This is a greatly updated version of my presentation Making Compassion Easier: a strategy for achieving vegan critical mass. I gave it at the International Animal Rights Conference in Luxemburg, sept. 2015.
Keywords of this strategy are moral vs nonmoral, pragmatism, incrementalism, meat reduction.
Your comments are welcome. I’m continuously updating my thoughts, so this strategy is entirely a work in progress.
“Veganism is a means. We use veganism to get to a cruelty-free world. … You don’t have to be consistent with your dogma, you should be consistent with what you really want.” That might have been the most important part of the entire talk. Thanks so much, Tobias!
Just one thing, Tobias: Psychological research indicates that just saying “eat less meat” or “reduce your meat consumption” won’t have any impact. This is for two reasons. 1. If anyone cares enough to be open to this idea, they are most likely to think, “Oh, I don’t eat much meat.” How many times have you heard, “Oh, I don’t eat much meat. Just chicken. (Or “chicken and fish.”)
2. If not given a specific goal, past habits determine actions.
This is why our read on the research indicates we should ask a specific but doable request that will have the biggest impact.
http://www.onestepmatters.com/
yes, i agree, it shouldn’t be a vague message. i will include that in the next talk. stupid that i didn’t make this explicit here. thanks
Thanks for sharing the website Matt! I encounter this same issue at the moment. Although I agree with the concept Tobias is going for. But at the moment I am at my parents for some weeks and they often say that because of me they reduced their consumption of meat. A thing most activist love to hear, but what they are actually doing (in contrast of saying) is the opposite. They consume meat multiple times a day and in relatively big quantities. So I am afraid that their vegetarian pasta once per month already makes them feel that what they do is enough. How do we tackle this issue effective? 🙂
Btw, Tobias, I don’t if I could tag you in the youtube-videos of your talks but I left some comments there as well. Take care!
– Mittch
Had the pleasure of being in the audience. Two brilliant talks.
Both were fascinating and uplifting talks at IARC.
I was particularly drawn to the concept of thinking how your actions rather than what you eat are likely to have a greater impact.
hi tobias,
once again – than you so much for both of your presentations!
i am giving lectures to school kids in germany – and i will make some changes for the better in my presentations – thanks to your ideas.
can you please provide me with the ppt-slides of your presentations?
Thx Robin. Can you give your email address ?
hi tobias,
it is robin.drastig@tierrechte-im-unterricht.de
thanks a lot!
Thank you for the video, Tobias, it was really inspiring. You gave me hope: we can do this!
Is the second presentation also available somewhere? The above presentation was very interesting, thanks for sharing it.
thanks. yes, it’s in the last post. and also on the “videos” page of the blog 🙂
Ah, oops. I actually already read that last post (another very interesting article), but somehow my mind failed to link the two together.
hi tobias,
can you please provide me with the ppt-slides of your presentations?
thx,
robin