Thanks for the comment, Jacy — I’m familiar with your essay, obviously share your goals, and actually agree with a lot of what you say.
I agree that “collapse of compassion” is a concern, but tends to be adequately addressed with a focus on individual animals in outreach (rather than big numbers). Farm sanctuary visits can have a big counteracting role to play too and I believe they should be encouraged when possible. Lastly, I agree that starting with an institutional message is far more effective than launching into reasons for an individual to become vegan. It lowers defenses and makes people realize there’s a problem… but we still need to get to the V-word at some point.
Why?
There’s a good amount of evidence that eating animals prevents people from seeing them as sentient or important (a less pronounced form of moral disengagement, as seen in soldiers and slaughterhouse workers). In participating daily in an act of depravity, people go to great lengths to deny emotion and feelings to animals, despite evidence to the contrary. This article illustrates this phenomenon: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12152-016-9271-x.
On the flip side, I think it is no coincidence that the vast majority of animal rights activists become vegan before becoming outspoken advocates for animals. This seems to be supported by the results of this study that compares the strength of animal rights values held by omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08927936.2015.1083192
So while I agree that it’s an uphill battle to persuade people to become vegan, I see it as a pivotal step toward actually accomplishing institutional change. There’s no precedent for non-veg*ns becoming active farmed animal advocates (I’d argue that omnivores in the welfare movement are motivated by their own desire to continue consumption) and there’s no precedent for 1–2% of a population being capable of pushing institutional change. We need more people to get on board and I’ve seen no evidence that they’d do so while still eating animals.
You say as much in your counterargument section: “Finally, given how small the animal-free food movement currently is, institutional change might be so intractable that perhaps the best thing we can do right now is to promote individual change, increasing the number of vegans and vegetarians so that we can create institutional change later when we have more public support.”
In fact, overall your essay doesn’t suggest a complete abandonment of individual outreach and ends on a more uncertain note. Have you changed your thoughts since its publication and now believe it is one of our movement’s “biggest mistakes”? If so, why?
