The vegan paradigm, focused on diet change, completely obscures the object of the animal protection movement, which is a social and political revolution in ideas about animal rights. Diet is a core part of a lot of people’s identity, and to a random person walking down the street, being approached by a vegan activist asking them to simply stop eating animals is a major imposition. After organizations have spent decades talking to people about veganism and distributed over 30 million pamphlets, the number of vegans and vegetarians per capita has barely changed.
GLENN: It’s common to hear that being vegan is the “most important thing you can do” to reduce animal suffering, or that your consumer choices are the primary lever you have to influence the livestock industry. Until recently — about a decade ago — the primary mode of activism for farmed animals in the United States was to hand out pamphlets on street corners and college campuses promoting plant-based diets and educating people about speciesism. The leading organizations, including today’s leading “welfarist” orgs like The Humane League and Mercy For Animals, purported to show that for every few hundred or thousand people who took a pamphlet, X number of them would go vegan.
This all makes it unclear why we shouldn’t just talk to people about veganism. Why focus on merely improving the treatment of farmed animals — which might achieve less and runs the risk of making people think it’s okay to consume animal products that are raised “humanely” — when we could ask them to go vegan instead?
The short answer is that focusing on vegan outreach just doesn’t work. Diet is a core part of a lot of people’s identity, and to a random person walking down the street (or browsing the metaphorical street online), being approached by a vegan activist asking them to “simply” stop eating animals is a major imposition. They’ll probably think the activist is telling them what to do, and most people don’t like being told what to do. As a result, even after orgs have spent decades talking to people about veganism and distributed over 30 million pamphlets, the number of vegans and vegetarians per capita has barely changed…
Welfare campaigns… cast corporations and the government, rather than individual consumers, as the actors at fault for animal suffering. And by leading with a message focused on suffering and systemic change rather than diet and individual choices, they manage to raise public awareness of factory farming while actually boosting support for the total abolition of animal agriculture. This is true even when they successfully curtail egregious factory farming practices that one might think would catalyze opposition to animal agriculture.
Multiple research teams have tested how welfare campaigns affect support for animal product consumption and abolitionism by presenting survey participants with either a news article about a new corporate or government animal welfare policy or a control article. They consistently find that participants who are shown the treatment article say they’re more likely to reduce their consumption of animal products, and sometimes by wide margins. As law professor and researcher Justin Marceau remarked at one of the leading animal advocacy conferences this year, participants in a yet-unpublished study “who learned about the fact of a Prop 12 type [animal welfare] law [in their state] were about twice as likely to think that pigs should have more rights, and to say that they were less likely to eat pig”…
For all the good you can do by going vegan — or talking to people you know personally about veganism (as opposed to random people on the street) — you can do even more good by supporting or raising money for corporate and political campaigns to improve farmed animal welfare… This point was made, albeit in a more incendiary manner, in a 2007 article by animal rights lawyer and activist Wayne Hsiung titled “Boycott Veganism.” Hsiung argued that the vegan paradigm, focused on diet change, completely obscures the object of the animal protection movement — which is a social and political revolution in ideas about animal rights, rather than just a change in how individual people behave as consumers… Hsiung is absolutely right that supporting animal-centered activism — including with your money — is more impactful than going vegan and spending resources asking other people to go vegan as well. SOURCE…
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