Politics, Personal
Conduct, and the Vegan Police: the Vegan Outreach Perspective
by Matt Ball, cofounder,
Vegan Outreach
Having been prompted to
do some broader thinking about the status of animal advocacy in the past year – including
contrasting the AR2012 conference in Washington D.C. with past AR conferences – I [currently] have a somewhat different perspective on [these] issues, compared to my concerns when we were
starting Vegan Outreach in the 1990s.
As the Animal People co-founders
and longtime readers will remember, when Jack Norris, Anne Green, and I
started working together 20+ years ago, there was almost no strategic
farmed animal advocacy or daily grassroots promotion of vegetarianism. More
than 99% of animals who suffer harm from humans are killed to be eaten, but
almost the only voices for them at the time were a relative handful of
disconnected and usually isolated vegans. At the time, the vegan community was
dominated – in volume if not numbers – by loud, judgmental vegan-police types. There
was no strategic vision of how to create fundamental and growing change, and no
dedication to, or even thought about, optimizing advocacy. Most efforts went
into defending and glorifying veganism. "How to win an argument with a
meat eater" was the rallying cry – not "How to end factory farming and
create a vegan society." This is why Vegan Outreach spent a fair amount of
time addressing the vegan police problem back then.
However, from the Vegan
Outreach perspective, the circumstances of those times do not prevail any
longer. Farmed animal advocacy and vegetarian promotion is a central concern – and
often the sole focus – of organizations from the smallest local groups all the
way up to the Humane Society of the U.S.
The early years of Vegan
Outreach were defined by trying to get people interested in strategic, constructive
advocacy and outreach with the biggest possible impact for animals. Now, at the
end of 2012, the most dynamic groups doing the most successful work in the U.S.
are focused on farmed animal welfare and vegetarian promotion.
Vegan Outreach alone has
literally thousands of otherwise unaffiliated volunteers who are active in
exposing factory farms and promoting ethical eating – and doing so not in a
dogmatic, arrogant manner, but in a pragmatic, psychologically-sound fashion.
And now, we're just one
of a large number of groups dedicated to optimal advocacy, focused on bringing
about real, lasting change for the 99% of people who are not vegans.
Another way to look at
it: if you asked the average person on the street about vegans in 1995, that
person would have mentioned their nephew's crazy misanthropic friend. When
asked about vegans now, people think of Bill Clinton, Ellen DeGeneres, Jonathan
Safran Foer, and the latest athlete to go vegan.
Of course there are
still screaming vegan police – still angry, and, basically, still impotent folks
who focus not on cruelty to animals, but on hating vegans and vegetarians who
have chosen to value pragmatism and results more than purity and exclusivity.
As Jack Norris put it
long ago, we want a vegan world, not a vegan club. That's what Vegan Outreach
is all about. However, as we know, there still are – and will always be – those who
draw self-worth from being apart from and superior to the rest, who want and
need their exclusive vegan club.
Yet it is important to
remember – and this is one of the most important lessons I've learned over the
years – that those people have little impact in the real world, except in
feeding a negative stereotype and wasting the time of practical, forward-looking
advocates.
An analogy can be made
with leafleting. We often will come across a belligerent individual who wants
to monopolize our time arguing. We can waste our time with this person, who
will never change his or her mind and only seeks to undermine us. Or we can
ignore that person and do the constructive and necessary work of reaching new
people with the animals' message.
There are two practical
consequences to this. The first is to recognize that angry, obsessive vegans
are prominent in society. Therefore, those of us focused on the animals must be
the opposite of the stereotype that the angry and obsessive people create.
The
second can be summarized as "don't feed the trolls." Vegan Outreach
is often contacted by people who say we must condemn group X, or oppose
proposition Y or bill Z, or attack us for not focusing on dairy, or want us to
take a position on the latest controversy within the animal cause.
Instead of expending our
limited time and resources on what history has shown to be endless and useless
internecine debates, we simply wish everyone the best of luck in their efforts
to help animals – and then we continue with the constructive, necessary work of
exposing factory farms and promoting ethical eating to new people.
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