Veganism as a lifestyle choice can't lead to meaningful change.

[Tim Gier]

In his recent podcast (please listen to it here), longtime vegan activist, educator and author Kim Stallwood talked about "The Animal Rights Challenge". In one sentence, that challenge can be summed up in Stallwood's words:

"The movement’s obsession with personal lifestyle choice stops us from understanding the immensity of the animal rights challenge."

Here's the way Stallwood explains it on his website: 

The movement’s emphasis on personal lifestyle choice to achieving institutional change is inadequate. It may help some individual animals and inspire some people to make compassionate lifestyle choices. But it is not for everyone. Lifestyle choices can be a fickle friend as trends and fashions change. Not everyone is the same. Not everyone does change. Not everyone is willing to forgo what are commonly perceived as rights (e.g., human rights trumping animal rights), entitlements (e.g., animal tested medications) and pleasures (e.g., fox hunting and eating meat). They don’t want us to tell them. They don’t want to see the photos and DVDs. We can’t tell them what they can and cannot do. They’re only animals. People are more important.

This is the frame around the animal rights movement’s mission and its repertoire of protest. Caring Sleuths live inside the frame with our alleged self-righteous attitudes, seemingly smug vegan/vegetarian cruelty-free lifestyles, perceived radical boycotts and protests, and superior rescued cats and dogs. Everyone else lives outside the frame. They look in. They ask “Am I one of them?” “Do I want to be like them?” “Do I even like them?”

The movement’s obsession with personal lifestyle choice stops us from understanding the immensity of the animal rights challenge.

The main idea is that, since many (if not most) vegans became vegan because of some personal transformative moment (for example, after having seen video depicting cruelty towards other animals), vegans tend to think that the best way to "create" more vegans is to get to them to go through the same sort of personal transformation. Stallwood thinks that's a strategy that's bound to fail.

I think he's right, because, for example, I suppose that there are many more people who make no changes in their lives after having seen the movie Earthlings compared to the number who go vegan (or even vegetarian). I think it isn't true that if slaughterhouses had glass walls that everyone....

What do you think? 

[Louise, London]

 

Great piece of writing and perception of human difference...also I identify as a fairly new vegan who became active after watching a video and showed it to everyone hoping they would respond to it the way I had.  I failed as described, because of these differences in people, because its seen as a simple lifestyle choice.  Do I prefer the blue or the green one, this house or that flat.  I think that one of the answers is something I read more of on a member of this sites profile earlier (Kate Go Vegan and nobody gets hurt), that it needs somehow to come to light of consciousness that this isn't about a preference we have any moral right to make.  Its about violence and exploitation of living beings that is no less wrong in my heart and mind than it would be to inflict such injustices on a human adult or baby.  Kate makes a very good point that Speciesism needs to be a word that is spoken of enough to bring it into common parlance, so that it can be dealt with as an injustice as directly as racism or feminism or any other abuse of power.

[Louise, London]

Thankyou Barbara, for sharing some of the different approaches and views, it helped make it clearer.  It doees feel important to be here discussing, learning, putting all the pieces together.  The system will likely change from within, before changing altogether, and people will gradually reach a more heart centred awareness through therapies and personal development, new more relational focus in education systems, and through  book writing and campaigning on a practical level.  There seems to be a lot of different groups on facebook and the internet working to help raise awareness for aimals.  I was trying to think if there's a way of networking them so that collective non violent protest and awareness raising events could happen on a bigger scale.  Maybe have a candlelit vigil outside an abattoir or factory farm, just sitting together sending love and saying the Buddhist mantra 'may you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering'.  Its the most non violent way I can think of, and sending love and positive intent in this way can have surprising even seemingly miraculous results, though they may not alway be immediate.  If anyone reads this and would like to start a list?  Or if anyone has their own plans and ideas for campaigning, and has any ideas about how to network all the groups working to help animals, I'd love to hear?  Maybe this has already been tried.  Maybe its not even legal to have a gathering of large numbers of people outside an abattoir... perhaps someone here has these answers?