Reality check: we want everyone to go vegan, but only a tiny part of the population is doing so.

It’s not helpful to complain about this situation, or call everyone who doesn’t go vegan selfish, uncaring or hypocritical.

To see what we can do that’s more productive, look at the figures below. The pie chart on the left represents the small number of people who are willing to make the relatively big effort that is implied today in going vegan. That effort is represented by the steep slope on the right.

What most vegans and animal rights activists try to do is to increase that pie slice by increasing people’s motivation so that more of them want to make (and do make) the required effort to go vegan:This, in itself, is not sufficient to get to a vegan world. I’m optimistic, and I do believe that most people, in their hearts, care about animals and don’t want to see them harmed. The thing is, they just don’t care enough to be willing to deal with too much inconvenience (or what they see as inconvenience).

So, in addition to increasing people’s motivation, we also need to… You got it: we need to work on making the slope less steep:

Making the slope less steep means that we are going to create an environment that offers so many vegan alternatives, and in which the production of animal products becomes progressively harder, that people have to make less and less effort, and thus need less and less motivation.

The gentler the slope/the more vegan-friendly the environment, the more people will go vegan.

Some will only go vegan when it’s like this:

 

 

And a few laggards will need it to be like this:

Many vegans find it sad and depressing that we need to make things so much easier before people will do what is the morally right thing to do. I can empathize with that feeling. But consider this: it’s not as if you or me went vegan thanks only and exclusively to our moral motivation. We too needed a certain availability of alternatives, without which we might not have gone vegan. You may think that you only needed to hear the right information or have the right thoughts, but that’s not true: you went vegan when you had enough motivation to climb the slope. Some people might have climbed it when it was still much steeper (let’s say in the 1970’s).

Everyone of us needs the slope to be a certain way. Very few or none of us would have been able to climb this slope

Let alone this one:

It’s all relative. Be happy you were able to go vegan when you did. But realize there were always people who did it before you. And don’t expect everyone else to go vegan today. Work on motivation AND on making things easier.