Me and my shadow

748: 

When I was still buying unethical products, I realised I was collaborating in the very thing I wanted to see changed. I wanted to promote sustainable systems. I wanted to show my concern for the planet as well as the animals. I wanted to ease my conscience. Most of all I wanted to wrestle with my shadow, violence. I wanted to see myself for who I wanted to be, namely a non-violent person. But the temptations to NOT change were too great.

The implications of striving to be non-violent are far reaching. This deep, guiding principle is about conduct-with-dignity. It isn’t mildness or passivity. It is dignified outrage without the need to use any force. I knew I’d need self discipline to wrench myself away from the clutches of comfort and the oh-so-familiar violent world we all live in. I needed a plan of action to fight this shadowy presence. First up, I had to change away from animal food, leaving the animal-abuse world behind me. But I knew that soon after I’d be wanting to get this idea of non-violent living across to others.

            I wanted a direct approach about animal abuse, to protest against the violence of it. But no one wanted to talk about it. I became frustrated by the silence. I pressed my case by becoming aggressive – showing aggro towards non-vegans.

            At first, I was the typical new enthusiast. I was a proud ‘vegan’, struggling to alter my eating habits and buying patterns, to get to where I wanted to be, only then to become intense, in order to get my point across to others. I thought it was okay to be pushy, since it was for a good cause. I had a duty to be forceful. I didn’t realise at the time how close that was to ‘fighting violence with violence’.

            As animal rights activists, we might very well believe we have won significant welfare reforms for animals by being non-compromising and sometimes outrageous. By using this approach we’ve brought issues to public attention and have been instrumental in ending many of the worst abuses of animals. But it hasn’t convinced the majority of consumers to change their eating habits. They may have felt our disapproval and caught our dirty looks but they haven’t felt the opprobrium of anyone else, so they haven’t been constrained to change their attitude to animals. It hasn’t increased their sense of responsibility towards them. The collective conscience hasn’t yet been tweaked.

            This is what I think has happened – people have had the experience of a confrontation with an animal activist, who has talked passionately but who has also made it hard for the ‘ordinary omnivore’ to identify with them. On an emotional level people have been turned off prematurely, disagreeing with our arguments because they find us, as people, disagreeable types. They don’t want to know the sort of person who can be ‘that angry’. It’s like listening to great music on a radio which is picking up a lot of static interference; it’s an uncomfortable experience. This ruined listening experience jars on the nerves. You just want it to stop.

            Over the past thirty odd years, since the birth of Animal Liberation, some of us have inadvertently built an agro image. We’ve been too ‘in-yer-face’. I speak for myself when I say that I’ve handed people a golden opportunity to dislike me, and therefore to dislike what I’m saying. I’ve lessened my chances of being able to discuss important issues with them (concerning farm animals or lab animals). By being this way I’ve been seen as unapproachable. For them, there’s been no chance of their having a low key, informative chat with me on this subject. I’ve seemed like a person who is only interested in others if they agree with me. I’ve offered little chance for them to truly form their own opinion about all this.

            In the Animal Rights Movement there’s such a strong wish to convert that there’s not enough attention given to dispassionate education. As a spokesperson-for-the-cause I could seem to be exactly the wrong sort of person for them to be speaking to; perhaps I thought that the story-of-animals would, of its own accord, touch the hearts of people as soon as I told the story; it was a do-the-right-thing-and-go-vegan approach. Perhaps I didn’t have enough faith in the idea of ‘vegan’ being attractive in its own right, nor that Animal Rights was an exciting enough prospect. Perhaps I made the whole subject off-putting enough to be consigned to their back burner. Perhaps I was less interested in communication and more interested in fighting my own shadow.