Are Welfarists just Abolitionists who live in the real world?
The Huffington Post recently published an article by Bruce Friedrich of PETA called “Why Animal Activists Should Support Incremental Reforms to Help Animals”. I’d suggest reading it through before reading the rest of this article, as he makes some excellent points. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Ok great. So, reading the comments on there, and the comments I got when I posted it on the vegaroo facebook page inspired me to write this article, which is something I’ve been wanting to write for a while as someone committed to vegan outreach, while also working as a campaigner for an animal welfare organisation.
I get a lot of flack from vegans for working on a welfare campaign and see a lot of mud flung in the direction of welfarists, and I’m here to add to Mr Friedrich’s arugment for why vegans should support all steps towards improving the lives of animals. To be clear I’m not telling anyone how they should focus their individual work and energy. We all have limited time and resources and should make the most of it. Rather, I’m saying it’s counterproductive to criticise those working on welfare reform.
To make real progress for animals we need people working on both. We need the abolitionist vegans who recognise that humans enslave animals for our benefit and work to educate people and move them towards a vegan lifestyle. But for every one person who recognises this enslavement, there are 99 who willfully ignore it, find justifications or excuses for it, or most likely just don’t care. Welfarists work to make sure that in the interim, while we wait for those other 99% to see the light, that the animals they’re consuming can at least lead better lives.
The cold hard reality is that the majority of people will tell you that they would “never go vegetarian” let alone vegan. I point to my parents as an example usually, to which someone replied “But they’ll die off eventually.” Callous, yes, but I see the point.
Abolitionists are not stupid of course, and none would say that this kind of “conversion” (though I hate to use a word linked to religion, I’m going to borrow it for the sake of analogy) is going to happen over night. It’s not going to happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this blog. It’s going to take decades of education, reaching out to people while they’re young, etc. I certainly agree with and support this approach. The downside to welfare campaigns, they argue, is that it makes people feel better about eating “happy meat.” But I would argue that this is a good thing.
You’re still moving people up the morality ladder. You’re getting them to acknowledge that animals don’t deserve to suffer extreme cruelty. Of course we wish they would all realise that no animal deserves ANY suffering. But the fact is that most people could not care less.
The campaign I work on is to end the live export of sheep. It’s regarded as one of the most shamefully awful animal practises in Australia and certainly easy to make the connection to slaves on ships, dying painful deaths and suffering awful slaughter. It’s going to take many years before we end this trade and even then these animals are still going to be turned into meat. They just won’t have to suffer an agonising month at sea first.
Getting people to care about this issue is one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in my career. If we are going to spend years getting from point A to point B, how long will it take to get to point Z? In Australia, farmers are gods, and we are the #3 consumers of meat in the world. Moving the masses to veganism would require a major cultural change. Making people care just enough about the suffering of animals to pay an extra 10 cents for free-range eggs may seem like a teeny tiny baby step, but that’s because our task is monumental.
Working as a campaigner has taught me how slowly the government changes and how difficult it can be to sway attitudes. Many welfarists are abolitionists who just live in the real world. It’s easy to spout on about moral philosophy from behind a keyboard. I know that in order to affect change you sometimes have to make compromises. And when you tell people they have to do all or nothing, it’s a lot easier to do nothing.
When I posted that HuffPo article, one commenter asked me what I would do with $1 million if I had it to spend helping animals. Ever the realist I have to point out, I don’t have a million dollars. Nor do most organisations. There’s a reason why – there are simply not enough vegans to support organisations that can affect large-scale change. It’s not an issue you can fundraise on. But you know what you can fundraise on? PUPPIES! Which is why animal welfare organisations have more mainstream appeal.
Now I’m not saying that it’s not possible. I would love to see an organisation in Australia working on vegan campaigns. If anyone would like to give me a million dollars, that’s what I’d do. Rather than spending it in one go on a large campaign, I’d invest it into setting up a sustainable organisation that could continually work on vegan outreach.
But until a rich benefactor comes my way I’m going to continue working on welfare reform 40 hours a week, writing vegaroo and hosting vegan events in my spare time, and living a kickass vegan life that I hope inspires others.
February 24th, 2011 at 11:01 pm
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February 25th, 2011 at 12:27 pm
It’s good to have a discussion about this topic.
You might like to read the biography of William Wilberforce by Hague. As you may know he devoted his life to ending the African slave trade, which has parallels with your work. You can read and decide whether it was an effective strategy.
I don’t wish to disparage the work of welfare activists, however, the number of animals bred and killed (especially for food) goes up each year, not just due to human population but also the global per capita consumption is also going up. Barring some disaster like bird flu or environmental collapse, I really think a vegan movement is all that will turn that around. I acknowledge that it is difficult though.
February 28th, 2011 at 3:17 pm
Thanks Sharon, I enjoyed your article. I am very sorry that you have to put up with flack for your work on the live export campaign. They are not contributing anything positive by attacking you.
There’s a few things in your article: ethica…l, practical and “money”. It seems you are an abolitionist ethically since you believe that “no animal deserves ANY suffering” (I don’t think you are going to kick back and retire once all the sheep are off the boats
. And, if you had the resources, you would build a vegan outreach organisation and not a welfare one. But practically you work for a welfare organisation and within those boundaries you are doing a great job. But this is where money comes into it. Just because most of the money in Australia is in welfare organisations (and we all have to work somewhere) doesn’t mean that what they are doing with the money is the most effective way to reach our goals. People with the money get to decide how to spend it.
So rather than attack individual workers in welfare organisations, the vegan movement should be putting the vegan abolitionist case strongly to the directors and benefactors of those organisations, those who finance and control them. In the case of Voiceless, we should be trying to convince Brian and Ondine that they will reach their goals faster by spending their money on vegan campaigns, because it is just more effective.
– Copy and pasted from Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/vegaroo/posts/190876870946814
February 28th, 2011 at 4:48 pm
@Robert – not sure if you read the post I linked to on HuffPo, but the writer draws a lot of paralells to the slave trade as well.
@Greg – Thanks for re-posting your comment here!
I’m pretty much with except I think where our opinions differ is that you (and I reckon many other vegans) see vegan outreach as more effective and therefore where organisations should focus their resources. Whereas I think both are necessary and valuable so I wan tto see resources directed at both.
Now of course, how efficiently those resources are used is something I think we should all be critical of. (As in, thinking critically, as opposed to just attacking.) This goes for animal welfare as well as vegan organisations. As much as we criticise eaters of “happy meat” for patting themselves on the back, the same could be said for many vegans. We can all always go further in our activism and respective quests for social justice.
And if I had a million dollars, I might also invest some of that into researching what our most effective campaigning tactics really are. Because I think we all speak anecdotally about what we *think* is most effective, but I’d love to see some actual evidence.
As an interesting follow up read, a colleague sent me this article today that talks about how facts don’t actually sway people’s beliefs: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full
I think it’s something we’ve probably all experienced in trying to educate people on animal welfare/rights issues
March 2nd, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Sharon, I read that article (too quickly perhaps)- though I mentioned Wilberforce because he was particularly focused on stopping the slave transport boats.
Regarding research on effectiveness, have you thought about how this research be conducted? I mention because I have thought about one day supporting some ‘vegan’ university scholarship.
July 10th, 2011 at 9:40 am
great article Sharon, I lay on the same spectrum as you regarding this. I believe both camps do great work on shining a light onto the suffering animals go through to ‘feed’ the modern world and believe both will be instramental in changing opinion.
My views on all of this stuff really changed when I read ‘for the love of animals’ the book about how the RSPCA got started.. and how it took 30 years to get the first animal law passed into parliament. It made me really understand how its going to be at least 3 or 4 generations of humans (and possibly the extinction of sea life) before we get to see a landscape of what we hope for. I was SO impressed with the RSPCA puppy farms campaign they ran. I saw so many posters at bus shelters in the city, this and the live exports will be real ‘gateway’ campaigns to getting people thinking about how we so cruely enslave animals. I think these campaigns are going to be far more effective on a broader way of getting people to go vegetarian (or to seem into the larger conciousness of how we routinely abuse animals for frivolity! – people need to eat.. we dont need puppies)
thank you for the work that you do! we all do what we can, I cook and teach people how to easy it is to eat vegan and be happy…it makes me sad that we cop so much flack… we’re the good guys! big lovexxx