Keeping a low profile

1444: 

Vegans are either vilified, ridiculed or ignored.  But just for the moment none of this matters too much.  We shouldn't mind any of this.  There’s some advantage in being side-lined.  When the eye is turning away from animal matters it’s not focusing on Animal Rights groups, leaving us largely to go about our business, uninterrupted.

Since there’s so much ground work to be done at this stage, we hardly need the distraction.  We need to keep our eye on the ball and our energies intact.  It could so easily be wasted, tilting at windmills, protesting to no effect.

This period we’re going through at the moment is good for preparation.  Our movement may be largely ignored, but that’s good in one way.  At least we’re not constantly being rubbished in the media, with us spending a lot of time defending ourselves.  General apathy is useful to us since, apart from a somewhat aggro image we’re acquired, no other harm has been done to our vegan movement, mainly because no one wants to draw attention to us.  No one wants to even consider animals as deserving rights or humans needing to adopt vegan diets.  The media don’t want to offend their advertisers or customers, so they don’t high-profile this subject, and for similar reasons you’ll never see an Animal Rights advocate being interviewed on TV, because of the danger of making the interviewer look stupid or cold hearted.

         

A low profile suits our purposes at the moment, so it’s a fine time right now for doing the ground work, for learning about effectiveness and becoming familiar with public perception. 

Today, the whole subject of animal-abuse is of interest to those who want more information.  It isn’t being much discussed around the dinner table or on TV, but it does feature on-line, where useful information is available for those of us who want it.  Via web sites and chat rooms, people are wising up to what’s going on in the Animal Industry and, alongside a general change in fashion, advertising of animal products is becoming less convincing.

For those who don’t want to know anything about 'farm animals', our difficulty is breaking into their interest-areas. We need to learn how to make vegan lifestyle attractive, and come across as reasonable, intelligent and well informed people. And definitely, we need to drop our “I-hate-all-omnivores” baggage.