10 Kinds Of Vegan Activism
From the interview with Martin Balluch posted at Abolitionist Online:
“We need to change industry to provide easily available ample and cheap vegan alternatives to everything and at the same time make it ever harder for animal industries to produce cheaply”
It got me thinking about various methods of pro-animal activism. I was just brainstorming and remembering what I’ve read and heard elsewhere, but here are a few specific forms of action we vegans should take to help create a vegan world:
- Be a vocal vegan: Let others know we’re vegan. Just drop it into conversations here and there. I’ve found people often think they don’t know a vegan, but in fact they do know a vegan, it’s just that the vegan they know is a quiet vegan.
- Start or expand a vegan blog or website: Make it easy for curious omnivores to learn about veganism online.
- Promote vegan websites or businesses: If you like a vegan product or a vegan business, let others know.
- Start, expand, or invest in vegan business: Don’t just put your money where your mouth is when it comes to acting as a consumer, put your money where your mouth is when it comes to producing your income, investing in your retirement, and so forth.
- Boycott nonvegan business: This is obvious. Don’t let them have your money, your time, or your attention.
- Leaflet: Hand out pamphlets. If you’re shy, carry some pamphlets with you and leave them around at various locations like libraries, cafes, and shopping malls for people to find and read themselves.
- Protest: Join an animal rights organization and participate in demonstrations.
- Educate children: Give presentations about veganism and animal rights at schools or after-school programs. While babysitting, introduce kids to vegan foods and a discussion about animal rights.
- Share videos and books: Lend out or give away animal rights movies, books, and vegan cookbooks.
- Cook for people: Invite nonvegans over for dinner and prepare a wonderful vegan feast.
What is your favorite kind of vegan activism?
I believe that being a “vocal vegan,” which implies your boycott of those industries that exploit nonhumans, is the most effective means to both explicitly and implicitly challenge the assumptions that the justification for eating animal flesh, for example, is derived from. Questioning those baseless assumptions, publicly and persuasively, can change an individual’s perspective entirely. It’s like watching that single person pick up a piece of trash that others have simply walked past - it has the tendency to shake you out of your stupor.
Secondly, educating our children, I believe, can result in a generational gestalt shift if done properly. Imagine it, a generation of children who ask “Why did this animal have to die?”
~ Recent blog post: "They exist for our use" and so forth…. at http://www.not-quiteright.net/tvg ~