Is vegan something I am, or is veganism simply something I do?

I've long said that "I am vegan" to people when describing my diet and/or my ethics. It's a nice simple shorthand. However, it also defines me in a way that "living a vegan lifestyle" does not.

I'm not sure we should talk about veganism as part of one's identity. This sort of framing may actually discourage people from making a change. Changing one's self-identity is a big deal. On the other hand, asking someone to act on the feelings of compassion that they already have is much less of a big deal. Instead of telling that they need to change who they are, we are just acting them to change their behavior. Even better, we're asking them to change their behavior so that it's in accordance with their stated values.

At CAA, we've long taken a low-pressure approach of encouraging people to "explore veganism". If someone tells us that they can't become vegan, we encourage them to make whatever change they can. This change in framing seems like a natural extension of that "soft" approach.

The problem with all of this is that it's incredibly awkward to not say "I'm vegan" in spoken conversation. Saying "I live a vegan lifestyle" just sounds weird. I can't imagine that this language will be adopted. This is especially unlikely since the people who already have experienced a change in self-identity probably want to hold on to that identity!

However, I think that we can approach this sort of change slowly. For a beginning, we can look at the written materials we use to pursue animal activism, and modify them to emphasize that veganism is a matter of lifestyle, not identity. We can also make a point of describing things as vegan (food, clothes, etc.), not people.

Vegan Outreach has a great line in one of their essays, "we want a vegan world, not a vegan club." I suspect that making veganism an identity furthers the creation of that club.

Some people find this odd. Isn't veganism obviously the healthiest diet? Why wouldn't we use such a powerful argument? Shouldn't we make the best case we can for veganism?

I came across a blog post titled "The China Study: Fact or Fallacy?" that reminded me so well why we don't engage in this argument.

Go ahead, take a moment to read (or at least skim) that blog post.

Are you back? Great.

The China Study was big news in the animal rights world when the book first came out. I haven't read it, but from what I've heard it basically says "go (mostly?) vegan". Wow, a whole book backed by lots of data telling people that veganism is the way to go! How exciting!

That blog post a perfect illustration of why this isn't exciting. The blog post contains 9,000 words of statistical analysis, complete with tables, charts, and more. In the end, the author of the post concludes that The China Study is extremely flawed.

Is she right? Who the f*ck knows?

And that's the real problem. It is incredibly difficult for someone without expertise to assess claims about health. How do I know if the blog post author has any credibility? For that matter, how do I know if T. Colin Campbell (author of The China Study) has any credibility? I am not a biologist, epidemiologist, statistician, or dietitian. That blog post sure has a lot of numbers and charts, though! I bet The China Study has some too.

It's trivial to find health arguments for dozens of radically different diets (vegan, Atkins, paleo, raw, and more). If I, as an animal rights activist, start making claims about human health, why should anyone listen to me? There are lots of people with better credentials ready to disagree with me. I can cite sources, but so can others. Without a lot of independent research, it's very difficult for a layperson to figure out the truth, and that assumes there is one truth to figure out. Scientific research is full of contradictions, especially in a field as complex as diet and human health.

Health arguments are a distraction from the real key issue, animal suffering. Animal suffering in factory farms is undeniable and easily proved. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to understand that being crammed in a tiny cage unable to move is torture. Few people in the general public will argue the opposite. An argument based on animal suffering appeals to the fundamental empathy all of us possess, and doesn't require statistics or studies to suport it.

I say surprisingly, because I thought that the weather was conspiring against me, but I was wrong. It was raining outside, but it turns out that the University of Minnesota does allow leafleting inside academic buildings (but not inside the student union). Unny suggested I try either Blegen or Willey Hall on the West Bank. I went to Willey near the Gopher Express.

I had thought that traffic would just be too slow for this to be useful, but I was wrong. In fact, compared to my experiences leafleting outside on the UMN campus, this was actually a better location. I think the weather may have driven more people inside, and I picked a spot that was at a good crossroads.

Surprisingly, no one "official" came to tell me I couldn't do this. I had asked Unny to print out a copy of the UMN's policy, which I brought with me. I was sure I'd have to show it to someone, but apparently not.

All in all, I handed out at least 450 leaflets, and maybe more than 500, in just about 2.5 hours.

After doing this, I had a few observations for future leafleting ...

With just one person, you really don't need a high traffic area. I heard a lot more refusals during peak traffic. I'm not sure how this breaks down numerically, but my guess is that I actually gave out fewer leaflets per minute during peak traffic.

The fact that people are less receptive during peak traffic makes sense. The busy times where I was located were between classes. Most of those folks are heading to their next class. They don't have free time to think about taking a leaflet. In addition, because I was at the top of the stairway, people probably felt pressure to keep moving rather than block the flow of traffic.

In contrast, the rest of the time was great. The traffic was low, but there were very few totally dead times. Instead, I'd see maybe 1-5 people per minute. This is perfect, since I was able to approach almost every one of them.

Even better, the slower traffic let me approach people in a more relaxed and friendly manner. People seemed most receptive when I greeted them, waited for them to make eye contact and respond, and only then offered the leaflet. I'm no psychologist, but I think the initial exchange of pleasantries probably helps humanize me in their mind, and gives them some sort of investment in our contact.

By contrast, if I said "hi" followed immediately by an offer, or I just offered the leaflet with my usual "information to help animals" phrase, I become just "the leafleter". The recipient hasn't invested anything yet, and they can say no or ignore me easily.

Of course, the downside to this sort of slow but steady traffic is that it really doesn't work well for multiple leafleters. I was joined by another person later in the morning, and there really wasn't enough traffic for both of us to be there most of the time, so she ended up going to a different spot.

If I was trying to find a good event for a group, I'd prefer something like leafleting the end of a concert. The traffic is incredibly heavy, and you can actually make use of a decent size group.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this went. I'd like to do more outreach like this, but I seem to end up spending all my volunteer time on fundraising, tech, finances, and event planning. Those are rewarding too, but it's nice to go out and do something simple.

I'd really like to thank everyone who sponsored me in this event. You helped raise a good chunk of change for a cause I dearly believe in.

Defining ruthless pragmatism is harder than you might think. The problem is that it's easy to claim we're being pragmatic, but I think mostly that consists of acting out our biases. If you are inclined to think that people won't hear our (animal rights) message, you'll probably tend towards so-called "direct action", because you think that intimidation and property damage are the most pragmatic approach. If you think otherwise, maybe you tend towards outreach and education. Either way, it's easy to give lip service to pragmatism.

The other problem of definition is one of scope. Anyone concerned with animal rights should also be concerned about human rights. For example, non-human animals might be best served by the forced extinction of the human species, but that doesn't consider all animals' rights. Similarly, we need to be careful not to sacrifice other social justice issues on the altar of animal rights.

But I think a ruthless pragmatist needs to have an even broader and longer-term view. It's easy to push yourself to give 150% for animals all of the time, but how long can that last? If you are unhappy with your life, will you be a lifelong activist? Is it better to push as hard as possible for ten years and then stop, or should you aim for a reduced effort over fifty years? If you engage in actions that violate your own sense of justice, are you being pragmatic, or does the inevitable psychological backlash make this ineffective in the long run?

These are all hard questions. It's easy to say things like "by any means necessary" or "we must all do things we don't like", but I'm not convinced that this attitude is truly pragmatic. It certainly feels pragmatic. Activists, more than most, are prone to mistake self-denial and self-abuse for pragmatism. It's easy to look at all the suffering in the world and think that only if you are personally unhappy are you really doing all you can. But that's a trap that leads to burnout and increased despair. If you've been active in animal rights for a while, you've probably known people who've left the movement, many giving up veganism or even going back to eating meat. A pragmatic movement will do its best to keep people active and living their values for their entire life.

There's another part of ruthless pragmatism that we're missing as activists, and that's measurement. I've heard very little in the movement about concrete strategies for measuring the success of various actions. Does the ALF have a feedback loop built-in? Do they stop and evaluate every few years? Sure, they may measure their economic damage, but do they actually have a way to evaluate the impact of that damage?

But let's not pick on the ALF. Do we at Compassionate Action for Animals do this? We do, actually, but we could do much better! Most of our metrics are not measuring the actual impact on animals. Instead, we measure things like number of attendees at events and their evaluations, number of leaflets distributed, etc. These are all interesting, but we haven't actually established a concrete connection between these numbers and the actual impact on animals. Even worse, we don't have any good way to figure out if we should be doing some other set of activities entirely.

Pragmatism requires more than measurement after the fact. We also need to constantly be on the lookout for new research to direct our actions. As a movement, I don't hear much talk about the latest research in psychology, sociology, or economics. Much as it may be painful, we need to take a page from Madison Avenue and figure out the best ways to influence people (hint to the so-called abolitionists, it's not logical argument!). More and more these days, research is showing that people's behavior is shaped by unconscious factors they can't even articulate. How can we take advantage of that in our movement?

So do we want to be ruthlessly pragmatic? I'll give that a qualified "yes". First, we need to expand the scope of our ruthlessness. Our ruthlessness must be both ethical and sustainable. Anything else just isn't ruthless or pragmatic enough. Second, we need to work past our built-in biases and use measurement and research to make our actions as effective as possible.

During her keynote, pattrice stated that meat consumption is at an all time high. I can't argue with the raw numbers. More animals are being killed for food now than ever in the past. But I'm getting a little tired of hearing this fact quoted without any context.

First, I think it's important to realize that meat consumption has been going up for a long time. I don't have any facts to point to (I'm lazy), but it's reasonable to assume that meat consumption started increasing long before there was an animal rights movement. In fact, increases in meat consumption probably date back to the beginning of agriculture, when people were able to raise animals, rather than having to hunt them.

The beginning of the modern animal rights movement is generally placed some time in the 1970s. Many people say it began with the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. The fact that meat consumption has increased since the movement began is part of a longer historical trend of more people having more money, and also the increased industrialization of meat production. So meat has gotten cheaper, and more people have more money to buy it.

Additionally, since the animal rights movement began, the worldwide human population has increased dramatically. In the US alone, our population went from 200 million in 1970 to 300 million in 2007.

We can measure the success of the animal rights movement in part by measuring the increase in meat consumption against the increase in the human population. If we really wanted to get fancy, we'd also measure it against the percentage of people living in poverty (more richer people means more meat).

Ultimately, I don't know if we're winning. I do think pattrice (and many others) are using the wrong metrics, and statements based on said metrics are useless at best, and harmful at worst.

If anyone out there is doing any solid work on understanding trends in meat consumption as part of larger population and wealth trends, I'd love to know about it.

This past weekend's TLOV 2009 conference is over, and I have a lot to think about. In particular, I both agreed and disagreed with much of pattrice jones' keynote on Sunday afternoon.

Her keynote outlined an approach to animal rights based on the axiom that "animals exist". This means that animals are creatures with desires that need to respected right now, as opposed to in some future theoretical sense. As a consequence, this requires animal activists to act with "ruthless pragmatism", which may mean doing things that make us ethically uncomfortable.

I (mostly) agree.

She said that simply getting people to go vegan is not enough. She stated that in order to win we have to both reduce demand and raise the costs of doing (animal abuse) business.

I agree with this as well, but with some caveats.

Pattrice praised both the ALF as well as welfare legistation like Prop 2. It's true, both do raise the costs of doing business. The welfare legislation also has a real impact on actual animals, and so is worthy in and of itself (as long as there's not something even more useful we could be doing).

But let's tackle the ALF. Is the ALF ruthlessly pragmatic? I don't think so. In fact, the ALF is one of the most idealistic "organizations" I know of. Certainly, they're not metrics-based, methodical, or any of the other things I associate with pragmatism.

Pattrice says that the ALF has cost animal abuse industries millions of dollars through their vandalism and animal releases over the years of their existence. So how much is "millions"? In 2002, The FBI testified before Congress that the ALF and ELF combined had caused $43 million in damage since 1996. From my reading online, it seems like ELF is more damaging in their activities, but let's be generous and split it. That means that the ALF is doing approximately $20 million in damage (in the US) every five years.

The first question, then, is does this damage raise the cost of doing business? Second, is this the most effective thing that these activists could be doing?

I think the first question is relatively easy to answer. In the US alone in 2006, the mink "crop" sold for approximately $136 million at auction. Looking back at previous years, wholesale mink pelt values at auction were more than $1 billion from 1998-2007.

So we have an industry making $1 billion in 10 years (in the US alone) at wholesale! The retail amounts are even more staggering. Retail fur sales were $1.34 billion in 2007 alone.

So given those numbers, is it reasonable to think that the ALF's generously estimated $40 million in the same time period had an impact on the fur industry? I don't think so. Even if all $40 million in damage had been taken just by mink "farmers" (which it wasn't), that's less than 5% of their income. Unless their margins are ridiculously low, it's hard to imagine this being a major problem.

Even if this caused a 5% increase in retail costs, fur coats are a luxury good. Luxury goods have a lot price elasticity, and a 5% increase in price may have a 0% impact on sales! And given the 10x markup from wholesale to retail, there's clearly room for retailers to absorb a 5% increase in the costs paid to wholesalers.

This might all sounds like I'm saying that the ALF just needs to get out there and do a lot more damage. At some amount of damage, they would be able to have a serious impact on prices, and this would eventually decrease sales, which in turn would decrease production.

The problem with this approach is that we haven't yet looked at the costs to the animal rights movement. I'd love to argue that the ALF's actions are detrimental to the movement as a whole. They make us look bad, and make it hard to get people to listen to us. But that's a somewhat nebulous argument.

A more solid argument is that the costs to the ALF activists themselves are very, very high. Any activist who is involved in a significantly damaging action wil become a high-priority target for law enforcement. The most likely outcome is that they will be caught, turned into witnesses against their cohorts, and/or put in jail for long periods of time. Either way, they are no longer able to be activists for a significant period of time, and they are certainly not able to repeat their ALF actions on a regular basis.

So the price of "success" for an ALFer is to stop being an activist for a non-trivial amount of time. Of course, this "success" also imposes a cost on the larger movement, as well-meaning supporters spend money and time on the ALFer's legal defense and jail support.

The animal rights movement cannot compete with animal ag when it comes to money. In their 2007 fiscal year, HSUS had approximately $100 million in income. HSUS is by far the biggest 501c3 working on animal rights in the US, and arguably only some of their money goes to "animal rights" work (I'm not knocking HSUS for that, BTW, I think they're great).

PETA, which is probably the next biggest organization, brought in about $30 million.

That's pocket change compared to the combined financial resources of the animal abuse industries. Mink wholesale alone is equivalent to the income of the two top AR charities in the US. The fur industry is miniscule compared to farmed animals. In 2007, beef producers alone brought in $50 billion wholesale.

That's a lot of big numbers, and it seems overwhelming. How can we possibly win? Well, we need to be ruthlessly pragmatic. I think that strategic nonviolence is the ruthless pragmatic philosophy that shows us the way to victory.

Strategic nonviolence analyzes the disparity in power between us and our opponents, and shows us that we do have one big advantage. We are on the side of justice, and our cause is morally persuasive. Animals do deserve equal consideration, and they are being horribly tortured by humans. We can use this morally persuasive argument to convince members of the public to join our cause and support us.

But we cannot fight toe-to-toe with money or violence. Our opponents can outspend and outfight us quite easily. We cannot engage them on the battlegrounds where they are strongest.

We will not win unless our movement grows quite significantly. How will we know it's grown big enough? Instead of covert releases of animals at night, 1,000 of us will march to a factory farm and liberate animal in broad daylight, unopposed. 500 of us will stand arm-in-arm blocking a slaughterhouse entry, and we'll do it every day for a month. When we do these things, the public at large will praise our bravery and commitment to equal consideration for all beings.

But we're not there yet.

CAA is committed to focusing on just one issue, and we avoid taking stances on other issues. Sometimes people question why, and I often see calls among the greater animal rights/social justice world for a multi-issue movement.

There are lots problem with any multi-issue group, and the bigger your scope the bigger the problems. For example, what are your goals, what are your strategies? How do you know you've won?

But I think the most serious problem is simply recruiting volunteers. I've illustrated that problem with this handy Venn Diagram.

Each circle represents your potential volunteer base, and the intersections are the potential volunteer base of a hypothetical group, either an AR/anti-abortion group or an AR/pro-abortion group.

Now, some people might dispute the relatively small size of each intersection. That's not the point (and I mostly did it so the text stayed readable). The real key is that the two intersections are mutually exclusive. Our hypothetical multi-issue group can only pick one of those two intersections.

Even in cases where the intersections are not exclusive, you still need to find people who fall into that intersection, and the more issues you add, the smaller the intersection becomes.

I consider this to be entirely proved by this blog entry, because it includes math. And math is always right.

I'm thinking specifically of the conference we just put on. We got a lot of food donations. We served breakfast and lunch for two days to around 180 people. Amazingly, we were able to do this for a mere $9.17 per person per day! Contrast that to catering, which is at least twice that much. Also factor in that because we didn't have catering, we provided our own (biodegradable) plates, cups, and flatware, which I included in the $9.17 figure.

We were able to cut our costs in half, but it didn't come for free. We had several volunteers who spent time contacting restaurants and markets to get donations. Of course, because we didn't have a catering service we had to purchase our own serving supplies, do all the food prep, and do all the cleanup. We had quite a few volunteers involved in that on both days. All of this effort was mostly volunteer-led as well. Caryn Brooks was in charge both of securing donations and day-of food handling, and she did a great job.

Overall, we saved around $3,600 ($10 per person per day). If all this work took around 60 hours of volunteer labor, then each hour of labor was worth $60!

This is just one example of how this tradeoff works. CAA is not a very rich organization (our annual income is well under $50,000), but we manage to do a lot by focusing on trading labor for money. We've always made a point when discussing long-term strategies to emphasize the importance of recruiting and empowering volunteers.

It is important to make sure that volunteers do more than just "grunt work". If we required staff to supervise all of our volunteers, our expenses would be much higher. By letting volunteers take the lead as organizers, we can get more done with much less money.

There's been a lot of news about vegetarianism and global warming. The New York Times recently reported :

The biggest animal rights groups do not always overlap in their missions, but now they have coalesced around a message that eating meat is worse for the environment than driving. They and smaller groups have started advertising campaigns that try to equate vegetarianism with curbing greenhouse gases.

It's very tempting to try to ride on the tail of the latest trend and news topic, and I'm not denying that there may be credibility to the claim that eating meat is bad for the environment.

However, I'm very skeptical that animal advocacy organizations should be pushing this argument. If next year it's proclaimed that eating fish is the best solution to global warming, what are animal activists going to say? That global warming is not important? I don't know that this will happen, but if diet fads are an indication, vegetarianism could be the savior one moment and a villain the next.

I believe that we should push our strongest argument: our treatment of farm animals is unjust and unnecessary. I also think sincerity goes a long way. If your name is 'Compassionate Action for Animals', people are more likely to trust what you have to say about animals and morality, not environmental science and policy.]]> tag:blog.urth.org,2007://2.8 2007-07-24T18:00:00Z 2008-11-08T03:04:59Z

I got back from AR2007 late last night, and I'm brimming with thoughts on the conference, animal rights, and activism. I'll be writing more on this over the next couple days, but I'll start with my thoughts on the conference.

The Good

The best thing about the conference was meeting people (the "hallway track"). It was really cool to connect a face with all the names. I had some good conversations with Eric Prescott of An Animal Friendly Life. It was also great to meet Erica Meier from Compassion Over Killing and Nathan Runkle of Mercy for Animals. I also met the inimitable Cass Danger, who has become a top VegGuide.Org contributor in an amazingly short time, and is also doing lots of activist work of her own.

I also enjoyed meeting future star of the silver screen Rick Corbett and his sister Rain. I really hope Rick becomes very famous. He's a good speaker, and will be a strong voice for animals. He's also a nice guy, and in the future I can say "I knew him when ...". Rita Anderson, a self-described "61 year-old grandmother", really embodied the voice of reason. I enjoyed Saurabh Dalal's talk and its emphasize on taking a systematic approach to planning and evaluating our work. Howard Lyman blew me away with his speaking skills. He's really a master, and I hope I learned a little from watching him.

I went leafleting twice while I was there with Jon Camp, Jenna Calabrese, and Stuart Solomon, as well as folks from CAA. It was really cool to hang out with some of the top leafleters from Vegan Outreach. It was also fun to do some outreach, since I've gravitated into fundraising and admin work over the years here at CAA.

There was a man I talked to very briefly whose name I don't remember, but I was excited to meet him because he is a police officer from British Columbia. It's easy to think of law enforcement as our enemies, but we're trying to build a movement, and that means we want everyone involved. Our cause is one of compassion, and treating anyone as an implacable enemy to be fought is a losing tactic.

I spent a lot of the conference following Unny Nambudiripad around. Unny is another CAA founder and board member, and is also the friendliest person on earth. He's great at introducing himself to new people, and by following him I got to meet many more people than I could've done by myself. I also had a lot of good conversations about activism with him at the conference.

I wish I had gone to more of the "rap sessions", but unfortunately I didn't realize that these were group discussions as opposed to presentations. The two I attended were both worthwhile, and more interesting than many of the presentation sessions I attended.

The first rap session I attended was a discussion of what tactics are acceptable for our cause. In our movement, that inevitably means a debate on whether or not so-called "direct action" (lab break-ins, freeing animals, arson, property destruction) are acceptable.

Let me be clear that CAA's core value of Nonviolence rules out this sort of activity. This sort of direct action is extremely counter-productive, but that's a topic for its own blog post.

I don't believe that debating will change the minds of people committed to doing these sorts of actions, but I realized that this debate is valuable for those who are still undecided, or those who simply support these actions by default. If I can convince a few people to embrace core values like ours, I consider that a success.

Another highlight of the conference was the Vegan Toastmasters sessions. I enjoy the whole performance aspect of public speaking, and I loved the "table topics", where the table topics master asks a question and you give a 1-2 minute response. I loved the challenge of that format, and winning the table topics contest was a nice bonus.

I was happy with how my own presentation on wikis went, though the 12 minutes that I had really wasn't sufficient for this topic. I wanted to do a quick demo, to make the abstract concepts I covered concrete. But again, I'll cover this problem in my next post on what I didn't like about the conference, AR2007 Thoughts - The Bad.