘win our point’, that’s when people can turn against us. When vegans stop raving on about cruelty (as if no one knew it existed) and begin to refer to it calmly. When we know we can pull that off, do ‘pretend’ angry, then people begin to like us or rather stop disliking us. We can even throw in a few details, but not too many mind, we don’t want to be boring. Animal Rights can be a love story if we want it to, anything to bring a twinkle of light back from a listener.
On one level people are very well informed – most adults know more or less what’s going on out there - but what they don’t know are the details. And presumably we do, otherwise we wouldn’t be so keen to talk about it. So, in their eyes we should have some useful information to impart. And that’s why we should always be well prepared with our basic arguments. Not cynically delivering them with a smile but just avoiding that highly unattractive characteristic of the righteous missionary.