ARCO's Abolitionists - A Vegan Forum

Alex wrote:I like this game!

Is it appropriate to play if I am one of the bloggers mentioned

rags wrote:Here's another game for you. This is the answer: "No".

What is the question...

A) Is it true that there are big differences between animal rights and animal welfare?
B) Was Adolf Hitler a vegetarian?
C) Is it cold where polar bears live?

My March post was one of my more off-the-cuff rants, taking the chain to task for calling the chickens whose flesh they sold "happy." Some animal advocates might have suggested I give credit to the business for doing something and, indeed, even CEO John Pepper felt credit was due. He felt unfairly maligned by my post, and was quick to express it in the comments for that blog entry, following it up with an email.

But what he didn't understand at the time--which, to his credit, he does seem to understand now (unlike some animal advocates, apparently)--is that it is inconsistent for an animal rights advocate to praise someone for selling the products of animal exploitation, no matter what level of suffering is bound up in the flesh of those beings. It is incumbent upon us to point out just how pernicious and harmful that sort of language is to animal rights, particularly with respect to how it further entrenches the idea that is acceptable to unnecessarily use animals as a means to our own ends in the first place.

Further to John's credit, he is far more open to honest discussion and criticism than most people I have ever met. He ended up inviting me to lunch so that I could elaborate on the animal rights point of view for him, and describe why it necessitates a vegan approach. Of course, we both had a nice vegan meal at a local restaurant near his headquarters, during which John listened carefully and asked great questions.

Of course, he did not go vegan immediately following lunch and, to my knowledge, does not yet intend to personally go vegan. However, animal advocates should never expect people to flip on a dime. What a way to ensure heartbreak or otherwise bend our activism to meet a meaningless goal! Apart from the reality that most people don't function this way, and need time to sort things out, the goal of an abolitionist isn't simply to get someone to adopt veganism for whatever reason might best serve that individual's interests, but to adopt veganism because that person decides it is the right thing to do--that it is consistent with their beliefs. Only they can make that decision for themselves. Our job is primarily to get them to look at animals from a perspective that might help them think their beliefs through and re-evaluate their behavior.

Apparently John thought this might be a message with some value for his coworkers, because he asked me to come speak to his store managers during one of their regular meetings.

[snip]

I had walked into that room expecting resistance, for obvious reasons, and ended up having a great abolitionist discussion that the participants seemed to follow quite clearly, and take in with relative ease. I have to say that this only further exposed for me the lie that animal advocates need to do "whatever it takes" to get people to go vegan. I understand the sheer desperation behind that position. Tens of billions of animals are killed by humans for trivial reasons every year, and we just want it to stop. But it can never stop until enough people understand and agree with why it has to stop. My presentation on Tuesday convinced me that the best and only way to make this happen is to approach your audience as a respectful and articulate abolitionist. Anything else is misleading, counter-productive and ultimately sells people short, along with the nonhuman animals we aim to protect from harm.

The question that comes to mind in light of this Boloco journey is, when (and how) will I find another opportunity like this? It's rare to have someone invite you to come speak about veganism to a respectfully open group of working adults whose paychecks depend on animal exploitation. How do we nurture more connections like these? (seriously, please answer this questions in the comments below if you have ideas) We can't expect every CEO to respond to irate blog posts, as John Pepper did, and we can't expect cold calls and letters to open doors this way, either. Many people will ignore us unless we resort to bad PR threats or otherwise leaning on non-abolitionist tactics that do a disservice to everyone in the end.

[snip]

The point of all this public navel-gazing is keep discussing what effective animal advocacy looks like. It seems to me that those who claim abolitionism is too radical or too hard for the public to handle really must not "get it", despite how simple it is to understand and present if you actually do the reading and thinking it requires to break free of the speciesist views that perpetuate old-style welfare-oriented advocacy. If we are going to raise human consciousness and change the way we look at and relate to nonhumans, we have to start doing it now, and we have to do it with activism that is consistent with our end goal of abolishing animal exploitation.

I'm meeting people all over the place who take what I have to say about animal rights and veganism very seriously when respect their intelligence and mine with honest and direct advocacy. This tells me we ought to be sharing the abolitionist message with as many people as possible as often as possible, and not squandering our limited time and resources with counterproductive campaigns that reinforce the notion that unnecessary animal use can be acceptable.

We don't need to wait until a certain percentage of the population is eating "happy meat" or has decided to be vegetarian, while a select few have "opted" for veganism. We can do it right now, and we can make a difference.

To achieve and maintain 'legitimacy' with institutions and the public, the 'mainstreaming' of the animal rights movement into the animal protection movement--a rebranding, if you will--has led to the suppression, marginalization and even outright rejection of those who promote the movement's core animal rights ideals. Activists that advocate for an abolitionist approach to animal rights are labeled 'fringe', 'radical' or 'extreme' in a bid to put as much distance between them and husbandry reform advocates as possible. Now, I don't know about you, but it would seem to me that--in a movement claiming to be in favor of animal rights--the activists whose means are consistent with the movement's abolitionist ends should be considered the core, not the fringe.

The difference in treatment of the members of in-groups and out-groups by the more powerful in-group is often stark and shocking to one who doesn’t hold the in-group’s prejudice. Members of the in-group are held in the highest esteem and are treated with the utmost care and hospitality, kindness and gentleness. Indeed, in-groups members, especially those in whom the prejudice is deepest, often coddle fellow in-group members with a fantastic spectacle of love and affection. Meanwhile, the indifference toward out-group members often results in the harshest cruelty inflicted by the very same individuals who are so kind, gentle, and loving toward in-group members. In fact, the kindness and consideration shown to in-group members almost seems a kind of compensation or cover-up for the indifference and cruelty shown out-group members.