“I’m outraged!”

587:

Some decades ago “outrage” was powerful. There was even a saying in Australia, made popular after 1975 - “Maintain your rage”. All that heavy emotion, in the name of outrage, was effective enough at the time, but did it really achieve anything in the long run, and did our animal rights outrage really shift people’s attitude? Today, anyway, Animal Rights outrage is barely a whimper.

In the earlier days of the Animal Rights movement, anger made quite an impact. But that ‘shock-horror’ angle doesn’t cut it any longer – we discover what’s going on, there’s a moment of outrage and wanting to do something about it, then we calculate the impact on our own lives. Then we block it out. What we know, we pretend to others we don’t know. Being a well informed omnivore these days might be exhausting for the conscience but the alternative is unthinkable for most people.

Vegans propose a new way of life. But we don’t sell it too well, which is why it seems an ‘unthinkable way of life’ to non-vegans. Outrage doesn’t help these days, not because people can’t relate to outrage but because we vegan advocates are so predictable. We use the one weapon and it gets blunt from overuse. The heaviest club we hit people with are examples of ‘the horror’ of animal exploitation or the danger to health of eating animal products. We whip out the ugly pictures and frightening statistics. We quote quotes, tell the stories of our own encounters on farms and at abattoirs, or the rate of heart attacks and diabetes, and we even learn to tell jokes at our own expense, but often we go on too long, we go too far and we seem too right. We get a reputation. And then people only half listen and half digest what we say (in the same way we zone-out when politicians are electioneering). People are easily bored with ‘the message’ and find it easy to half reject it and half dislike the messenger.

Perhaps there is no neat solution. This is such a big issue and the resistance is so deep-set that even if there’s an encouraging positive reaction it might not be maintained for very long

. And this message requires not only a radical response but a long-maintained response.

If responses are, overall, disappointing, we surely have to get used to that. But clearly enough, what we have to deal with and how we do eventually come to deal with it is the make or break of “Project Animal Freedom”. At this early stage, progress is painfully slow. People are still so set in their ways, that a clumsy approach by us might entrench negative attitudes. The clumsiness happens most often when there’s been an ugly turn of atmosphere in an otherwise pleasant conversation. As soon as we feel we aren’t getting much of a response to what we are saying it’s likely we get impatient. And that must seem like making a value judgement, and feel like making a detachment, and this is what probably does most damage to our attempts at advocacy.