Question
Why are vegans so preachy?
Alternatives
The sadly ironic "live and let live". Each to their own. What I eat is a personal choice.
Summary
Like any large group, amongst millions of vegans, we will find people with varying social and communication skills. Even if a messenger’s behaviour warrants shooting, the message they present might be worth thinking about. How well or poorly someone presents an argument or idea does not necessarily tell us whether it is important and true. Ignoring our deeply unfair relationship with non-human life because we met someone emotionally unintelligent is to punish the wrong beings. You owe the animals on your plate the respect of taking your own journey into the ethical arguments for veganism, because what you choose to eat matters too much to those animals for you to wait until someone argues for veganism in a way you find appealing.
Discussion
Vegan Stereotypes
Vegans reflect the diversity of humanity, with all the normal flaws, biases and varying levels of emotional intelligence. There are sweet vegans, sarcastic vegans, nerdy vegans, cool vegans, and grumpy vegans; actually, most of us can be any one of these depending on what day you happen to meet us on. There are some vegans who have hostile and judgmental personalities, not only towards non-vegans, but also towards other vegans who don't live up to their expectations. These people think they are helping veganism; they even have a thought-terminating saying that is meant to justify their attitudes: "All activism is good activism". Yet, this clearly isn't true, and often their negative example can discourage people from listening to the vegan message or eating fewer animal products. You know if someone is a difficult vegan if they think of themselves as the "real vegans". As said, this is OK, there are many different personality types who are vegans, no doubt including some who exhibit dark triad qualities. The problem, though, is that people like to put other people into boxes that they assign qualities to. Vegans are still relatively few in number, and if someone hasn't met many vegans and meets a difficult vegan, they might assume that this is what all vegans are like. The box with the word vegan on it is tainted, and they won't look favourably on the concept of veganism. Veganism, however, is a philosophy about our relationship with the non-human world. No individual or group owns the concept; compassion towards animals is a universal ideal, and is not owned even by the Vegan Society of the UK, which gave us the word vegan and the most widely accepted definition of veganism.
Anyone who has had bad experiences with a preachy vegan should try this social experiment: try saying you are vegan for a while, or tell your friends and family you are going vegan. You'll find that people on all sides of the topic can be preachy. You will experience the sort of repetitive conversations and reactions that vegans get all the time, the exact motivation for this text you are reading right now! Things have generally gotten better in this respect, and generally, most people are considerate; a few are even interested in knowing more about veganism. Some people, however, seem to have a major prejudice against veganism, along with most other forms of socially progressive ideas. That said, there are also many social progressives who have a major blind spot when it comes to animal agriculture. In the end, for all the preachy vegans in the world, there are many more people who get quite annoyed or angry about the idea that we should be more compassionate towards non-human animals; vegans are a personal affront to their way of living.
Many vegans have been in the situation of being out for a meal and enquiring about vegan options. A person, usually but not exclusively male, then starts bombarding them with poorly informed and often hostile questions. It’s actually worse than this in many social situations, as a hostile person is usually representing the majority opinion around the table. Most vegans will have sat at entire tables of people who have apparently never cared about the animals they eat enough to look into the reality of factory farming. Arguing against the mob is almost an impossible task. The problem is partly that some humans are more status-seeking animals rather than truth-seeking ones; if someone says something, what matters is not how intelligent or true it is, but whether the surrounding people are validated by it and cheer it on. It may be unfair, you may have intellectually and logically prevailed in most aspects of the conversation, but if you failed in the court of public opinion, you and the animals have not won. There is also the problem that when one person argues against a number of people, they usually only have a small percentage of time to present the opposing opinion. We may protest that ideas should be judged by their ethics and logic alone, but we know that is not reality; the medium is often more important than the message, and the people who speak the most often sway the day. Non-conformists are held to higher standards than the majority, and this is just part of life; so keep your poise, and bring the conversation back to the ethics of our treatment of animals, not vegans themselves.
Communicating across the divide
We still need to talk about preachy vegans. As vegans, most of us will have read the books and watched the videos; some of us have even heard the cries from within factory farms, and smelt the stench that farmed animals are forced to live in. We know and feel all of the emotional angst that preachy vegans are expressing at this unnecessary human-caused suffering. But we must also recognise that non-vegans haven't had these realisations, they live in a different emotional and intellectual landscape. Farmed animals to most people are not individual beings with their own hopes, fears and personalities, but rather just a blurry space on the edge of their consciousness. If animals are treated so badly in farms, they might reason, why would that be legal? Why isn't everyone upset about their treatment? Why indeed. So instead of seeing us as advocates for animals, they see a status-seeking person trying to win an argument with them, or even trying to emotionally blackmail them. They can't tell the difference between vegans and every other entity trying to inhabit a piece of their mind, like religions, politicians, marketers, influencers, salespeople, scammers and charlatans. Vegans need to recognise this reality, and consistently behave in a way that makes clear we are not just another group selfishly promoting our own interests. By carrying ourselves in such a way as to resonate with the compassion in others, rather than their defensiveness or sense of shame, we can most effectively advocate for the animals. This may require some internal work, but then learning to communicate in a kinder, more empathetic and ethically consistent way is work most people should do at some point in their lives, even for purposes other than vegan advocacy. It doesn't matter what is in our hearts; people can only hear us if we are able to effectively communicate what is within us via our words and demeanour.
Tailoring your message
While we're on the subject of preaching, among people who consider themselves activists, perhaps no other cliche is more often said after a speech or discussion than "Aren't we just preaching to the converted?" This treats something like veganism as a binary state, where you are vegan and saved, or you are a heathen who needs to come into the light. Veganism may be something close to a moral baseline, but it is not the end of our journey towards a healthy, ethical or fulfilled life. People shouldn't just be converted and left to their own devices; they should be continually educated, inspired, included and energised. They do need a different sort of communication, though; I've been in a room full of vegans where someone gives some version of the talk "Why you should go vegan". That is the wrong talk for that audience; people need to consider their audience and pass on the information that will best help them further along the ethical path.
I've also heard talks that seemed to rely on you already agreeing with what they said to enjoy them, or even really hear them. If you give a talk encouraging veganism to a mixed audience, it doesn't really matter if all the vegans in the room are nodding when you are saying things that the non-vegans just can't relate to. To the unconverted, you need more basic, targeted, subtle and thoughtful ways of engaging than vegan preaching. Vegans may cheer your angry preaching on from the sidelines; you might even gain a following and some groupies, but it’s probably not effective in achieving what should be your aims: to help animals. We must hold your arguments to a different, more careful standard when talking to people who don't agree with us; we must try to speak in such a way that even the people who want to disagree with your perspective can’t help but acknowledge it has merit.
The psychological disconnect
Whilst discussing perspective, it’s interesting what is considered preaching and what isn't. Generally, what people agree with is the good sort of preaching and what they disagree with is the bad sort. An example of this was when a group called The Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses erected a billboard showing a racehorse that had been injured during a race. The horse was lying down on its side, and although this wasn't made evident on the billboard, people could assume that the horse was awaiting being put to death. The activist group were soon notified by the landowner that the billboard had been taken down because people in the community were disturbed by the image of the injured horse. Compare this with the billboards featuring farm animals that litter our suburbs and roads, blights on our urban scenery that are considered commonplace and never questioned. These billboards feature detached parts of these animals, murdered while young and perfectly healthy, whose body parts have been burnt and then labelled “food”. These injunctions to consume more animals are apparently socially acceptable, whereas a billboard calling for greater compassion towards animals draws complaints and condemnation. People are happy seeing chunks of flesh of murdered animals, but they don't like to see an animal lying waiting to be murdered. Perhaps nothing could be as clear in showing the disconnect between the food on people's plates, which people see as a disembodied product, and the lives of the animals from which that food comes. It’s not just what you see that creates your world, but also the story you tell, or choose not to tell, yourself internally about it. Is that a piece of food, or is it the burnt flesh of an intensively bred, malformed animal murdered prematurely after a terrible life? For people who eat meat, it is clearly both, but for some reason, whether it be habit, intellectual self-defense or self-interested bias, they often only see the former. Our worldview can be so hardened and habitual to us that it can be hard to even comprehend someone if they are saying something that contradicts it. Studies show us that people find it harder to pay attention to and recall images that they find psychologically discomforting. People will subconsciously avoid disturbing elements in images, as if some sub or preconscious part of the brain is filtering information before it gets into their conscious attention. People also find it harder to recall images with disturbing aspects to them. Given that what goes on in slaughterhouses and factory farms is disturbing to normal individuals, it makes sense that these psychological mechanisms will come into play. We are therefore not just trying to inform people, but trying to change their current frame of reference, often against their subconscious will. The task of advocating for animals is not just putting information out into the world; we have to help people open themselves to uncomfortable information in a way that doesn’t provoke emotional self-defence mechanisms, and that is considerate of other traumas that people might already be dealing with. None of this is easy, but it is a challenge we must accept in order to best help the animals.
If I were an animal bred in a factory farm or on my way to slaughter, I’d desperately hope someone would be preaching for me, but more importantly, I would want them to be most effectively helping me. Being right is not enough; shouting at the world in anger is probably counter-productive. The point is to change the world, to make ethical progress. People rarely change from one fact, phrase, sign, t-shirt, interaction or conversation, and will often be especially resistant to this if it is put to them in a hostile manner. As many as the thought of billions of animals in factory farms and slaughterhouses burns most vegans, as urgent as the task before us is in the face of so much suffering, we have to accept that the world is unlikely to suddenly awaken to reality tomorrow. We need to put some thought into long-term, structural strategies that involve economics, philosophy, psychology and politics. Emotions are vital in motivating us, but their power needs to be carefully harnessed by our rationality so that we are most effective.
If you want to be an effective vegan advocate, especially if you want to be a preachy vegan, you need to do the work. Read about psychology and effective behaviour change, the history of our movement and its thinkers, the arguments and justifications of the other side, the lives of farmed animals, the livestock industry’s effects on the environment, human rights and our political systems. You don’t have to know everything, indeed you should be quick to acknowledge that you don’t, but you don’t want to come off as either ill-informed or overly emotionally motivated. Like any conversation, it is important to have the facts on your side, to try to listen, seriously consider other points of view, make them feel heard and look for common ground on which to build. Keep in mind, before we judge others, that most of us haven’t always been vegan, and being vegan doesn't mean you don't have other areas to ethically improve upon.
Being strategic
There is also the question of preaching effectively, of using our emotional resources and time to achieve the best outcome for animals. The random people you meet on a street, who walk past a protest, even your friends and family, might not be the subset of the community most open to change. There are, however, large numbers of people beyond your immediate social interactions who are actively pondering a vegan diet, or could be easily convinced to move in that direction, and these people want or need a little hand up. Finding these people and helping them, what we call "pushing on open doors", can be a much more effective and less confrontational form of activism. You can do this by things like cooking classes, vegan mentoring, introductions to plant-based diets, baketivism, and so on. I've been involved in some amazing programs we called Vegan Pledges, where groups of people were taken through a program to help them try being vegan for a month. The pledge was free for participants, and included food samples, nutrition advice, mentoring, events and group support; it was incredibly effective. You don't have to come up with all the strategies yourself; there have been so many smart activists around the world, and things they have tried, you just need to learn about and familiarise yourself with them.
When it comes to effective activism, not only don't you have to do it on your own, you probably shouldn't. If you want to make a change at a wider level, being part of an activist group, or starting one if you have to, is a way of multiplying and strengthening our individual efforts. Having a group to think about plans and campaigns with, and to implement them, means you can do more ambitious and well-thought-through things. A group benefits from having a variety of personalities, skills, knowledge, ideas and perspectives; it can also keep going when “life happens”, and people drop in and out over time. Also, people can concentrate on the things that they enjoy, such as the sort of things that attract introverts, extroverts, neurodiverse, and neurotypical people, and so on. I used to help run volunteer inductions for an Animal Liberation organisation, and if there was one thing I found hard to get across to people, it was that activism doesn’t have to be the more confrontational "go vegan" style. Small organisations need lots of different skills, from various professional services to baking, fundraising, marketing, committee membership, handy work and so on. Indeed, just turning up, doing what you say you will do, being nice to everyone, and being reliable is perhaps the best trait any volunteer can have in a group. If you really have the urge to preach, that's fine, but if you just want to help animals, there are many other ways to do so.
Speaking for them
Sometimes we refer to non-human animals as the voiceless. Many people point out that animals do speak for themselves, as they instinctively cry out against the injustices and pain that are inflicted upon them as standard practises in animal agriculture. Those cries, however, will never be heard by the consumers who pay to have these animals bred, confined and slaughtered. We have banished the slaughterhouses and factory farms well out beyond the urban environments most people live in, so the animals they eat are barely real beings to the consumers who have so much power to decide on their fate. We must help people to hear the voices of those animals; we have a duty to speak for them, indeed, even to preach for them in the right time and place. To take it upon yourself to speak for another being, though, requires a high bar of consideration. If we have to preach, we need to do it thoughtfully; we need to focus on what helps the animals and not just what we personally want to do. Just preaching because it makes us feel better to "get it out", especially if we are acting in such a way that it actively discourages people from the cause we are preaching for, is not a good thing in itself. You should be angry about the way animals are treated; other people should also be angry about it, but triggering irrational forces like anger is unpredictable and likely to backfire. I have spent time with cows, pigs, chickens, goats, ducks and other animals at sanctuaries. When I think about how gentle most farmed animals are, how much they appreciate a kind voice and touch, it inspires me to try to embody the way they generally are in how I communicate on their behalf to others.
You may not care what other people think of you and your way of being in the world. You may even wear your prickly individualism like a badge of honour, perhaps rejecting the world before it can reject you. This may win you fans in the right social circles, but the world we are trying to change is much more vast. To be a vegan is to be part of the idea of what vegan means for the people we encounter. Like it or not, whatever identity we have, especially if we are in a minority, we will be a representative of that identity in the world. We may not choose the responsibility of defining what veganism is for other people, but it is thrust upon us every time we say we are vegan, wear a vegan shirt, or order a vegan meal. To be an effective advocate for animals, we must understand that our medium and our message are inextricably intertwined. Veganism is about compassion to all animals, humans included, so let us embody that consistently so as not to confuse that simple truth in other people’s minds.