Getting rid of vegans

Thursday 23rd July 2010


We don’t necessarily need to draw attention to ourselves. And yet there’s no reason not to be absolutely outrageous. However we decide to ‘do’ it, let’s hope we never dress down our subject. It never needs to be dour, Animal Rights. (I’ve never seen a dour looking animal in my life!)
This is a subject that only wit and humour can do justice to. The gullibility of the omnivore is so ludicrous that there’s a fruitful supply of satirical material just waiting to be plucked. Best thing about being omnivore is the silliness of it. But we shouldn’t be laughing. This is a serious subject. We aren’t trying to tell jokes at a funeral. We have to be a bit serious-serious about Animal Rights.
But more importantly, whether we send it all up or talk deadly seriously about it, a plan is needed. The success of any ‘heist’ rests on the plan-of-approach. Equipment in place, gelignite ready, good plan? Probably better to know the combination of the safe, it’s quieter. People are already deafened by the noise of our message. They just want us to go. Away.
When we’re communicating our message (message-schmessage!) what is it that is actually getting across? It’s the feely-feelies; it’s not what we say it’s how we present. Impact. Straight to the point, clear … this is what we’re showing of ourselves and this is what we’re trying to say, “bottom line”. We don’t want to hurt people’s feelings or satirise them (although it’s tempting!!), nor punish, nor finger-wag, just get down to brass tacks.
The base-line truth here: they do wicked things so don’t support them; hens are put in cages, pigs in body-hugging steel frames and this is the horror. To a claustrophobic like me this is THE horror. But me talking to you about this, right here, we are not at issue over misunderstanding – the message was never going to be difficult to understand nor, from a vegan communicator’s point of view, ever particularly unapproachable. What we are seeing here is a mass turning away. A “go away” which is beyond logic and argument, beyond plans for the future. It’s simply primary self-protection that blames this subject for ganging up on my ‘feely-feelies’. It looks as though it hurts. The medicine’s too strong. Vegan.
Are we not witnessing the storm before the calm here? Where we are at hour eleven, and in this last ridiculous flutter of immaturity we see a mere glitch of chemistry working on us. This is surely the barrier here; omnivores are chemically imbalanced at the very thought of giving up all the ‘nice foods of life’.
What we, as animal advocates, are up against here is resistance.
People have built concrete-filled barriers. And, apart from those few vegan-born kids, we’ve all succumbed to it, the indulgencies and then the building of walls-of-resistance. Omnivores deliberately and self-protectingly ignore the horrible truths of animal farming. And they daily strengthen their walls at the behest of the appalling Animal Industries.
What a vegan has to say to omnivores isn’t so much complicated as confronting. (That’s presently our problem, and why we don’t get ourselves lynched I can’t understand). Our logic is all very clear so, normally, you’d expect the omnivores to swing over in droves, but they don’t … not yet anyway. Is this because of a tiny glitch in our self image, so small we hardly need to bother with it, yet so big we kid ourselves it’s small? Almost all of us have regular grumblings of stomach (needing refill) and twitterings of those brats-cum-connoisseurs, the addictive taste buds and their close cousins who’re also in the receptor business. In other words we have our ‘little weaknesses’. We call it “favourite foods”. They’re our friends and we love them. “No”, we say, “we won’t go-vegan”, in fact as first line of defence we say “vegans go”.