Turning adversaries into allies – an interview with Leah Garcés

Leah Garcés

Leah Garcés is the director of Mercy For Animals, and previously launched and headed Compassion in World Farming in the United States. Recently, Leah also published the book GRILLED: turning adversaries into allies to change the chicken industry (Bloomsbury, 2019). In it, she tells about her own fight to help end factory farming. I found it a great read, and was particularly inspired by how she has worked together with the industry to help help make things better for animals, and create a new food system.

Vegan Strategist: Chickens seem to have everything against them: they are small (so that many more of them are eaten than cows or pigs). Consuming their meat seems not as unhealthy as eating red meat. And they seem less problematic environmentally than the bigger farmed animals. Plus, it’s harder to feel empathy for them. What is the best way forward towards helping them?
Leah Garcés:
Before I answer this question, I think it’s worth noting that consuming chickens is hugely damaging to our health and to the environment. It’s actually even more harmful to both than eating beef is; the chicken industry contributes more to growing rates of antibiotic resistance, for example, and due to the number of chickens raised in the United States and the way their waste is managed, the chicken industry is a major (largely unregulated) polluter. Too often, we look at environmental impact only through the lens of greenhouse gas emissions. But all the arable land used to grow feed for farmed animals is also destroying precious ecosystems—in Brazil, for example.

Because the vast majority of land animals raised for food are chickens, helping them means transforming our entire food system, which is no small task! Our theory of change for chickens involves encouraging companies to improve how chickens in their supply chains are treated while compelling them to remove chicken from their menus and add plant-based products. We can do this in so many ways. We can show companies that relying on factory-farmed birds is a major risk, both because the system is inherently weak and because consumers are demanding better choices. By working with chicken farmers, we can help them find a way out of the exploitative contracts binding them to major poultry companies––and help them transition to growing crops, like beans or hemp. We can leverage our supporter base and social media audience to support plant-based companies and restaurants that serve their products.

Suppose you had to make an elevator pitch for the chicken. What would it sound like?
Did you know chickens have superpowers? They can see colors we can’t see and orient themselves in the earth’s magnetic field. They can count and do math when they are one day old! Chickens can see both close and far away at the same time. They empathize, deeply feeling the joy, fear, and pain of their flock mates and babies. We often overlook them just because they’re different from us. But they’re truly remarkable and worthy of our love, respect, and protection—just as much as our companion animals.

Most of your book is about animal protection advocacy, but you also spend a significant part on the new alternatives that are being developed, including cultured meat. Which of the two are you expecting to have the most impact in the coming days? Have you ever been tempted to get involved in the business side?
I really don’t see it as a binary choice. I see the advocacy as the why and the plant-based and cultured meat market as the how. One cannot exist without the other. It’s a mistake to think that a business solution alone can liberate animals from our food system. Businesses don’t emerge and succeed in a bubble. Plant-based and cultured meat businesses emerge and evolve because we’ve succeeded at two things: We’ve steadily increased the external cost of animal products through welfare measures, and we’ve raised awareness of the cruelty, environmental degradation, and injustices of our current protein-production model. As advocates, we create enormous social capital for these products. Imagine if a soda company had the kind of social capital that the plant-based meat companies have, where nonprofits literally demand and action that you not only exist but dominate. It is a dream come true for a business and will accelerate their success. Now think of the reverse—precisely what is happening to soda. Imagine nonprofits opposing your business. Advocates create and take away social capital. Businesses succeed and fail by this social capital. Advocacy groups play a critical role in accelerating and shaping market change and, ultimately, the success of plant-based meat, dairy, and eggs. I am 100 percent confident that they must continue this effort for many years to come. Otherwise these businesses won’t be successful.

While I have been tempted to go into the business side of things, I think many people have the skills to do that, and they don’t have to be passionate about animal rights. I believe I’m uniquely useful as a strategist and advocate for animals.

Leah Garcés befriending a sanctuary pig

You tell the stories and tactics of different parties in your book. Some are more aggressive than others. How do you feel about aggressive versus more diplomatic campaigning, and on what basis should activists choose between them?
We need many different pressures and interventions to succeed, especially when we are trying to change such a big system, like our food and farming system. It’s good to have an array of strategies working in tandem to exert pressure from all angles. You should choose what you are good at, what you feel bears the highest impact, given your unique skills. For me and Mercy For Animals, it’s always been a mix of both sides of the spectrum. I believe we should always offer dialogue first—it’s more efficient, for one. But if that doesn’t work, then undercover investigations and campaigns are necessary to force that dialogue.

What’s your answer to the perennial objection to welfare improvements that they could lead people to become complacent and hence that this would not be helping us towards the abolition of animal agriculture?
There are two reasons for campaigning for welfare improvements and no reason to leave these improvements in the hands of individual consumers. We spend too much time considering individuals and not enough time the systems that people make choices in. The first reason welfare improvements are important is the animals themselves. Imagine you were a prisoner in a terrible prison on death row. Would you want people to advocate just for an end to the death sentence or also for improved conditions in your terrible prison? You would want both, and the 81 billion animals trapped in factory farms globally today want both. Abolishing the whole system will take time. In the meantime, we owe it morally to these animals to reduce their suffering. The second reason is that welfare improvements bring up the price of meat, dairy, and eggs. The laws of economics are clear on this point: As price goes up, demand goes down. In fact, few things drive demand more than price. So clearly the price has to go up for people to eat fewer animals, and the alternatives need to be cheaper than the animal-based versions and as easily available.

You write: “I’d be accused time and time again—by both animal activists and the companies that contracted these farmers—of being too sympathetic toward factory farmers, of having the wool pulled over my eyes.”
Can there ever be truth in that? If so, how – being so close to them – one avoids being smothered or seduced into accepting measures and initiatives that don’t mean much?

As advocates for change, we do need to be sensitive about which animal welfare policies we accept and promote and recognize which are insufficient. I keep this top of mind during my negotiations.

I am up-front with farmers and meat industry executives about my end goal—to create a plant-based world—but they also understand that I’m excited to see incremental progress on animal welfare and plant-based innovation. It’s a constant balancing act, but I’m very happy with the results of this approach: extensive media coverage, corporate and legal progress, and bringing in allies outside the animal protection movement.

You talk about finding common ground. I’m guessing it would be much more difficult to find any common ground for activists who don’t want to talk about or appreciate welfare improvements?
I don’t think that’s true. In fact, after many years of building a relationship with Perdue, the company began exploring plant-based alternatives to their chicken products. Jim Perdue himself said, “Our vision is to be the most trusted name in premium protein.” He didn’t say “premium animal protein.” That is hugely significant. While some might not like welfare improvements, you have to recognize that the pressure to explore plant-based protein emerged from welfare improvement discussions. I see plant-based protein work as a natural extension of welfare improvement work.

You didn’t really find evil or badness at the level of the farmers. I guess then it’s tempting to think that the evil can be found one level up, with the business people directing the farmer. But did you find it there?
I didn’t find anyone I was able to have a conversation with inherently evil. Where many activists might see the meat industry as a monolithic beast to be destroyed, we could instead see lots of individuals just like you and me, just trying to do their jobs. These individuals want, for the most part, to behave well, but they’re constrained by economics. The key is to hack that economic formula with a solution in which everybody wins. People who were willing to talk and listen were genuinely interested in learning and making progress. They often didn’t know how, and that’s where I tried to be useful. However, many companies and executives have refused to pick up the phone, meet me, or answer an email. They are not ready or willing to admit that change is needed in our food and farming system. So in those cases we have to use things like investigations or campaigns to help achieve dialogue. But I almost always find that once we get to that conversation, to sitting at the table together, far more possibilities for progress exist than either of us initially thought.

You write: “In order to end factory farming, we cannot ignore these farmers and their struggles. We must create a future with them in it.”
How do you see their future? What options do they have?

Instead of thinking about how I could put factory farmers out of a job, I started to consider how I could find them different jobs, like growing mushrooms or hemp. In fact, a farmer I later worked with made just such a switch. When Mike Weaver of West Virginia became fed up raising chickens, we teamed up to film and expose what was really happening behind the closed doors of his warehouses. But Mike didn’t stop there. It turned out his chicken farm wasn’t much different from the farms needed to grow hemp. Now Mike grows hemp, an environmentally friendly way to stay on his land and pay the bills. It’s the ultimate win-win and one Mike, the once chicken factory farmer, and I, the vegan animal rights activist, can both get fully behind.

Leah Garcés befriending a pig

You write: “It soon became clear to me that they were trapped by the factory-farming system, just like their chickens were.”
Can you tell us something about the lives of farmers, that can make us, vegans and animal activists, more sympathetic towards them? What was it especially that moved you?

When I met Craig Watts, he’d been factory farming chickens for 22 years for Perdue, the fourth-largest chicken company in the United States. When Craig was a young adult, he searched for a way to stay on the family land that had been passed down for five generations, in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. Very few jobs were available, so when Perdue came to town and offered him a contract to raise chickens, it was like a dream come true. He took out a $250,000 loan to build the chicken houses. Perdue paid him for each flock he raised. With that money, he began paying off the loan.

But soon the chickens became sick—after all, this was a factory farm. He struggled to pay off his loan. When the chickens got sick, they died, and you don’t get paid for dead chickens. So while the paychecks got smaller, the bills kept coming. Soon he wanted out. But he was all but an indentured servant. He hated raising chickens, but if he stopped, he’d risk losing everything.

By the time we met, he’d reached a breaking point—his birds were sick, and payments seemed never-ending. He also realized that he couldn’t live with Americans not knowing the truth about how chickens were treated.
I had been very scared to meet Craig. But when I listened to Craig’s story—his struggles and his own surprising hatred for the system—my fear dissipated and something else replaced it: shame. He was the kind of person I had spent my whole career angry at, blaming, and ready to fight. It’s easy to hate someone you’ve never met. I’d not once considered his strife or asked myself, “Could he be an ally?” Craig felt trapped. If I could offer him a way out, he’d take it.
The experience really changed my perspective on how to solve hard problems.

Is/was it hard for you to bring up this collaborative attitude or did it come naturally to you?
My nature is very practical and oriented toward goals and solutions. But at points I just carried anger. Anger usually doesn’t get me anywhere except tired and pessimistic. I have studied and read a lot about nonviolence as a strategy for achieving social justice. Gandhi and King followed this principle, and many scholarly articles and books about this are very useful to the work we do.
Ultimately, I always wanted to make progress toward a goal, even if only in small steps. This meant finding points of agreement wherever I could and people committed to our commonality and that progress.

You write: “Now that I had kids, I didn’t want to waste any time doing anything else except helping farmed animals.” I’d say many parents might withdraw after having kids, yet you seem to have doubled down on your target?
When I had kids, something switched in me. Time became very, very precious. Children have a way of making you realize that life is passing by much more quickly than you’d realized and life is short. If I wanted to make an impact, if I wanted to leave the world better than I’d found it, there was no time to waste. It forced me to ask questions of myself: What is my purpose in my life? The answer is to reduce suffering. So I looked for where the most suffering was and where I was uniquely positioned to reduce that suffering. I had witnessed so much suffering at the hands of humans, but I felt the cause of greatest suffering was tractable. That was, of course, the systems that exploit farmed animals.

Not so long ago you became the CEO of Mercy For Animals – and you have three children. How did you ever find the time to write this book?
Relentless focus. I carve out my time meticulously. Sometimes every minute of my day is accounted for and calendared out. I first wrote an outline of the book and then worked to fill it in. I set a weekly goal of the number of words I wanted to write and stuck to that. It wasn’t much per week, but I did it every week without fail. It’s amazing how much you can get done when you break a big goal into bite-size pieces and just stick with it.

How would you compare working for Compassion in World Farming with working for Mercy for Animals?
At CIWF USA we focused primarily on positive corporate engagement. At Mercy For Animals more tools are at my disposal—from undercover investigations and large campaigns to celebrity support and a big social media platform.

Suppose all people went vegan tomorrow, what, if any, place or future can you see for the ducks and chickens that you love so much?
Well, in my fantasy world, they become companions to humans, loved and cherished as much as our dogs and cats.

Vegan advocacy: Unapologetic or pragmatic?

opposing views on vegan advocacy

On Jan 28 2017, I did a Facebook live discussion with Casey Taft on the topic of vegan advocacy. Casey is the founder of Vegan Publishers, author of Motivational methods for vegan advocacy: A clinical psychology perspective, and is a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine.
In terms of vegan advocacy, Casey feels that promoting a clear vegan end goal is the best way to bring about both reduction and cessation of animal use and that we should be careful not to promote the very thing (speciesism) that is the biggest contributor to our animal use in the first place. I, on the other hand, believe that while there’s a place for this approach, it is not what is most needed at this moment in time. I maintain that asking people to reduce their consumption of animal products is helpful to create a vegan world, and is not a betrayal of vegan principles or of the animals. This post is part summary, part observation of the discussion we had. Throughout the text I will link to related blogposts I wrote previously.

opposing views on vegan advocacy

A civil discussion across the aisles
First of all, in spite of our different viewpoints, the discussion between Casey and me was friendly and civilized, and I found in Casey a respectful critic of my views. When I accepted Casey’s suggestion to talk, this for me was my first objective: to have a constructive discussion “across the aisles”. On the meta-level, I am very interested in how people with very different opinions can still have civil conversations (this is a bit like one of Sam Harris’s stated goals for his Waking Up podcast). Due to our different experiences, different upbringing, different genetic makeup, we are bound to experience the world differently and to have different opinions about many things. I believe one of the main conditions to create a better world is that we are able to discuss these differences. When we meet people who have different opinions, it is important to be charitable to each other, and to start with trusting that the other person has good intentions. So, I’m thankful that Casey and I were able to do that.

Points of agreement
Though our viewpoints are quite different, it isn’t that Casey and I are at loggerheads about every issue or aspect of vegan advocacy. Reading his book in preparation for our discussion, I found myself agreeing with quite a few things: obviously, the abolitionist aim, but also the idea that ultimately people need to see what we do to animals as an issue of social justice. I agree with him about the importance of respectful yet assertive conversation, and with reinforcing positive behavior rather than punishing undesirable behavior. I appreciate that he wants to build a bigger tent by including demographics that have largely  been excluded from vegan advocacy. I share his stance against misanthropy. I agree that we don’t have enough research to say too many things with too high a degree of certainty.

A pragmatic approach
The main difference between our approaches is that Casey believes that we should never advocate for anything less than veganism, and that when we do that, we are betraying the animals, as well as our beliefs and that we may be actively undermining the case for veganism. I, on the other hand, believe that there is, so to speak, no moral obligation to always and everywhere present veganism as a moral obligation. If there’s any obligation, it is to do what works.

It is important to emphasize that the strategy I suggest – on this blog, in my talks and most elaborately in my book How to Create a Vegan World  is not meant as the only strategy that should replace all others. Rather, it is a complementary, but – I think – necessary strategy. I believe that in this I differ from many “abolitionists” who believe there is only one right way to advocate for veganism, and who consider anything less than that as an aberration that is at the same time ineffective and unethical. It’s equally important to emphasize that I do believe in the same goal: the idea that we should stop using animals for human purposes and should minimize animal suffering.

My view, very briefly, is that getting a lot of people to reduce is easier than getting a lot of vegans, and that, therefore, this is the fastest way to tip the system: a lot of reducers are what has been and is driving demand for plant-based products. A higher demand (coming from these reducers especially) obviously leads to a higher supply of good alternatives. Thanks to more alternatives, it becomes easier and easier for everyone to shift towards more plant based eating (see What vegan can learn from glutenfree) and to be open to animal rights arguments. I emphasize that, apart from trying to influence people’s attitude in the hope that people will change their behavior, we also need to help people change their behavior first (eating plant based to whatever degree, for whatever reason), so that they will more easily open their hearts and minds to the horrible situation animals are in. An example of this is also health conscious vegans who evolve into ethical vegans.

Where you stand depends on where you sit. We are presently so invested in using animals, both on the individual and societal/economic levels, that it is very hard to start thinking differently about eating animals. (The shortest introduction to my views is this video.)

If we agree that a critical mass of reducers is important, it is also important to see which arguments convince people to reduce their consumption of animal products. Health and environment seem to be effective arguments in this context; so, we should use them.

Does pragmatism = betrayal?
Now, Casey and others may agree that all of this may very well be true, but that for us vegans to advocate for reduction is to implicitly condone the eating of animals, and to downplay the social justice issue that is veganism or animal rights. One of the arguments that is often used to support this claim is to say that we wouldn’t be doing this in the case of humans. We wouldn’t advocate for a reduction of slavery, a reduction of domestic abuse, a regulation of child abuse; we would call for it to stop.

This argument sounds very elegant at first sight, but I believe it is very much off the mark. I have written about this previously (see On comparing animal rights with other social justice issues and Slavery Free Mondays, but basically, comparing, for example, child abuse or wife-beating with eating animal products, is comparing something that 99 percent of the people abhor and agree to ban entirely with something that almost as many people not just condone but actually celebrate.

Advocates of Casey’s view may then reply: but it doesn’t matter what people think about these issues; what matters is that we can compare human and non-human animals and that we are right to do so. Well, I believe that if we want to carve out a successful approach to stop people from doing something, we really do need to take into account where society is, not just where we are. Comparing eating animal products to beating one’s wife will often be ineffective, and people may feel very accused and morally reproached (alienating feelings usually will not lead to change).

Moreover, if you really believe that these issues are (almost) identical, then what about this: what would you do if you saw a man beating up his wife, or a child, or if you were witnessing someone buying a slave? If you had the power, you’d stop it, right? So, given that these issues are allegedly comparable, are you then morally obligated to do the same when you see people buying meat in a supermarket, or preparing it in their kitchen? Should you grab the meat out of their hands, or physically prevent them from buying or cooking meat? I don’t think so. The analogy, as analogies go, may not be perfect, but I think this shows that even us vegans think about these situations and issues as different. Similarly, while I appreciate Casey’s experience and everything he does for both animals and domestic violence victims (and abusers), I believe it’s problematic to compare the treatment of domestic abusers with the treatment of non-vegans. For example, Casey writes that most of the abusers he treats are ordered by courts to see him, which is indicative of the difference in itself.

I used to advocate like Casey does, from a “moral baseline” position. I changed my mind and my approach after years of advocating and campaigning. The main thing for me is not to be consistent with my ideology or theory, but to be consistent with results. If something gets good results, I will go for it. I will feel true to myself and my beliefs, even if, according to some, my approach is not in line with vegan orthodoxy (see also: Veganism: ideology versus results).

Research on effectiveness
Another point where I differ with Casey is in our opinions about the research that is being carried out by organizations like ACE (Animal Charity Evaluators), Faunalytics (formerly the Humane Research Council) and others. Casey has called their research pseudoscience and has written how their studies do not follow basic principles of science. While I do appreciate that, from his experience as a professor in clinical psychology with a lot of practical experience, Casey may bring a lot of interesting points to the table, I’m sure he too realizes that he’s not the only expert. I will not go into detail about the studies in question, but I’ll just make some general comments on this topic.

Like I said, I agree that we have not been able to do enough research to state many things with a very high degree of certainty. Note that this doesn’t mean we don’t have anything at this point. Plus, there is also a lot we can derive from more general research in the fields such as psychology, marketing and sociology. There is also common sense, and our combined experiences – even though we have to be careful with all these sources of data and knowledge. In any case, I’m very happy that there is more and more money being granted to and invested in research.

Casey seems to have a high distrust of the findings of the research (mainly done by the above mentioned groups) so far, one reason for that being – if I understood or interpreted him correctly – that the (preliminary) results often seem to point in the direction of support of incremental asks. Casey relies on theories and his own experience that according to him point in different directions, based on psychological theories and research, such as goal setting theory and the Transtheoretical Model (Stages of Change). He does not believe the findings of work in those areas suggest incremental asks are most effective, and that, in the case of Faunalytics and others, the data have been interpreted in a biased way to confirm the researchers’ original (incrementalist) views. Casey is mainly talking here about the Faunalytics study on former vegetarians and vegans. Che Green from Faunalytics has responded in the comment section on this article by Casey. I disagree with the conclusions Casey draws from the research – see What can we learn on research from ex-vegetarians?

I think in all of this it is useful to ask: what is it that could change our minds? My impression is that some people – I’m not necessarily saying Casey here – will not accept any evidence, because accepting it runs counter to their theories. There is, in other words, no way to falsify one’s conclusions (which is indicative of an unscientific attitude).

Personally, I don’t feel too much distrust towards the research done by groups like ACE and Faunalytics. Their studies were conducted with the specific aim to find out what works, and they have no interest whatsoever in fooling themselves. Even though we would be wise to remain critical (as with everything), I like to assume that people working on research in support of vegan advocacy would do their utmost best to avoid flawed methodologies and thus flawed results.

Big groups and money
I equally don’t share Casey’s distrust of “big groups”. It is definitely possible that big organizations go astray and sometimes are just raising money to fund their own continued existence, without doing all that much for the causes they advocate. However, there is obviously no reason to think that this is always or even usually the case. If a good organization is able to raise a lot of money, that is a good thing. Big organizations need funds to pay their staff and, therefore, need to fundraise. The more staff hours a group can devote to liberating animals, the more animals will be helped (no, it’s not going to be all done by volunteers). Money is a necessary resource not just to free up more working time, but also to do outreach. If we use money well, then the more money we can collect from people, companies and governments (often siphoning it away from other, more neutral or less noble, uses – see Money money money in our movement).

Reconciling different views
Casey and I finished our discussion by looking at what we can do to get along better and to reconcile these sometimes opposing viewpoints. Here are some ideas:

  • I talked about what I started this post with: trust. We have to be able to trust that all of us have the same good intentions (even though none of us is entirely pure in their intentions – we are humans, not saints). (see also: Can abolitionists and pragmatists ever trust each other?)
  • We also need to keep an open mind and be ready to change it. And, we need to practice what I call slow opinion.
  • While some approaches are definitely better than others and not all strategies are created equal, as long as we don’t know entirely what works best, strategic pluralism and experimenting with different approaches is (to a certain extent) a good thing.
  • It’s possible that different approaches can best be applied in different contexts. An “unapologetic” go vegan approach may be useful in one to one conversations where we see that the person is open-minded, while incremental, pragmatic approaches may do much better in the case of trying to create institutional change. Indeed, trying to change individuals (often done by individual advocates and grassroots groups) is quite different from advocating for institutional change (usually done by bigger, more professional groups). Similarly, approaching politicians with a health or environmental message will often be more effective than approaching them with an animal rights or “unapologetically” vegan message. Understanding these contextual differences may make us more tolerant of approaches that we usually don’t follow. (See also: Vegan activism: the difference between individuals and groups).
  • What is effective is also very much a matter of the factor time. Things that may not work (or not work optimally) today, may very well work (or work much better) in ten or twenty years time. I believe right now is a time for a mainly pragmatic approach, and that as time goes by and people become less and less dependent on animal products, an unapologetic approach will be more and more productive. (see also: The right strategy at the right time)

Again, despite our differences, I appreciate the work that Casey is doing, and I appreciate the fact that we had a constructive discussion.

You can watch the whole discussion (70 minutes) here.

Would you have gone vegan if…?

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.

 

Vegan Islands versus Infiltrators

Many producers of meat alternatives dream of occupying a place among animal products in the supermarket. I mean, literally. They want to be sold where the meat products are sold, instead of in a separate vegan section. Apparently, judging by this picture, Beyond Meat managed to get this coveted position with their Beyond Burger.

Beyond Meat products in the meat section
Beyond Meat products in the meat section

Not every vegan may agree that the meat section is the best place for vegan products. Out of a personal preference, vegans may want the vegan products to have their own separate shelf, aisle or island.

I’m using the example of Beyond Meat’s product placement to illustrate the much broader idea of what I call Islands versus Infiltrators. A separate vegan section would be an example of an Island, while Beyond Meat’s burger patties in the meat section are Infiltrators. We can see many other examples – on similar and different levels – of this distinction:

  • vegan restaurants versus omnivore restaurants with vegan dishes
  • vegan shops versus general shops with vegan products
  • vegan cookbooks versus omnivore cookbooks with vegan recipes
  • vegan dating sites versus regular dating sites with the option to check “vegan”
  • vegan catering companies versus mixed catering companies
  • vegan cooking courses or a general course with vegan recipes

And there are many more examples  of exclusively vegan things. Vegan cruises, a vegan version of airbnb, vegan radio shows, vegan schools, etc.

You can ask yourself whether you are more pro-Island or pro-Infiltration. Let’s briefly look at some general advantages and disadvantages of both phenomena.

The advantage of Islands is clear. They are cosy and convenient for vegans. If we’re on a vegan cruise, we know we’ll get good vegan food, and everyone else on the cruise is vegan or at least veg-curious. Using a vegan cookbook, we are not confronted with pictures of recipes with dead animals in them (which, obviously, are also useless to us). Eating in a vegan restaurant, we know the chefs and waiters know what vegan is, and that there is no chance of anything “wrong” ending up in our food.

But the advantages of Infiltrators are just as clear. While Islands mainly benefit the vegans, Infiltrators are important for reaching new audiences and buyers. Infiltrators get much more exposure among omnivores, many of whom will never enter a vegan restaurant or specialty shop, and will never buy a vegan cookbook. They also will not go out of their way to find and stop by the vegan section in their supermarket.

When I asked on Facebook where the Beyond Beef (and other) products should be in the supermarket, many people answered they should be in both sections. Apart from this probably being difficult to realize (as far as I know, producers pay for shelf space), we also shouldn’t underestimate the impact of us going to the meat shelf and picking out a vegan product in front of other people. The best predictor that a beggar in the street will receive a gift from a passer-by is that the person walking ahead of them dropped something in their hat. The same applies here: the more people see other people picking up the vegan products, the more they might be more inclined to take a look, buy and taste them.

Maybe you’ve experienced how often omnivores seem to think that just because something is vegan, it is not for them (kind of like how ordinary vegans might be deterred from choosing a dish labeled “suitable for diabetics”). The problem today is still that vegan stuff is seen as stuff for vegans. So often, media articles, reviewing a new vegan restaurant, product or service, write something like: “Now, vegans can…” or “Now, there is x for vegans!”, as if it’s only vegans who can profit from it. We need to get rid of the idea that vegan is just for vegans. Infiltrators help counter this idea; Islands are often likely to confirm it.

If you are thinking of setting up some service or selling a product, you can consider whether you want to launch an Island or an Infiltrator. Chances are that as a vegan, you will feel much more comfortable with Island products and services, but the question is whether that is the most impactful.

But also as a consumer, you may consider what you want to spend most of your money on: the vegan restaurant or the vegan dish in the omnivore restaurant, for instance. Again, eating at the vegan restaurant is more convenient. But ordering the vegan dish in the omnivore restaurant signals that there is a demand, offers opportunities for conversation, for critiquing the dish so that the chef can improve it, etc. You also help keep the dish on the menu, increasing the chances that more people will be exposed to it.

That is, of course, not to say we should stop visiting vegan restaurants or other vegan businesses. On the contrary, they deserve our support. Moreover, Islands may have a symbolic function. They say, “Look, we can do it without animal products and still be viable”. They also may have media value: they may be covered by journalists, because they are new and exciting.

At least for the time being, we’ll have both Islands and Infiltrators. You choose where your money goes. I hope to have given you some arguments to use to think about your options more thoroughly.

Do 2 semi-vegans make 1 vegan?

One of the default figures by which the animal rights/vegan movement wants to measure its success, is the number of vegans. But is this the most important metric? I think there are other indicators telling us much more about how far we have advanced than the number of vegans. The latter remains very small, so much so that it is actually hard to measure without a significant margin of error. Reducers, on the other hand, show up big on the radar when we are polling the population, and they might be much more significant. But how do reducers compare to vegans in terms of impact?

More specifically, I’d like to ask the following concrete question: are two semi-vegans just as good as one vegan? (I’m obviously talking in terms of their short or long term impact on sparing animals). In case you think there is no such thing as a semi vegan, or a 70% or whatever vegan, read this article.

one vegan two semi vegans

If we understand a 50%-vegan to be a person who chooses vegan alternatives only half of the time compared to a vegan, then it seems that two of these 50%-vegans would have the same impact as a vegan as far as their consumption goes. But there may be some additional, complicating, arguments to make.

One thing to consider would be these people’s “value” in influencing others (see The fetish of being vegan for the argument that communication is potentially much more important than your own consumption). At first sight, the vegan might be much more motivated to go out and win hearts and minds – and she will almost certainly be more vocal about it. She might feel the holy fire burning inside her and become a very committed activist. When we look at our movement, at the people making things happen, it seems that most of them are obviously vegans.

But let’s think this over. The vegan may spend more time on outreach than the two semi-vegans, but will she necessarily be more successful? Maybe people get more inspired by reducers than by vegans, to start reducing themselves (of course, for those among us who don’t believe reducers are a good thing, this is not an argument). The mere fact of being vegan may have a deterring effect on others – as for many people it seems such a difficult thing – which being a reducer may not have.

Another important idea to take into consideration may be what I call the spread-factor. The one vegan’s impact and efforts, both in terms of consumption and activism, will be more concentrated (as she is but one person) than the impact and efforts of the two semi-vegans (and certainly than five 20%-vegans). I’m not a mathematician and I haven’t thought this through in depth, but maybe the higher this spread-factor, the more people – (both consumers as well as suppliers) will get in contact with some kind of vegan demand.

You could also wonder if the same volume of demand coming from multiple persons might not have a bigger effect than when coming from one person. Imagine you are a restaurant owner. Who would be most likely to influence you to change your menu: one vegan or two semi-vegans? You might think that the semi-vegans could eat everything in the restaurant, but they wouldn’t come there for their vegan meals, so you lose two customers. Two customers (or say the five 20%-vegans) might be more worth making an effort for than one vegan, who you might just ignore.

This may seem like a bit of an academic and abstract discussion, but my purpose here, as often, is to make our movement see the value and importance of meat reducers, and to avoid focusing on vegans alone. As I have written in several posts on this blog, I believe many reducers will create a tipping point in society faster than a small percentage of vegans can (see What vegan can learn from glutenfree). It’s the many reducers that drive the demand, forcing suppliers to respond with more and more good vegan options, and thus making it easier for all of us to go full-time vegan. In addition, for those who are afraid these reducers don’t have the by-us-much-desired ethical motivation: their moral development may very well come after their behavior change.

This is, of course, not to say that increasing the number of vegans is not necessary or important. I think vegans are much more prone to commit to serious activism, spend money on vegan causes, make vegan documentaries, open vegan restaurants, etc. But I suggest a two-pronged approach: increase both the number of vegans and the number of reducers.

Do you have other arguments for why we might value one vegan more, less, or the same as two semi-vegans? Let me know.

 

If every vegan made one vegan in five years…

Suppose every vegan made one vegan in five years, and those new vegans did the same thing in five years, we’d have a vegan world in no time.

Ever heard that argument? It’s one of those things that sounds good at first sight, but gets problematic once you spend some time thinking about it. 

multi
Somtimes this argument is used to argue for the position that we don’t need any big animal rights organizations, or laws, or big companies… but that we can realize all the change that we want by just having vegans talk to other people about animal rights and moral obligations.

But if it would be that simple, why don’t we have a vegan world yet?

Some would answer this question by saying that, quite simply, it’s never been tried. They would tell us that we have never, consistently and as a movement, given omnivores the straight vegan truth and the go vegan message. In this sense, veganism, for some, is like communism: it’s never been tried hard enough.

Of course that’s not true. Surely, for as long as there have been vegans, many or most of them (at least the “ethical vegans”) have been trying to convince other people to join team vegan. And at times they were probably successful.

But still, no vegan world. Why not?

Let’s dial the numbers a bit. Let’s start with an extremely low present number of vegans: one. Yes, one vegan. Imagine that there was just one vegan, but that this vegan would make one new vegan in one year, and that each of those would do the same in one year. The whole world – the whole WORLD! – would be vegan in… 38 years.

With exponential functions, everything goes very fast. But that doesn’t mean much. Multiplying ourselves is not as simple as it looks. If it were, there would have been many sects who would have conquered the entire world by now. But the fact is we haven’t been all convinced to become Jehovah’s witnesses or Scientologists.

Maybe we think for veganism it’s different because our argument makes more sense, and potentially more people would buy it than they would buy some dogmatic religious idea? Maybe, some day. For now it didn’t work yet. For now there’s many more people buying weird religious ideas, for instance, than our rational vegan ideas.

One problem of course, is that not all of us are expert communicators and that the way we talk about veganism is not always attractive (in the worst case we turn more people off than we attract). Another point is that vegans seem to fall off the wagon almost faster than we can “make” them. For every vegan there’s three or four times as many ex-vegans. One step forward, two (or three, or four) steps back, it seems?

The point I mostly want to make here though, is that a one-on-one approach, based on moral arguments, is never going to cut it. It’s not that we haven’t been trying it. It’s that it’s not enough, and not even the most important thing we can do.

So the “imagine if every vegan makes one more vegan…” argument is not an argument that would justify only focusing on one-to-one outreach and grassroots activism, as some would have it. We need much more than that. We need lobbying and product development. We need laws. We need supermarkets and restaurant chains to work with us. We need the power of big groups. We need to fundraise a lot of money. We need to be present in the education system. We need influencers in all domains of society, from celebrities to business leaders to politicians, who can help many more people change their behavior and their minds. And above all, we need to think about strategy and psychology, so that our one on one advocacy can be effective.

We all know where we want to go

I think within our movement we so often forget we’re all working for the same things. There may be minor differences in the envisaged outcome, but basically the animal rights/vegan movement wants a world where animals are not being used or killed by humans.

The differences are about how to get to that situation. Having a clear and concrete objective doesn’t imply we also know how to make it a reality. On the contrary, sometimes having a clear objective can be misleading, in the sense that it makes us think the way to get there should just be based on our aim. If we want x, we ask for x. But that’s not necessarily the best, the easiest, the fastest way to arrive somewhere.

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In the movie Lincoln, there’s a discussion between Abraham Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens about how to pass the amendment for the abolition of slavery. Stevens talks about our “inner compass”, which should point North (showing where to go, what is right, etc), but in many people doesn’t. Lincoln’s reply goes like this:

“A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it’ll… it’ll point you true North from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and desert and chasm that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp… What’s the use of knowing True North?”

Please check out the post Lincoln’s thoughts on a compass, the inspiration for this post. And watch Lincoln, if you havent.

Compromise isn’t Complicity: Four Reasons Vegan Activists Should Welcome Reducetarianism – and One Big Reason Reducetarians Should Go Vegan

This guest post is by Hillary Rettig. She is author of The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way and other works, and a ten-year vegan and vegan activist. She is a cofounder of Vegan Kalamazoo and a member of In Defense of Animals’ Sustainable Activism Council. The views expressed here are hers alone. Visit www.lifelongactivist.com and www.hillaryrettig.com for more on Hillary and her work, and she welcomes your emails at hillary@hillaryrettig.com.
In this article, Hillary examines the strategic value of approaches that call for reduction of the consumption of animal products, rather than their outright elimination, as a stepping stone on the way to abolition.


In 1806, British abolitionists faced a quandary.

For more than twenty years, they had been working to achieve a single overarching goal—to get Parliament to pass a bill outlawing the British slave trade—but had experienced defeat after defeat. Now, in the wake of several expensive and humiliating failed wars, including the U.S. Revolutionary War and Anglo-French War, as well as reports of France’s post-revolutionary Terror, the public and political mood had turned hostile. Even former supporters were now denouncing the abolitionists as “seditionists” and “Jacobins” (after the guillotine-wielding extremist French party).

bury the chainsThe abolitionists were “deeply discouraged,” writes Adam Hochschild in Bury the Chains, his terrific history of the movement. But right at that dark moment, abolitionist and naval law expert James Stephen came up with a novel idea: instead of introducing yet another doomed-to-fail abolitionist bill to Parliament, why not instead introduce one that merely made it illegal for British subjects to invest in, insure, supply or otherwise participate in slave trading by France and its allies, including notably the United States? And that legalized the seizure of French and allied slave ships by British navy vessels and privateers?

It was a genius idea for three reasons. First, it would play to post-war nationalist sentiments. Second, naval and maritime interests would love it, since the officers and crew of ships would be entitled by law to claim a percentage of the value of any illegal ship they captured. And third: what Stephen and the abolitionists knew—but what was generally not known by the British public and politicians—was that around two-thirds of British slave ships sailed under either the French or U.S. flag. So the bill, while seeming like an innocuous piece of patriotic fluff, would actually dismantle a huge percentage of Britain’s slave trade.

Nevertheless, the other abolitionists hesitated. Along with the moral question of whether it was right to settle for a partial solution to an absolute evil, there was the strategic question of whether the bill, by eliminating competition, might actually wind up strengthening the remaining slave trade. And there was also the public relations question of whether the public might perceive the abolitionists as implicitly endorsing slavery conducted under Britain’s own flag.

Fortunately, they decided to follow Stephen’s plan. After some adroit political maneuvering – nicely dramatized in the 2006 movie Amazing Grace – the Foreign Slave Trade Act was passed. It was, from an abolitionist standpoint, an outstanding success. As anticipated, it immediately knocked out a huge part of Britain’s slave trade—and, contrary to abolitionist fears, actually destabilized the rest. And it reinvigorated support for abolition.

Small wonder that, a scant year later, the long-sought-after abolitionist bill was finally passed.

This wasn’t the only tough compromise the abolitionists made, by the way. They had made an even tougher one nearly twenty years earlier, when, at one of their very first meetings, they voted to work only on shutting down the slave trade and not on freeing Britain’s (and its colonies’) slaves. They didn’t make that decision lightly—they knew it meant leaving more than half a million people enslaved, most in horrific circumstances in the Caribbean sugar fields. But they considered that battle unwinnable at that time. (They did hope that eliminating the slave trade would lay the foundation for future emancipation—which it did!)

The U.S. abolitionists made a similar compromise when, as depicted in the movie Lincoln, they agreed to give up their insistence on including language mandating full racial equality, so as not to jeopardize passage of the the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery.

And, about a hundred years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., similarly compromised when, despite his hatred for poll taxes, he agreed to support the removal of a contentious poll tax ban from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 so as not to compromise that bill’s passage.

More recently, we’ve seen progressives settle for the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., “Obamacare”) as a stepping stone to single-payer health insurance, and LGBT activists accepting civil unions en route to winning full marriage equality.

Every social justice movement compromises.

Now it’s the vegan and animal rights activists’ (hereafter referred to as “vegans”) turn. A group of activists have announced a new “Reducetarian” campaign designed to get people to, as the name implies, reduce their consumption of meat, dairy, eggs, fish, and other animal products (hereafter all referred to as “meat”) for reasons including animal cruelty and environmental sustainability. Although some vegans have always embraced the “reducetarian” approach–if not the actual name–the creation of a formal Reducetarian movement takes things to a new level, especially as its supporters include such non-vegan notables as legendary human rights activist Noam Chomsky, environmentalist Bill McKibben, and scientists and best-selling authors Birute Mary Galdikas, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. These are all people with enormous credibility and influence who, even if they don’t yet share our goal of global veganism, could do a lot to help the vegan movement.

That’s why many vegans, including myself, welcome the Reducetarian campaign. But others are like the 1806 abolitionists: deeply uncomfortable with a “partial solution” that asks people to reduce their meat consumption rather than eliminate it. These vegans typically refer to themselves as “abolitionists,” and I will use that name for them in this article, although it is important to note that the vast majority of vegans, including many pro-reducetarian vegans, share the goal of abolishing animal exploitation. While I think the abolitionists are well intentioned, I would respectfully ask them to consider these four points:

1) Compromise is Fundamental to Societal Change. As the above examples illustrate, the idea that compromise is complicity is ahistorical. It’s also illogical, since all solutions, to all problems, are partial. Plus, as Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals, “In the world as it is, the solution of each problem inevitably creates a new one.”

CompromiseAlinsky also writes: “Compromise is another word that carries shades of weakness, vacillation, betrayal of ideals, surrender of moral principles… But to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word… A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian.”
So, yeah: as beef consumption declined – due to public health concerns, E. coli scares, vegan activism, and other factors – chicken consumption increased. And we’re also seeing the growth of the “humanely raised” meat industry, which (as the abolitionists fear) is almost certainly helping some consumers rationalize their meat eating. Undesirable as these developments are, why would we expect any different? Power doesn’t give up without a struggle. These developments are not signs of failure, as some of the abolitionists seem to think, but of success. We’re changing consumer behaviors, and forcing the meat industries to react.

2) Change, in Humans, is a Process. Alinsky says an activist’s primary duty is to, “see the world as it is.” Reducetarian supporter Peter Singer, in his activist primer Ethics into Action, gives similar advice: “Above all, keep in touch with reality.” Well, here’s the reality about humans: We often learn, and change, slowly. We find it difficult to break bad habits. We crave. We lapse. We’re egocentric. We are susceptible to social pressure and corporate propaganda. And we often choose short-term gratification over a greater benefit delivered over the long term.
These are just some of many behaviors that most of us wish we, and others, weren’t susceptible to. (And they all have reasonable explanations, by the way: the short-term gratification thing—which psychologists call myopic discounting—makes sense given that, for much of our species’ six-million-year history, we lived in such dangerous circumstances that if you delayed a gratification you might not live to experience it.) Is there even one abolitionist who hasn’t committed every one of these regrettable behaviors in one realm or other of her life?
Moreover, the barriers to veganism are substantial and include not just the pervasiveness of animal exploitation in our culture and economy, and the resilience of animal agriculture as a capitalist system, but the central and intimate role that food plays in our lives. A few years back when I attended foster parent training, for instance, the teachers stressed how one of the most welcoming and comforting things you could do for a new foster child was to feed him foods he was used to.
peter singer mixAbolitionists don’t want to hear any of that. Their mantra—“Go 100% vegan. Right now. It’s easy.”–reflects a stubborn unwillingness to accept the realities of human nature and the mechanisms of personal change. As Singer put it in his book: “Too many activists mix only with other activists and imagine that everyone else thinks as they do. They… lose their feel for what the average person in the street might think. They no longer know what is achievable and what is a fantasy that has grown out of their own intense conviction of the need for change.”
Some abolitionists, it’s true, do acknowledge the reality that many people change in stages; only they argue that vegans should never actively promote the incremental steps. However, not providing support for the most common method people will use to attain your goal is a weak strategy. Also – as I hope this article will demonstrate – it’s not difficult to both applaud someone for taking an incremental step while also helping him keep his eye on the prize.

3) Let’s Skip the Whole Pointless Discussion of People’s Motives. Yeah, research shows that ethical vegans lapse less. That’s one data point among many that are relevant to promoting veganism, and it pertains to some people and situations but not others. (For more on this, see Tobias Leenaert’s excellent talk on why “compassion costs too much” for many people.) In any case, if our goal is truly to reduce animal consumption as quickly as possible, then the solution is to create a mass market for our ideas, similar to the way Apple or Coke or Disney creates a mass market for its products. By definition, that means welcoming people with diverse motives.
rettig mass marketAlso, as Leenaert points out, ethics don’t just influence behavior, behavior can also influence ethics. We often see this when social justice-, public health-, and public safety-type laws are passed: people comply reluctantly at first, and then more willingly as their views change. Antidiscrimination laws and laws mandating seat belt use are two examples; and it’s also worth noting that the act of parenting itself is probably a universal application of this principle, since it often involves mandating behaviors with the hope that those behaviors will instill ethics.
Since behavior can influence ethics, we should be encouraging people to move toward veganism out of any and every possible motive. Which brings us to…

4) The Vegan Movement’s Immediate Goal Should Be To Create Billions of Reducetarians. A currently popular abolitionist-type graphic shows cows lined up waiting to be slaughtered, with the caption, “Baby steps are cool. We’ll just wait on this line until you embrace veganism.” The truth, however, is that reducetarianism actually offers the best hope of saving those cows. If everyone in the U.S. reduced their meat consumption by just the modest target of one meal per week—around 5%—that would save around 450 million cows and other animals each year in the U.S. alone. To achieve the same result, the abolitionists would have to convert approximately 4.5 million meat eaters to complete veganism (based on the oft-cited statistic that a vegan saves 100 animal lives/year). That number, incidentally, represents more than three times the current total of U.S. vegans.[1]
rettig convert 5%

If I were one of those poor cows, I’d totally support reducetarianism.
To get from the carnist world we’ve got now to the vegan world we want, there will have to be many intermediate steps. Our immediate goal should be to create billions of partial / lapsed / struggling / uncommitted vegans, a.k.a. reducetarians, because that will not only eliminate the most animal suffering the most quickly; it will also lay a strong foundation for future progress.
Yes, we’ll probably have to coax those reducetarians along step by step, probably rebutting loads of misinformation—not to mention, rationalizations and equivocations—along the way.
And, yes, we’ll also have to cope with ever more devious ploys from an animal agriculture industry desperate to maintain its profitability. (Beef fat-fueled airplanes, anyone?)
And, unfortunately yes, we’ll probably have to make some more difficult, and probably even tragic, compromises.
But that is the path we’re going to have to follow, because, contrary to abolitionist fantasies, there simply is no other.

To the Abolitionists: Have Faith
In their ignorance of, or disdain for, history, strategy, and psychology, abolitionists pursue ineffective strategies, the “baby step” graphic’s coercive shaming being one example. Here are two others:

*Glib Theorizing. “One of the deep flaws of [reducetarianism],” wrote one abolitionist on Facebook, “is that it approaches the problem only as if it were a question of quantity while it is a qualitative difference between not being vegan and being vegan… And nobody will have any idea of what animal rights are if animal rights activists engage in this confused talk of meat reduction as if they were not actually talking about suffering individuals.” This comment sounds compelling, and it got the most “likes” of any abolitionist comment in the discussion, but, like many abolitionist statements, it makes no sense. Is a life saved via reducetarianism “qualitatively” different than one saved by veganism?
Beyond that, the statement is factually wrong: the Reducetarian website not only explicitly discusses animal suffering, it lists it as the very first reason to reduce one’s meat consumption.
Another comment in the same thread compared the idea of meat-eating animal-rights advocates (the subject of an article by Reducetarianism campaign co-founder Brian Kateman) to “slave-holding black-rights advocates,” and concluded, “Nope, sorry.” But why would we turn away any ally to our cause, especially if their activism, aside from being useful on its own merits, could actually (as discussed above) bring them closer to becoming vegan? And when, once in a while, someone embedded in an oppressive system actually does make a valuable contribution? masterofthemountainI’m guessing the commenter doesn’t know that British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson recruited active slave-ship doctors and crew members as informants to aid in his organizing, or that it was the slaveholder Thomas Jefferson who abolished the U.S. Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Also, where do we draw the line? If someone eats honey once in a while, does that invalidate their credentials as a vegan advocate? How about white sugar (often processed using bone char) or the beetle-derived red food dye cochineal?
Should a pescatarian be prohibited from speaking out on the plight of chickens?

*Making Things Up. One abolitionist recently claimed—again on Facebook—that increased meat prices (a goal of humane reforms) don’t reduce meat consumption: “People will buy it if they want it regardless of price. People who smoke will bitch and moan about the cost of cigarettes….Yet they still smoke.” Leaving aside this person’s trivializing of the realities of tobacco addiction, a two-minute Google search would have showed that he was wrong about both cigarettes and animal products.[2]
Another recently wrote, “The science of habit formation speaks stronger for going vegan and getting used to it rather than keeping reducing meat.” I’m currently writing a book on weight loss and have read more than fifty books and countless articles on that subject, and I can promise you that NO reputable expert would say that. Most, in fact, would say the opposite: that trying to change everything in your diet all at once is a recipe for failure. For example, in Thin for Life, her comprehensive survey of weight loss research and strategies, author Anne Fletcher notes, “Many people…feel overwhelmed when they try to make multiple changes all at once.” For that reason, her recommended diet plan, “has you take things one food group at a time.”
And societal change also happens gradually! Citing evidence from the civil rights and gay rights struggles, Charles Duhigg, in his best-selling book The Power of Habit, says that “small wins,” as he calls them, tend to synergize and wind up having, “an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.”

Although abolitionists are quick to accuse others of speciesism, in my view the willingness to dismiss—especially on such flimsy grounds—tactics that demonstrably save nonhuman lives smacks of human privilege. So does their dismissal of welfarist strategies, like the elimination of battery cages and gestation crates, that have the potential to greatly reduce nonhuman suffering. “Suffering matters,” as the late animal activist Norm Phelps said.

What these examples also demonstrate is how much the abolitionists fear and distrust not just non-vegans—which, besides being unfortunate on its own merits, will make it hard for them to influence anyone—but the process of activism itself.

I urge them to be more optimistic. Dr. King’s arc of history bends towards justice not just because most people’s hearts incline toward justice, but because the fight for justice has always attracted the best—smartest, wisest, most creative, most passionate, and most persevering—people. We also have the advantage of (as Harry Potter reminded his friends during the darkest hours of their fight) “something worth fighting for.”

Moreover, we’ve inherited, from prior generations of activists, a set of best practices—including compromise, inclusiveness, and eyes-on-the-prize pragmatism–that, if followed, will guarantee a win. It won’t be a “complete” win, because that never happens. (There is still human slavery even today.) And it won’t happen as quickly as we would like—it never does. But probably, especially if we all work together, it will happen faster and more thoroughly than now seems possible.

To the Reducetarians: Go Further

At the end of his monumental history of the decline of violence in human societies, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Reducetarian campaign supporter Steven Pinker writes, “To review the history of violence is to be repeatedly astounded by the cruelty and waste of it all, and at times to be overcome with anger, disgust, and immeasurable sadness….It would be terrible enough if these ordeals befell one person, or ten, or a hundred.”

Yup.

So, to Pinker and all the other Reducetarian supporters, I say the following, with the greatest possible respect:

You have done a wonderful thing by publicly advocating for people to reduce their meat consumption.

However, now that you’re on record as understanding that animal agriculture is cruel and wrong, I urge you to go vegan as quickly as you can, and to encourage other reducetarians to do the same.

Some might argue that because life itself is a series of moral compromises—we’re culpable every time we drive, fly, pay taxes that fund warmongers, or buy any non-organic or non-fair-trade item—occasional meat-eating is acceptable. But it’s likely that eating animals is by far the cruelest and most destructive behavior you directly engage in.

Besides, for every bite of meat you give up, you’ll gain something infinitely more profound and satisfying: the knowledge that you’re not just listening to your better angels, but are, once more, on the right side of history.

[1] Per Asher, Green et al., vegans currently represent about .5% of the U.S.’s population of 320 million, or approximately 1.6 million persons. 
[2] http://ps.oxfordjournals.org/content/90/1/229.full. “In most cases, egg production has decreased in European countries like Germany that have enacted stricter housing standards or banned cages altogether…Egg production in Germany declined by approximately 13% from 2000 to 2007.”

Tipping the system towards a vegan world

This is our challenge: we need to get all remaining non vegans (red) – about 99% of the population – to go vegan (green).

red men
One way to do this is by trying to convince them one by one. It has been and will be a very slow process.

red and a few green men
The one-by-one approach should be combined with a reducetarian approach: we can ask people to reduce. Many more people will respond positively to this ask.

many red and green
A combination of a small amount of vegans, together with a much bigger, critical mass of enough meat reducers, will tip the system much faster. Demand drives supply, society becomes much more accomodating, norms change, going vegan becomes a lot easier.

green men

How to veganize the world: one possible strategy

This is a somewhat longer article that gives a summary of the strategy you can also find in this talk. It first appeared in French here.

How to veganize the world

Let’s assume that if you’re reading this, you agree that, apart from all kinds of other changes, your ideal world is a world where animals are not used for human purposes, be it food, clothing, research, entertainment, or whatever. A vegan world, in short.

Can we ever achieve a vegan world? Right now, it doesn’t look too good. To use Melanie Joy’s so called “three N’s of justification”, meat is natural, normal and necessary. And to add two more N’s: it’s nice (tasty) and it’s not the first and only thing we worry about. Also, demand for meat, dairy and eggs is expected to grow a lot in the coming decades, because of the increasing purchasing power of people in upcoming economies, like China and India, which together represent one third of the global population.

Still, I’m optimistic. I think a vegan world is an obtainable goal (although it of course depends on what we consider to be a vegan world exactly, but let’s not have that discussion). The question then is: how do we reach that goal?

The most obvious idea, and the strategy that gets the most emphasis from both individual vegan/animal rights activists as well as from most organisations is simple: try to convince as many people as possible to go vegan, by explaining them that animals suffer or deserve respect and even rights. This is an important part of the strategy, but it is definitely not the only required part and it is maybe not even the most important part. I believe the social struggle for animal rights is the biggest and most challenging struggle of them all. To win it, we’ll need different tactics. But first, let’s see why this struggle is so difficult and different.

The struggle for animal rights is different

We love to compare the movement for animal rights with several human rights causes, such as the anti-slavery movement, the fight for women’s liberation, anti-racism, and so on, but it is important to note that, while there certainly are similarities, there are also big differences. The first among them is that in our case, the beings campaigning are not the same as the victims. We, their supporters, speak for beings who can’t speak for themselves. And we are still quite a small group. The public support for our cause is by far not as big as it was or is for let’s say the struggle for black people or women’s rights, exactly because in those cases respectively people of color and women were and are to at least a significant extent part of the protest. In the words of author Norman Phelps “we are attempting to be the first social justice movement in history to succeed without the organized, conscious participation of the victims.”

Take into account also the incredible degree to which our society is dependent on animal products. Most people, especially in the western world, have animal products at every meal. That’s three times a day, every day. Huge economies depend on the consumption of animal products, including also big parts of the clothing, research and some entertainment industries. We are invested in the (ab)use of animals to a degree that we probably have never been invested in the “use” of for instance black people, women or children. This obviously makes the whole system suffer from a very high degree of inertia. It’s good to take that into account.

Another reason for inertia is this: the main behavior (in terms of volume) that we are trying to change is eating behavior. Our food habits are sort of ingrained in us, maybe more so than anything else. What we eat is tied to emotional and psychological factors. We can be addicted to food, and some researchers believe that some food products or ingredients may have a level of addictiveness comparable to hard drugs. When it’s about food, we don’t think with our mind but with our taste buds or our stomach. Meat eating has been part of our history for hundreds of thousands of years. Many people experience some part of primary craving for it.
Conversely, what makes our challenge even bigger is that our opponents have it quite easy: their message (that eating animals is ok, normal, healthy…) is one that the large majority of the public wants to hear. It’s a message that the industry throws out their with billions of advertising money.

The above factors (as well as others) should be taken into account when strategizing about our movement and how to get to a vegan world. This is not to say that no comparisons are valid and that there are no similarities, but it means that we shouldn’t be too quick to draw conclusions based on what happened in other movements. We are largely in uncharted territory.

Moral and non-moral factors

moral non moral
When we look at the factors that can influence individuals (and society as a whole) to go vegan or progress towards veganism, we can make the following distinction: there are moral factors and non-moral factors. Concern for animal pain and suffering is the main moral factor or argument that we use. We hope that by considering the plight of the animals that they eat, people may change their behaviour. Non-moral factors are factors that can motivate or help people to eat or go vegan as well, but which have in and of themselves nothing to do with morality. For instance the environment in which individuals find their food and eat can be conducive to them eating vegan or not. A wonderful selection of great tasting meat and dairy alternatives could convince people to choose them without any thoughts of the animals being involved. Concern about one’s health is also a non moral factor (though I would never call it selfish or egotistical, as some people do).

We think moral factors work best

In our movement, we focus mostly on the moral factors. We spend a lot of time telling people that animals are sentient beings, that they have a right to life etc, saying that that is reason enough for them to change their eating habits.

Why do we focus on these moral factors? In part, because we think this focus is the most effective thing we can do. And we think they are effective because they are what convinced most of us who are vegetarian or vegan at this point. That we were moved by those factors, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that others will be too. Indeed, if it worked for everyone in the same way, we should have a lot more vegans already, obviously. You could see the present day vegetarians and vegans (a couple of percentages of the population) as the innovators and early adopters on the “diffusion of innovation” model. The rest of the population – the so called early and late majorities, and obviously the laggards) might very well need different ways to be convinced – because they are different people, with different interests – than us. Briefly put, when we advocate, we should always keep the following in mind: that you are not your audience.

The right thing for the right reasons?

Not only do we believe that these moral factors work well, we also want them to work well and we want people to be convinced by these moral factors and nothing else. We want people to be vegan for the right reasons, which is to say: because they care about animals. I guess this is because we believe that only people really caring about animals provides real and lasting protection for them. We have doubts that a vegan world will ever come about as a result of a lot of health or foodie vegans, and for good reason. There may be other reasons too, more personal ones, but I’m not going to start psychoanalyzing.

So because 1. we think a focus on moral arguments works and 2. because we want people to do the right thing for the right (moral) reason, our movement has very explicitly focused on it for the past few decades.

The problem with moral campaigning however, is that it’s not enough. One thing we can learn from other movements, and in particular from the anti-slavery movement (and here is a parallel with other movements which I think we can draw), is that the good fights are not won (if they are ever won) with moral arguments alone. In the case of slavery in North America, not only was it ended by an actual war, but also other things were really important, like the invention of the steam engine which could automate certain tasks and could make them cheaper than working with slaves.

Morality alone won’t do it

In the case of the animal rights movement, these non-moral factors are arguably even more important. If you would draw the case for the moral arguments to its logical extreme, you would argue that we have a duty always and everywhere to avoid animal products (let’s restrict ourselves to diet here), even in the case of us having only water and bread as our only meal for the rest of our lives. Now, that may morally make sense, and many present day vegans would not turn their back from veganism even if all they could eat was water and bread. However, we can easily imagine that every advance in alternative products (both in quality as well as quantity or availability) makes it a lot easier to further evolve on the scale towards veganism. To put it another way: as the offer of alternatives for animal products improves and increases, the required moral motivation or concern shrinks. This is a good thing, because we don’t have people’s motivation directly under our control, nor do we control their compassion or discipline to change.

Behaviour change may precede attitude change

For those of us who want people to go vegan for the right reasons and actually care about animals, there is good news though: attitude change can follow behaviour change. Let me explain. In our movement, as in most social movements, we usually work like this: we want to change people’s attitudes or beliefs about something, and hope that these changed attitudes will make them change their behaviour. In our case: we try to change their attitudes about animals by informing them about how animals are sentient beings who can suffer, deserve rights and respect, etc. We hope they understand this and then take the next step, which is to stop eating animal products. This works sometimes, but probably not often enough. Not only are we unable to make many people care (we don’t have much control over their caring), but some (maybe many) of the people who actually do care, will not change their behaviour (this is called the attitude-behaviour gap). Indeed we may assume that deep down, most people do care about what happens to animals in e.g. factory farms. Most people, however, are not vegan. They are not putting that caring into practise. The reasons for this are many, but one of the main ones is undoubtedly that it’s generally not convenient enough to do so.

When people’s behaviour changes first though (i.e. without their beliefs having changed), this behaviour change can influence their beliefs. You may notice the parallel with what I wrote about before: moral reasons and non-moral reasons. People can change what they eat for non-moral reasons: they may be in an environment where there’s great vegan food, they may be eating it because someone else prepares it for them daily. In the future there may be vegan alternatives just about everywhere. In some situations vegan food could be the default option and people may choose this option without thinking.

Now what happens is that once they experience that vegan food is good to eat, is doable, affordable, etc, they get more open to the animal rights arguments because they are no longer afraid of losing something. They know and have experienced already that there are great alternatives for animal products, so they don’t fear missing out. This time they are less prone to avoid reading an article on animal suffering or avert their eyes when they see coverage of factory farms on TV. They are less likely to dismiss it.

Let me illustrate how behaviour influences beliefs with a concrete example. Imagine a bullfighter and a slaughterhouse worker. These two people basically do the same thing: they kill cows. Now if you would ask non-vegans who of the two persons they feel most angry with, the answer will be: the bullfighter. Why is that? In part it is because many people see bullfighting as senseless violence while they see slaughtering an animal for meat as a necessary thing to do. Food is in their eyes less trivial than entertainment. I think, however, that this is not the main factor at play here. I think the main difference is this: most people are not involved or invested in bullfighting (they don’t attend bullfights or don’t watch them on TV), but are invested in the slaughtering of animals because they eat meat. Behaviour influences beliefs. It is much harder to judge or condemn something you do yourself. It is easy for most people to condemn fur because they are not wearing fur.

Another way behaviour change comes before concern for animals is of course when people go vegetarian or vegan for health reasons. Research shows that in a significant part of the cases people who go veg for health reasons develop (just in the way I described above) a concern for animal suffering, and often ethical vegans started out as health vegans. I think the concern of some vegans that health is not a good motivator or argument to talk about veganism because it is less “sticky” (i.e health vegetarians or vegans will be more prone to give it up) doesn’t hold much water, because without the health argument we might have had way less vegetarians or vegans in the first place, and secondly many people, as I stated, evolve in their motivations over time. This objection is mainly a reflection of us wanting people to do things for the right reasons. (On the other hand, health benefits of veganism shouldn’t be exaggerated, and potential nutritional pitfalls should be explained).

The importance of incrementalism

As you may be able to see, what I described above is not about making people vegan directly. By experiencing vegan meals and products, people slowly change their behaviours and beliefs, and many will eventually arrive at being full fledged vegans because they care about animals. However, this is not to say that all the people who reduce their meat consumption are of no value in and of themselves. On the contrary. I believe the fastest way to a vegan world is to emphasize the reduction of animal products (in tandem with a “go vegan” message that is carefully targetted at some audiences and in some circumstances). People will be a lot more inclined to actually do something when you ask them to take a step they can imagine really taking. For most people, the question to go vegan will be a non-starter. That doesn’t mean there should be no outreach material or groups or individuals that are using the “go vegan” message. It just means that there should also be a message out there to reduce (and maybe this message should be more prominent than the go vegan message). The important thing here is that a big group of meat reducers is the fastest way to increase demand, and thus supply. The more meat reducers there are, the more veg products will appear everywhere, and the more easy it will become to to go totally vegan. It is crucial to bear in mind that many of us may be vegan thanks to the fact that it is now a lot easier than before, and that it is a lot easier thanks to… the big group of meat reducers asking for veg products (rather than the still tiny amount of vegans).

Conclusion

To put all this together: apart from the “go vegan for the animals” approach, there should also be an approach that focuses on behaviour change first. This behavior change can be for whatever reasons (health; the availability of great alternatives…), and to whatever degree (meat reduction, vegetarianism, Meatless Mondays…). Just like people can evolve in terms of their motivations, they evolve in terms of their frequency of meat consumption. A big group of meat reducers will increase the supply, making it easier for everyone to go vegan. When vegan products and meals become even more available, and certainly when they come closer to being the default option, spreading the animal rights message will be much easier, as by then both individuals and society as a whole will be less dependent on animal products. This also means that at this point in time, it is extremely important to focus on creating amazing alternatives for animal products, both in supermarkets and in restaurants.