Personal Purity vs. Effective Advocacy

[CavySpirit]

Personal Purity vs. Effective Advocacy

This great article really puts some of the more difficult philosophical struggles into perspective. Please give it a read.

Thank you to Susan for contributing it.

[pigsforlife]

The link did not work.

[Susan9608]

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[Maisiepaisie]

I agree with the article, thanks for sharing. Although for me personally, I don't eat at places where meat is served or at friends who eat meat for fear of cross contamination, but that just me.

Also related, I think a lot vegans involved in animal rights put people off because of their attitude to people who are, in their opinions not so perfect as they like to think they are. I used to be involved in a local animal rights group. New people would turn up to every meeting but most didn't stick around for long. There must be reasons for this. I did a lot of fundraising for the group and turned up regulary for almost all demos but all that counted for nothing when I had a dangerous dog euthanised. The fact that this dog had savaged my sons face so that he needed stitches didn't seem to matter to these people. "He would have been alright with training" they said. Well I'm sorry but I can't take the risk of having that dog around my kids or my other animals. For 6 months I had to keep that dog in separate rooms away from my kids and pigs while I tried to rehome him but to no avail. I don't think thats a decent life for the dog and I myself was bitten 6 times. Anyway after I got this dog euthanised I found out a lot of the animal rights people had been calling me behind my back when I got a nasty message from one of them on myspace. Because of this I'm no longer involved in animal rights. I feel these people make things worse for animals by making others uncomfortable because they don't agree with everything they do. I also think its ridiculous that some of them will not have anything to do with people who eat meat. One of them even said so on a TV interview. How does that help animals?

[Chaos&Order]

That was a great article and thank you for posting the link. You'll never get people to listen to you if you anger them and they might start associating all veg'ns as being all the same.

People give me a funny look when I say I'm vegetarian. I thought about doing an experiment where I tell people I simply don't like meat and see how their reactions differ. I think there is a negative association with the terms.

[Alusdra]

I think someone may have posted this a while ago. It really is a great article. I'm not vegetarian, but it applies to all advocacy. You have to use the 'sugar' approach to more effectively get people to agree with you. It's kind of like positive reinforcement training.

And this has been really bugging me but I keep forgetting to make a separate thread about it- but why do some people spell vegan without an a? Like veg*n or veg'n? Is it not supposed to have an a? I don't get it.

[Maisiepaisie]

Alusdra its just a shorter way of saying 'vegan or vegetarian'