Grapetruth

I understand and I respect that. I get that Thanksgiving is important to people. But as someone who cares a lot about animals, it's really hard to see people all eating a turkey as a tradition. I hold my tongue and don't speak out against it, symbolic day and all, but I feel sadness inside and sometimes it's hard to prevent that coming out in how I carry myself on the occasion.

Yeah :/ On the bright side, they're presented as a pretty "cool"/attractive character and it also exposed a lot of people to the idea of veganism in the first place. I liked the fact that a lot of people heard this line said by a vegan character in a mainstream movie: "I partake not in the meat, nor the breast milk, nor the ovum, of any creature with a face." (The 'with a face' part was unnecessary, since there are faceless animals we don't eat/exploit either, but good enough)

This anime doesn't particularly interest me otherwise (it's multiple episodes), I already saw the movie and it was just ok. The "vegan powers", "vegan police" stuff is something I never hear the end of from other people, though. "You get 3 strikes before the vegan police catch you!" "Vegan police!" "No vegan diet, no vegan powers." "Chicken parm isn't vegan?! Gelato isn't vegan?! It's milk and eggs b-" "Being vegan makes you better than most people" yada yada. That movie (Scott Pilgrim vs the World) is honestly where a lot of people get their first exposure to veganism from, and something they gravitate to whenever the subject comes up. In my experience anyway

Does it have any one-liners likely to be referenced by people? Like the ones from the movie

That's fair, I guess I would just hate for people to read it and take the absence of any description of how the dairy cow-human relationship is a horrific, unjust, exploitative and oppressive one to mean that dairy farming is acceptable.

If we really are exploring that relationship genuinely and without obscuring facts, the suffering dairy cows experience at the hands of humans must be acknowledged.

To be honest I shared this with vegans who I thought might relate, it wasn't something I typically say to non-vegans, because in my experience, they make fun of vegans before they would allow themselves to truly engage with the idea of animal suffering/exploitation/killing etc by humans. So I would probably modify my language to be more facts-based and make them aware of the problems with animal farming/exploitation. If I see a living, conscious animal, that's immediately a "friend" to me and I respect them, so all animals are friends. I hope this inspires more kindness to them. But for others, the idea of that might seem worthy of ridicule.

I understand the resistance to "appealing to emotion", but I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing as a whole; if we're sure that being vegan is the right thing to do, then appealing to people's emotional side with how they view animals could be a useful tactic. Perhaps it would need to be less vague however, such as "animals are sentient, complex beings" rather than friends.

I would argue saying "think of the children" while holding up an image of an aborted fetus might be a bit of a misrepresentation of reality rather than just an appeal to emotion, at the risk of offending someone. Undeveloped, unconscious fetuses aren't equivalent to "children" or fully formed, conscious humans in the sense we typically understand it (e.g. a sentient human woman who would truly suffer from an enforced pregnancy), but it might lead people who don't know to believe they are. I don't think anyone really thinks I'm personally friends with every farmed animal who gets abused and slaughtered as a result of people's animal product purchases, so I don't think it's misrepresentative to call them friends as a general term of endearment for all sentient life.

But I take your point, I really do.

"Hello my friends" (says to complete strangers), or "My friends over in x country" (where you don't actually know anyone), for example. Wouldn't it also work in the human context, even if you don't know the individuals personally? Just wondering. I've heard "friends" used to refer to people you care about simply because they're humans and you acknowledge their (even theoretical) existence. So why not non-human animals as well?

I appreciate what you mean. I wonder what it is about the phrasing. Calling them friends is too much? It's a term of respect, that's all. I care about my friends, and I care about animals. Friends not food.

I agree people are in denial about what they consume and what they do, and it's so sad. And I think you meant this anyway. But just saying, I think this can apply all animal products, not just meat. Which is important since I think dairy and eggs are the most cruel industries of them all.

Why exactly? Don't they have empathy for animals?

Checks notes: is a plant, has egg in the name. Yes.

I was asked if I could eat eggplant