In March 2009 I wrote a piece outlining my ideas about effective vegan education. In the article, I said:

I recommend that you prepare a few “elevator speeches.” Try to identify your core vegan beliefs and form them into a simple sentence or two. Use this to answer “why are you a vegan?” Likewise, have a website address [tryveg.com, goveg.com, chooseveg.com] or book title [Eating Animals, Diet for a New America] at the forefront of your mind that you can use to direct people who have further questions. Don’t try to answer everything yourself. Feel free to say, “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” when you encounter difficult questions. And then try to steer the discussion back to simple things everyone can do: eat fewer animals, eat more plants.

Interestingly enough, a few weeks ago, Erik Marcus said a similar thing:

What you need is a sound bite: a sentence you’ve committed to memory that packs a radical idea into language that seems commonsense and middle of the road. Here is my sound bite for die-hard meat eaters:

If you’re going to eat meat, you shouldn’t eat it every day, and it should never come from a factory farm.

It might seem like this advice runs counter to a true animal rights perspective – because animals aren’t food and veganism is the moral baseline – right? While it’s true that promoting meat-reduction is not necessarily promoting veganism, here are three reasons why it’s important to encourage people to become part-time vegans:

1. The animals’ suffering matters and it matters now. Even if we can’t prevent all suffering, we can some suffering, so we should.
2. People who eat vegan some of the time help increase the number of vegan options on menus and in grocery stores, thus making it easier for other people to eat vegan all of the time. More vegan options = more vegans.
3. When people reduce their meat consumption, they are on a path towards better health, more environmentally responsible eating, and less cruel choices. Even if they still eat animals some of the time, at least they’re thinking about these issues more and they’re changing their habits in the direction of progress instead of continuing on the path of destruction.

That doesn’t mean we should begin or end our discussion of animal rights with a promotion of semi-vegetarianism. It just means that we should include this option in our animal advocate toolbox and use it when appropriate.

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Sections: Vegan Activism
Topics: activism, education, elevator speeches, leafleting, learning, sound bite, veg, Vegan, vegan outreach, Vegan Theory