diplomacy

License to influence (but do it right)

~ Tobias Leenaert ~ 7 Comments

I believe that trying to make another person change their beliefs and behaviour is not a crime. If you believe in something, and you start from empathy, and you have rational arguments to back it up, then you have every right to try to make another person see your point of view and to try to sway them in your direction.

Don’t let anyone tell you that what people eat is just their own business. As long as they are eating animals or the products of animals, it’s not just their business. This doesn’t mean we should force them to think or do anything, but it does mean that you don’t have to be ashamed or embarrassed about wanting to change people’s hearts and minds. Moreover, everyone tries to do that, all the time. Everyone making a sale, every mom or dad, every child, every husband, every wife… is trying to influence others all the time – often for much less noble objectives than ours.

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People will tell you that they will decide what they eat for themselves. If only that were true. If only they weren’t so influenced by what supermarkets, producers and restaurants were trying to make them eat. If only they weren’t so affected by prices and promotions. If only they could choose what was on their plate independently of what their parents and grandparents or the other people in their nation or culture eat… No, most people are only under the illusion that they are free to eat what they want. Your voice won’t limit them any further. Rather, it can liberate them.

So just like the media, like their family or their peers, we too will influence people. We can not not influence. We can, however, avoid being coercive or manipulative. Trying to influence another person of something is not a crime, but it is an art. It starts with not thinking in terms of convincing people, but rather in terms of helping them to open up. It starts with behaving not like moral crusaders, judges, or the police, but rather, like supporters. 

The vegan handicap & the art of vegan conversation

~ Tobias Leenaert ~ 27 Comments

If you’re vegan or vegetarian: you may have experienced it more than once: you are at the dinner table with other people, and the conversation turns to not eating meat. Some people at the table may be able to have a rational conversation about this, but others get a bit (or quite) angry, defensive, or sometimes downright nasty.

For some of your table partners to turn defensive, you probably actually didn’t even have to start to talk. Your mere presence as someone who doesn’t eat meat/animal products, is enough to make them uncomfortable. And this discomfort may impact the whole ensuing discussion. This is what I call the vegan handicap.uncomfortable (1)

My guess (and I think it’s a pretty reasonable one), is that at the basis of the discomfort lies guilt. Most people in their right mind will know there’s something wrong with what’s on their plate. They may believe that it is ok to kill animals for food, but most of them also believe that when we choose to do that, we should give the animals “a good life” and make sure they “don’t suffer” (whatever those words mean to us). They believe there exists something like “humane meat” and that there is no problem with that. At the same time, however, most of them are buying meat from just any source: at the supermarket, in restaurants, in the cafetaria at their work… They are quite aware that they could at least get meat in organic stores, which they might think meets their criteria for “humaneness”, but almost none of them do that. Apart from all this, there may be a voice inside them that tells them that killing animals for food is unfair.

So the people at your table, looking at you, feel guilty – at a conscious or less conscious level – about the discrepancy between what’s on their plate and what they believe they should do. You confront them with that guilt, and they get defensive. They get the feeling that you are or are going to attack them, while your opinion merely represents that dissenting opinion within themselves: that gnawing little voice inside them, that they actually don’t want to hear.

It is very important to be aware of this dynamic. Assuming this attitude of guilt and defensiveness is not a good basis to work on, I suggest that the vegan at the table needs to go a certain extra length to put the omnivore at ease, and not put oil on the fire. All of this means that things you say may sound accusing and guilt-inducing much easier and faster than you expect or intended. It means that – pardon the expression – you should walk on eggshells.

There’s a lot of points you can give attention to in order to put others at ease and make the conversation go better. Here are some of them: behave very pleasantly, have a sense of humor, make it clear that you’re not accusing them, avoid charged words like “murder”, talk in terms of “we/society” and not “you”, explain how you have eaten meat yourself before (and how it possibly took you a while to see things clearly). Avoid sounding holier-than-thou. Don’t tell them things like they are complicit in humanity’s biggest crime ever (even though you may believe they are).  Admit that you are not perfect and that you don’t have the answer to everything. Above all, don’t talk all the time but listen and ask smart questions.
I would summarize this as: be nice. Being nice not just makes the world a better place for everyone (so I’m not talking about faking stuff), but it is crucial if you want to be effective at helping animals. 

This whole attitude of yours is, in my view, a lot more important than the content of the actual arguments you will bring to the table. Your conversation is first of all about the relation between you and the others, not about the content. When you have established a good relationship, when there is the trust that you are not accusing or attacking the other, then you can give more attention to the arguments themselves.

Vegan conversation is an art that we all need to master.

Yes, you can be a meat eating environmentalist

~ Tobias Leenaert ~ 37 Comments

In the post being vegan doesn’t trump everything, I wrote that it’s not necessary to be vegan in order to do good for animals. In other words, you can be an animal activist (at least of sorts) without being vegan.

You can also be other things without being vegan:

You can be an animal lover without being vegan.
(I read somewhere: “The privilege of being able to identify oneself as an ”animal lover” belongs only to vegans.” Ouch.)

You can be an environmentalist without being vegan.
(I often read: “You can’t be a meat eating environmentalist.)

In fact, you can be a lot of things without being vegan.

Think about the absurdity of the last claim, for instance. Say a non vegan person consciously never takes a plane for environmental reasons. Compare them to a vegan who flies five times a year. The carbon footprint of the vegan will be a lot bigger (all else being equal). (One could comment here that “you can’t be a meat eating environmentalist” doesn’t imply that you are an environmentalist when you don’t eat meat, but this is often what is implicitly communicated or understood).

But I want to make a bigger point here. When people identify as something (an environmentalist, an animal lover, a vegan, a writer… whatever…) it is probably detrimental in most cases when someone else says they are NOT that. I get it, I get it: we can identify factual mistakes (they’re not a vegetarian if they eat fish, for instance). But mostly, by saying they are NOT this or that (while we ARE) we will often probably only widen the gap between them and us. It could very well alienate them from whatever we want to get them closer to. I’m especially talking about situations where a person identifies as a vegan, while we spot him eating or using this or that, which we consider or know is not vegan.

I have been considering myself a vegan since 17 years, but one thing I’m not picky about is wine. Usually I can’t find the needed information on the bottle, so in this case, I give that wine the benefit of the doubt and I drink it (also because, frankly, I think drinking wine as a vegan helps to dispel the austere image of veganism that some have). Now, if you, True Vegan, would tell me I’m not a real vegan because of that, it wouldn’t help anything, I think – even though I’m more prone to feelings of guilt than most people. It would alienate me from you and from part of the vegan movement, and I would probably be irritated with what I would perceive (maybe incorrectly) as a holier-than-thou attitude.

I think big factual mistakes (like fish eating vegetarianism) can be corrected, but it can always be done in a non confrontational way (and best in private).
Debunking non vegan animal activists, animal lovers or environmentalists (saying that they are a contradiction in terms) should, I think, be avoided, if only because these are unclear terms anyway for which we often have no waterproof definition.  Of course, subtle, gentle, humorous hints never harm anybody.