Traps for the vegan activist

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For those who eat animals the most precious thing would be to have a clear conscience about it. But, for the thinking person, that is impossible. The guilt of one’s eating habits corrodes self image as well as destroying the best of our health. Short of abstaining there’s nothing that can help.

For those who do take up a plant-based eating regime their conscience is, to a large extent, cleared, and if they then become active as animal advocates their creativity is sharpened by the nature of the challenge they face.

Being creative as well as compassionate can bring the best out in a person, because we’re addressing one of the most important and difficult questions facing humanity today – human dependency on animal flesh and by-products and the consequent involvement, by proxy, with animal cruelty. A vegan is relieved of both problems by using only plant-based products. I’ve said this already a thousand times.

But there’s something else important here for the well-being of our psyche. There’s a certain benefit and satisfaction in having something meaningful to devote one’s life to beyond solely self-interest – whilst ensuring a longer, healthier and more energy-filled life we’re able to focus attention on animals from whom nothing is reciprocated. That opens us up to altruism, but there are traps along the way.

At some stage vegans may have to decide what sort of activist they’re going to be. It’s a matter of not falling into the obviously-tempting trap of going-to-war-against-every-non-vegan. The trick is to learn to keep our cool.

While it’s tempting to give up on people (especially those who criticise us) it’s better not to lose the ground we’ve made so far, that others have made, before us. So far we might have prized open a tiny crack which might close up if we get trapped by our own anger and proceed to blow the peace-loving reputation vegans might have built.

If we attack those who won’t agree with us, if we try any sort of persuasive violence, we’ll discover a dead end. Protests that become violent are good media fodder and yet another opportunity for them to ‘blacken’ us. The ‘angry image’ is a convenient one for those who dislike what we are saying. When we appear angry it’s self-defeating. But, despite all that, protest is important – it can be inspiring. It can sow the seeds of truth in people’s minds. Naturally we want to speed it up and be seen to be doing something about ‘cruelty’, and bring it to the public’s attention.

Activists go out on a night time ‘raid’, to a factory farm, to take video footage of conditions there. They aim to provide visual proof, thus to strengthen their powerful argument against these places. People watching the news see pictures of shocking things happening. It’s undeniable, and the viewer can no longer say they don’t know. They can’t indulge their ‘no-one’s-noticing-so-what-the-hell’ attitude. For them, it’s impossible to forget what they’ve seen.

But they go straight back to eating the very animals they’ve just seen horror footage of. To the animal rights advocate that’s so unbelievable that we can’t help showing it.

Which brings us back to this problem of approach – whether it is effective to show shock, anger and disbelief or take a more careful, patient and overtly non-violent, non-judgemental approach.

You might say that peaceful protest has won nothing for animals. The anti-vivisectionists, swearing non-violence, have been fighting peacefully for a hundred years and still animal experimentation goes on. One might think that nothing is gained by being reasonable. But were these protesters themselves showing a double standard? Were these well-intentioned peaceful people abusing animals by still eating them? If so, how could anyone take them seriously if they hadn’t been able to ‘put their money where their mouth is’?

Now, today, there’s a more sophisticated protester, a better-informed, totally non-abusing animal advocate, who can appeal to logic, health and compassion, who lives according to the highest principles; and this non-violent protester wouldn’t be rubbing their darts of criticism with the poison of judgement. But that is a hard logic to follow for any impatient protester. Each of us has to find out how we can show disapproval without causing unnecessary injury to others. That’s something we each have to work out for ourselves.