Meeting Resistance

1983:

What sort of people are vegans speaking to when they do get the chance to speak? We always hope they’ll be compliant and eager, wanting to learn all the stuff we have to tell them. But, it’s likely they’ll be ‘reluctants’.

We have to remember that many people don’t feel badly about behaving badly. If they do know about the suffering of animals it might not matter to them, and therefore eating these animals won’t concern them either. Nothing will get them to pull back on their animal eating. They will only change their food if they want to badly enough.

We can appeal to their sense of right-behaviour, to their health, to their compassion, but if it’s legal and if most other people do it, there’s no argument in the world that will persuade them to change if they aren’t presently frightened of the harmful effects of their usual food. They won’t even let their minds rest on the subject of Animal Rights, let alone consider changing their diet as radically as we are suggesting. We’re talking about food here, our favourite foods. Our eating pattern is the one consistent thing we’ve been doing all of our lives, right up to the present day. We are what we’ve eaten. To attempt to alter any part of that would be disturbing to our home life and might even seem like committing social suicide (by eating differently to other people).   

Vegans, as most people realise, are in a different reality; we are ‘out there’ wanting to talk contrarily about people’s usual food regimen. When a vegan starts speaking, people’s eyes glaze over. We are met with either inertia or dismissal. This is the collective resistance, but despite this, vegans need to work out how to move people on, or at least stimulate some form of communication on the subject of animal-eating.