Information Day

2069:

Regarding the enslaved animals, those we eat and make use of, as long as people stick them in this ‘special category’ (they’re not like our pets at home!) they can maintain a cut-off point “regarding certain animals”. This makes vegan information inevitably falls on deaf ears. For us it’s frustrating!

But getting angry about it is no longer an effective protest tool, not with this issue anyway.

Both vegans and omnivores believe that we can think and say what we like. Yes, true, but there again, isn’t anger the warning signal before getting personal and disapproving? This has always been a favourite method of getting what we want. Anger is real. But it’s our presentation that counts.

The world of communication starts just like a variety act. There’s a little performing, a little showing off and looking attractive enough for people to spend their time with us. Who wants to spend ANY time with a sad-sack or an evangelist? None of us want bad company but to be with up-lifting and laughter-making people. 

We need to be cuter. All five-year olds understand this, that to be fun and interesting-to-be-with is the name of the game. So, if we can make friends, do a little performing here and there, try to smile as often as possible, then some magic is possible, and surely it’s magic we need! By hypnotising the ‘opposition’ with affection (you know, the sort of thing usually reserved for pussy cats), we can ride the stormy seas of Animal Rights and reach harbour’s safety in the bosom of mutual affection.

Effective relationship-building must be accomplished, first up, for reasons of perception, namely omnivore-perception of ‘vegans’. It may not be a perception of untrustworthiness they feel – more like “you’re an idiot”. So, we may have to work quite hard to fix that one. But no big deal, because effective relationship-building is done there and then. We humans are multi-taskers. We devise millions of thoughts per second, each of which can start off a whole new world of thinking. Between each other we have a great opportunity to find common ground, instead of getting off-side with each other. Just watch how little kids do it, from the very beginning of life. They’ve got it down to a fine art. And eventually they always get what they want, whilst all the time building trust, and of course adding to their inimitable cuteness. If only it were the same way, adult to adult. By applying the ‘small-kid’ technique, vegans with omnivores, omnivores with vegans, we can get a lot out of Information Day.

Seduction

2068:

The seductive ‘turn-on’ we experience from using animal-based food and clothing, is powerful enough to make most people forget what they’re getting involved with. Stolen fruit tastes sweetest - the very power of the risk is attractive. The Devil take the hindmost.

Once you’ve started to consider the obscenity of using ‘animal’, the seduction of it becomes repulsive. What vegans are saying has to be such a powerful counterweight that it is enough to liberate animal slaves.

What is it we’re attempting here? Not just ‘welfare’ to improve imprisoned conditions for animals but their freedom from jail – to grant them ‘rights’).

Turning-On

2067:

We are taught to believe that being omnivore is the only way humans can live. Very few people have said how dangerous this ‘common perception’ is. The 250 executions, per year, per person isn’t a well known fact (its being little-known is significant in itself) but would it touch people if it were known?   Enough to change them?

Maybe not, because ‘universal acceptance’ says that animals fall into a special category. That category isn’t contemptuous of animals as such because we know we do love animals, but there’s a cut off point about certain specific animals. (As there used to be about racial inferiority). That ‘cut-off’ point is central to omnivore-thinking. People use an elaborate trick of the mind to stay within the safe confines of the Normal Club. Their willingness to consume animals is a requirement for living the good-life, with good-food being very much part of it. Animal-eating is everywhere, including restaurants, dinning on home-cooked dinners, those walk-down-the-street snacks. We never stop not doing it. Even the cashmere sweaters and silk fabrics – it’s all the result of many deaths of totally innocent creatures. The products are a ‘turn-on’. The pain and the fear behind these products doesn’t enter our heads. Without animal suffering these products could never reach us.

Picking Up On It

2066:

However much we learn about this subject, we’re always disappointed by what’s being picked up by others. In our society for all the ugly human dealings with animals, most people still won’t recognise Animal Rights. It’s as if animal-users either know nothing or care nothing about this subject.

Either way, we animal advocates are missing our target. We’re not convincing people about the need for the liberation of animals. Until vegans reach-out rather than push-away, nothing will change. By becoming more professional in our approach, we become more reliable. Then we seem safer, less volatile as people, and what we say more likely to convince. Obviously, if we simply leave it to the omnivore to find out what they will, they’ll get side-tracked by other issues.

As activists, we vie for attention-space. Every advertiser and sloganeer shouts for attention. We need to be different. We need to stand out as more responsible and professional. Until we move past the shouting stage, people will continue look away. They’ll be seduced by those who ‘do it’ better than we do (for whom it’s easier - every other main issue being easier than vegan principle because of people’s food attachments).

So, admittedly, we start with a distinct disadvantage in the first place. Unlike save-planet-save-children causes (which can appeal to both the selfish and unselfish side of us), ours at first isn’t perceived that way at all. Getting involved in the animal cause just looks like hard work. It is, after all, a tough message.

We need all our skill to help it along. We certainly don’t need to capsize it by alienating people, or by NOT addressing the worries which stop them picking-up on what we’re saying.

Separation

2065:

The reason our ‘mutual separations’ occur, over this animal question, isn’t just because of food, health and cruelty issues, it’s also about our attitude towards being judged. Value judging, the negative sort, concerns the non-vegan’s ‘contempt’ for animals. Nothing makes a vegan angrier than hearing the phrase “They’re just animals”. It implies that animals are dumb and we can do as we please with them. Vegans do passionately care about the suffering of animals. Farmed animals, laboratory animals, circus animals, etc. We want to let non-vegans know how deeply outraged we are.

But usually our arguments do no good because reasonable discussion is made almost impossible by their reading our ‘outrage’ and judgement, clothed in a show of sensitivity on the vegan’s part. They can smell the value judgment, and find it threatening. They see us as self-righteous do-gooders. We see them as dismissive. Mutual dislike. No one ever listens after they feel disliked. Thus ends any chance of communication between us.

Becoming Judgemental

2064:

Today, there are many decision-making people acting irrationally, worsening the mess we’re in instead of improving it. Vegans must address the rationally-intentioned, and have faith in them that they’ll understand what has to be done; that they will come to have faith in the effectiveness of en-masse boycott, to put an end to the Animal Industries.

Vegans are proposing a straightforward solution, but either non-vegans are unaware of it or they’re continuing to ignore it. For us that is frustrating and yet we know people have the intelligence to grasp the logic of our arguments.

But something is not connecting. So, we wait. During which time, we hope to find out why – for some it connects and for others it doesn’t. The problem might not lie only amongst the uncaring non-vegans but amongst vegans themselves.

There’s trouble in the ranks down at the Vegan Detective Agency. Some want to look for clues to the crime, others just want the culprits punished. Some of us never give up our appeal to the average omnivore’s intelligence, others just get annoyed and judge them negatively. I’d say this is the major divide at the Agency, between one type of vegan and another, between those who issue ‘fatwas’ on people they don’t like and others who want to educate them.

The first sort of vegan gets angry – it makes them feel good to get it ‘off their chest’. They judge ‘the animal eater’. It sounds good and strong. But by condemning them, directly or by implication, we separate from them. We set ourselves ‘apart’. We feel ‘better-than’. We quarrel with people we’re close to. The gulf between vegans and non-vegans grows very quickly; within seconds, we can separate from someone, just by ‘making a stand’, just by getting a bit personal about it.

And then it’s an uphill slog, trying to restore balance. Without mutual respect, we can’t impart information. Their receptivity is something we, as vegans, need to nurture.

Boycott

2063:

As soon as the penny drops, that vegan animal rights advocates aren’t supported, we might get scared. But ours is a great cause. We want to be constructive for those who need help desperately, who live as tortured animals or any beings living on this poisoned planet. The sadness is also for the walled-in humans who’ve brought about the chaos we know as ‘today’s world’. Our sadness comes when we realise the acceptance-walls built by egregious magnates, emboldened by the support of sycophantic ‘leaders’ and subservient consumers.

They’re the ones providing all the clues to where we are. If we’re lost, we may look to the largest corporate magnate - the multi-stranded Animal Industry. It’s the most diabolically cruel business and the greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all the industries. It needs to be comprehensively boycotted.

Gut-Speak

2061:

Imagine your best friend, the one you’ve known since childhood, the one who knows you better than you do yourself. They say, “You always hurt the one you love” – in this case your friend is your body. It puts up with plenty. It even adapts, bending here, twisting there, accommodating the demands of the senses as a loving parent does the screaming child. But abuse takes a toll.

Our brain tells us one thing, our gut-feeling tells us another. Gut-instinct says, “Be careful – there’s danger - you aren’t safe – you’re poisoning ‘me’ with animal stuff. It vibrates with the cries of abused animals. I feel it. Give me real food, gentle food, plant food. I know you are used the other stuff. Like everyone, you are used to it. But I can’t hold things together forever. As you get older, your brain will let you know that you are slowing-down due to the effect of your diet. And if that makes you uncomfortable, then don’t leave it too late to do something about it. All I can say is that you have always voted for comfort over safety. Filling your stomach has made you sluggish. Your brain will no longer rescue you. Your peers have moved on. You are alone. But I’m still with you, and I’m not fooled.

Hotel Conditions They Are NOT

2060:

However omnivores see themselves, they’re pulled in two directions at once - safety and comfort. In the end, it’s usually comfort or convenience calling the shots. It’s a case of my comfort versus the animal gulag down the road.

My comfort promises every luxury you can imagine – but many animals must die to provide it. And that’s only the end point. You can’t ignore what went before, their enduring imprisonment in slum conditions, being kept barely alive, just enough to reach required production levels or weight.

The very thought of that could be enough to keep the omnivore awake at night.

250 Capital Crimes

2059:

At some point in a discussion we need to establish the scale of the crime we’re talking about. Once the ‘crime-status’ is established there’s no need to go back over it again and again. Our main job is to establish why we think it’s a crime, that’s all. The main difference between an omnivore and a vegan is in the evaluation of the situation.

First, before discussing if it IS a crime, we have to settle the fact that that people in general are not idiots. We must credit them with enough raw intelligence to understand what we’re saying to them. And no, they mightn’t react the way we want, but they may take it in. If we use something like a shock fact, the ‘250-animals-we-each-eat-every-year’, the impact is powerful. It arrests people in their thinking, because it’s a surprisingly large number of animal executions to be responsible for (amounting to 25,000 deaths if one gets to be a hundred years old!!).

Once the scale of this ‘crime’ is established, we’ve effectively laid our cards on the table. And then, at least, we can have a sensible discussion (hopefully without heavy value judgement). Our emphasis should be on how people have been bamboozled by The Animal Industry, and how otherwise-beautiful people have been drawn into an ugly world where every year, 250 deaths are carried out on our behalf.

250 Deaths

2058:

Imagine how it would be if people did respond differently to what vegans were saying. Rather than getting defensive, suppose they started to see things from the animals’ point of view.

Imagine how it would be if vegans approached omnivores without wanting to attack them. Imagine how we’d sound without the din of judgement in our voices.

We have plenty of ‘calm’ facts to pass onto people. But our message isn’t mild, it’s urgent and important, and just in case we have to underline that, if what we are saying is dismissed. Then we might need to have a couple of shock facts in the bag, to help clinch things.

The shock fact is a weapon to be held in reserve. Having it at hand like a trump card: “We in the West each eat 250 animals a year”. That will be remembered. Perhaps challenged. But it will emphasise how speciesist we humans have become, to be able to disregard such a fact to pursue food-sensation. The rest of the argument, about ‘why we need to be vegan’, is merely detail.

Humanity

2057:

I know a very pushy vegan who is both loathed and loved. He has great compassion but also has a rough, take-no-prisoners manner. Others I know are ineffectual, who are really nice people but aren’t easy to identify with. In the end it comes down to being able to identify with another person and ‘resonate’ with what he or she says. But then we must ask ourselves if we’re truly that interested.

Vegans have got to be sincere, obviously. We need to spark something in others, impress them with the strength of our convictions and our willingness to uphold our principles despite any pressure from others.

We aren’t in a want-to-be-liked competition. It’s the subject that’s important here. Vegans just need to inspire interest and empathy with and for the poor creatures presently languishing in prison. If we aren’t being inspiring then we may be alienating people. And the last thing we want is for anyone to ‘close the book, never to be opened again’.

We’re more likely to get omnivores interested (inspired) if we can show how significant it is to today’s global problems, which haunt every single aware-ised adult on the planet. And that comes down to the significance of humanity. Everyone can relate to that, since if we have no humanity we aren’t complete humans. We’re just oiks. If we are moving towards restoring our humanity we are likely to be moving towards veganism.

Strong on Compassion

2056:

If an omnivore believes themselves to be compassionate by nature, how do they feel when they meet someone who accuses them of not caring about animals?

When a vegan condemns an omnivore, it can cut deep. It may not stimulate self-examination but the very opposite. The ‘dominant human’, the average omnivore, accepts that they are superior to animals. They will therefore meets this sort of attack with derision. And then they’ll counter attacks. They’ll question the integrity or sanity of the attacker. For them, what is being questioned here is so fundamental to life, and so universal amongst humans in every country of the world, that a personal change to veganism would seem pointless.

Vegans, of course, don’t see it that way. But this is where we, as vegans, have probably got to ask ourselves a central question concerning our own motives – “What do I want from Animal Rights? Do I want the feeling of being right, to feel superior or to communicate what I know? Certainly, we may know we have a watertight case. And if that makes us appear rather too confident about our views, do we abuse that advantage? This sense of being right can emboldens us, in a sort of ‘quasi-violence’ - a stab here and a punch there, to drive our message home.

The sledgehammer mentality reminds me of kids fighting in the playground. It’s always a game of one-upmanship. It’s a need to boast. As adults, we find ourselves still doing the same thing, but now the new ‘cool’ is all about looking relaxed and fearless, showing that one isn’t afraid of danger. The meat-eater’s macho is played out. The vegan’s macho is played out too. They do it by defiance. We do it by making value judgements. The omnivore tries to disarm us mentally, uses laughter to ease the tension, hides behind nervous laughter, allowing time to formulate a dismissive remark. Or they go the other way, and  refuse to talk about any of ‘it’, decaling the whole subject of Animal Rights a ‘non-issue’.  

We ask that classic question – why do you never understand? They ask their classic question - how we can be so intrusive?

Somehow, we each have to find a balance between these two questions, for each question is profound, and commonly felt.

This is why, as vegans, we have to internalise our outrage and sadness and heartbreak. It’s a millstone around our neck. Although our feelings feel like our strong spot, if it becomes emotional baggage then it’s our weak spot. We might be sincere about our pity for the animals but we might also pity ourselves at being socially excluded.  If we are to be effective as activists, we have to get used to exclusion. It’s strengthening in the long run.

Misperceptions

2055:

Except for those who are vegans-from-birth, all of us during our own lives have compromised our principles over the foods we’ve used. And we’ve justified it with some rather shallow thinking. Here we see vegans accusing omnivores of one central fault - that they couldn’t care less. But that’s not how omnivores see themselves. To them it sounds like unfair criticism - omnivores think they do care. They care about many things. “But there are limits”, they say. Using-animals just doesn’t register on the omnivore radar.

Most omnivores know very little about how vegans think and probably don’t take us too seriously anyway. But from our perspective, eating meat and dairy shows contempt for animals and therefore proves a lack of concern about what is happening.

There’s no common ground here in this misperception of each other. It’s complicated.

Apart from the strong cultural traditions holding habits in place, there’s a new culture emerging, establishing new habits. For those of us who are vegan, it’s our passport to an altogether different view on life – based on vegan principle. There exists now, a looming clash of cultures. Omnivores perceive that vegans are making terrible accusations: that “meat-eaters” are ethically dumbing down so they can enjoy their animal foods with impunity. In reply, omnivores accuse vegans of being the new morality police, intent on spoiling the pleasures of living, namely the partaking of readily-available animal products. We abstain and they partake.

There’s a gulf between the two ‘cultures’ and that gulf widens or narrows according to whether we aim to be hard or admit that we are incapable of being hard.

Arrogance-free

2054:

Inevitably we will always resent the arrogance of the majority, which leads us to feel anger, frustration and ‘judgement’. We get angry because we haven’t been able to persuade them to adopt vegan principles. The more we want them to change the less they want to comply.

As soon as we find something we’d like to change about people, in comes ‘judgement’, and therefore out goes all chance of agreement. “You now don’t seem to like me – why should I change to please ?”

As activists, we’re familiar with factory farming techniques. Most of us are aware of what’s going on behind the scenes with animals. On the other hand, we know omnivores aren’t aware. And if they are, they choose not to look, for if they did, they’d find out where their favourite foods come from. And no prizes for guessing what happens next! They’ll see ‘all this’ as off-limits. And so, we’re back to square one.

Whatever we tell people it will be like water off a duck’s back. And for this we judge them, because they are selling-out to convenience and personal pleasure. (So, what’s worse - what they do as animal-eaters or what I do as the value-judge?)

Arrogance is one of the heaviest judgements we can level at someone. We say it’s arrogant to evade such an important issue. But both sides see arrogance in the other. Each of us judges the other for their faulty reasoning about this subject of ‘animal-usage’. They hate us criticising them, sighting us as arrogant purists. We judge them for being shallow and arrogant hedonists. According to each one’s perception the other side seems arrogant and therefore fatally flawed.

Judgement-free

2053:

The worst thing about judging and disapproving is how much we do it. Even when we don’t think it’s possible, others can tell what we’re thinking. Even private thoughts can be sensed somehow. A twitch of the mouth, a sigh or a snigger gives the game away. We can be read like a book. We think we’re concealing our private value judgements, believing we’re more inscrutable than we really are. We don’t take account of the fact that most people are hypersensitive to even a hint of personal criticism. That’s why criticising rarely works out the way we hope it will.

We all get involved with this game of judging or being judged. As Animal Rights advocates, we judge the ‘meatheads’. Omnivores judge vegans, and so it goes on. But because we ‘plant-eaters’ are in such a tiny minority we don’t have a sense of authority, so we easily lose self-confidence. We often use aggression to bolster our confidence. For the minority to attempt to persuade the majority out of their confidence is as hard as pushing over a brick wall. The only way to win authority is to keep our persuasions judgement-free. After all, we do have truth on our side.