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.