Don’t carpet bomb the opposition

753:

“Keep driving. Try not to knock down the pedestrians”.

As an animal rights advocate I try to keep talking, but I try to avoid hitting people with all the facts, all at once. My ‘approach’ on Animal Rights would involve my being surprisingly sparing with my words - I’m expected to do one thing but I do the other, to be unpredictable. I don’t want to be seen as a ‘dangerous vegan’ who evokes a ‘flight’ response.

            I try not to say too much but just as importantly, I try not to give the impression that I’m into judging values. My aim is to say what I have to say without too much emotion and to say less in order to say more - the smaller the seed of truth, the less confronting it feels. (This subject being the ultimate confrontation!)

I reckon I’ve struck it lucky if I hear you asking a question. Then I’ll do you the courtesy of listening and hope you will extend me the same courtesy, and listen back to what I’ve got to say. I’m guessing I could sound confronting so to balance that I try to stick to a few facts and give you something to chew on when you get home. I want to leave you with a few new ideas perhaps. I do NOT want you to experience me making any sort of judgement of you. On this very serious subject I’d like to leave you with the germ of an idea, something that’s easy for you to remember and contemplate.

When I want to communicate the essence of this subject, I’ll mention the gradual habit changes, and suggest what can be done in the privacy of your own kitchen.

Attitude change (towards animal use) suggests considering going vegetarian or vegan. But on the practical level you might like to learn more about food and how to prepare it, so that if you ever consider this change you’ll be ready for the kitchen-side of it.

Ideally, I’d never want anyone to feel overwhelmed by the implications of change-of-attitude. It’s usual to see the sky falling, boycotting everything animal-based all at once and staring at an empty fridge - for that reason alone, you might need to go slow.

That’s the practical side, but in the rush to go slow you wouldn’t want to sink into safe compromise, which would spoil the clarity of this attitude-change. One has to remember that it’s the wrongness of ‘using animals’ that sparks this different attitude in the first place. You can discuss free-range farming and humane killing but they are non-starters, if only because they seem to reduce the suffering of animals but not eliminate it. Even if the ideal is too hot to handle at first, there’s no reason to forget the ideal which inspires everything else - that is, that total boycott might be too hard to hold to, at first, and it’s therefore possible that you could drop the whole thing. A gradual reduction starts the process and that eventually leads to total boycott and the principle of non-use-under-any-circumstance. I hope you are a ‘towards-vegan’ if you aren’t yet vegan.