Cause for Anger?

1524: 

Whenever eating animals come into the conversation there’s a stony silence, or there’s outright denial of involvement, or ridicule of the animal rights perspective.  Nothing comes up in the conversation that makes very much sense, since people give off such a powerful signal that they “just aren’t interested”.

Our obvious reaction isn’t necessarily very productive.  It’s infuriating when people aren’t interested, and it often brings out ‘the bulldozer’ in us, when we try to break though the stony silence with force.  Usually no one is listening.  But if anyone does listen, they often think we’re exaggerating, and so they maintain a slight disbelief in what we’re telling them.  “Vegans are so weird, it’s likely they’ll be lying too”.  It’s a real Catch 22 for vegans, this one.

So, ‘this one’ is the big challenge.  We need to develop the art of communication as opposed to confrontation.

How do we deal with our own feelings of frustrations at people’s attitudes?  How do we feel, when we write to the media and get rejected?  How do we react to a speciesist remark from talk-back radio?  How do we deal with being laughed at?

Public resistance to what we are saying comes out of a low awareness of what is happening to animals, mixed with a deep fear that such a diet of ‘vegan food’ will be too restricting – this is what scares people into holding such a negative reaction to what we speak about.  It forces them to turn a deaf ear in order to continue the lifestyle they’ve always had.

But if that is sad enough in itself, for us it’s heartbreaking, to see people suffering unnecessary illnesses because they can’t change.  And I guess it’s both the food poisoning and the animal cruelty that make people feel sick and act stupidly, by pretending to believe that cruelty to these farmed animals actually happens, or worse, that if it does happen that it isn’t cruelty at all.

It’s as if people are taking shelter in an absurd flat-earth-denial of sentience itself, holding that the cutting down of an animal is not so very different to the cutting down of a tree.