this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Looks left at 90% of the human population causing untold suffering without giving 2 shits.
Looks right at the 5% that are actually bothering to do something.
"Yes, let's shit on them"
Man I had to rephrase this a dozen times and I still don't have a good way to communicate what I'm trying to say.
The goal of this kind of callout is to make vegetarians, people who already value animal welfare, aware that they may still be contributing towards animal cruelty. For example, I was a vegetarian for years and then got rocked by the realization that, "oh wait, vegans aren't just crazies that I can blow off, it was me who was ignorant the whole time."
So I anecdotally assume that a huge percentage of vegans are vegetarians who went from thinking "vegetarians and vegans are basically the same, besides vegans taking the idea too far" to "oh wait there's a huge important difference between the two." On vegan spaces, people often joke that "bullying worked on me lol" because the gentle approaches are easily ignored, but the really blunt "your actions don't align with your stated ethics" is really difficult to brush off.
I get you, but I also think there's value in considering how these kinds of conversations affect people who are neither vegetarian nor vegan.
If you create a permission structure for 10 meat eaters to write off the whole group as extremist crazies, while you're trying to bully 1 vegetarian, who might be, maybe, bullied into veganism, that's still a net loss of a whole lot of animals.
Also, this isn't a veg friendly space. Having conversations like this among other veg*ns is entirely a different affair than doing it in an environment where the average response is just "hell no, I love my meat"
The 5% might not be lost causes.
My unpopular opinion: I don't really care about a chicken as long as human beings suffer.
In the best of worlds, sure, but today? Not so much.
Is it really that hard to care about both?
Oh I can care about them both. No problem! Won't really do anything but hey, let's care instead of getting our hands dirty eh.
Okay then, is it really that much harder to care about and do something to help both as opposed to just one or the other?