You could reduce meat intake and buy higher quality meat whenever financially feasible. Then you help fight the problem but can still look down on vegans
In my experience they often do go vegan overnight though. The key tends to be actually connecting the food on your plate with where it came from and accepting that animals are capable of suffering. Once that connection is made, animal products simply aren’t seen as food anymore and going vegan overnight is the only logical conclusion.
Some people may be further along the spectrum towards being vegan when this connection is actually made but regardless of if you are vegetarian, “only eat free range meat”, or an unapologetic meat eater, once the connection is made they are vegan.
You will get more people to join your cause with a positive message: i.g. “Do these small steps to start” than a negative one, I.g. “If you don’t go fully vegan, you are still part of the problem.”
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
So it is easier to convince people to reduce meat consumption, which than makes it more likely that people will go vegetarian or vegan later
And i actually feel like vegans on the internet can be too aggressive, alienating people they could get on their side
It’s kind of hard to approach this in a tactful way. I think a lot of why vegans don’t appreciate this approach is because it often doesn’t work in actual practice. I’ll give a personal example as an analogy - I used to be a smoker. I tried quitting at least 50 times over the time period I was addicted to nicotine. One of the tricks I would use was to reduce the amount I would smoke each day. It would help briefly, but what would always happen is that I would get to a point where it was too hard to reduce any further, and then after plateauing for a few days, I would rebound and smoke even more than I used to.
Reduction still played a role in my effort to quit, but there were a lot of other tricks I had to employ to make it stick, and the overarching point is that reduction as a goal went nowhere, but reduction combined with the intent to stop all together did eventually work.
And that’s what also happens with dietary changes. Reduction starts with halfway good intentions, but when it’s the goal it becomes a temporary self-soothe that simply ends up rebounding in the end. In fact the people who run wfpb health coaching clinics have stated in interviews that people are most successful when they go all in with the dietary changes - because it turns out that people often feel dramatic positive changes to their health within only days of going plant-based, and those positive changes reinforce their motivation to keep going.
And as this article points out, reducitarianism can never achieve justice. It’s like when suits-wearers promise to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% by 2035 or something. It’s better than nothing, but will never solve the problems that need to be solved.
Or vegans can just mind their own business and leave the rest alone. Claiming abuse and murder and yet still buy smartphones whose materials are sourced by abuse of the poor, drive around on liquefied animals and use plastics.
Stop using medicine and vaccines. K? Thank you. Those rely on horse shoe crabs donating blood and that’s animal abuse. Not to mention other medicine testing. Oh also, stop buying organic, since you know that’s exploitation of animals. Only veggies with good old artificial fertilizer are to be used. We don’t want you looking like a hypocrite while criticizing others.
I’d rather be a hypocrite one out of ten days, than to systematically support animal abuse and murder to feed me - which can be done perfectly fine in harmless ways.
Going vegan doesn’t mean you are saving animals. Without your demand for meat they would never get born in the first place. So not eating something that doesn’t get born doesn’t mean you saved them from being eaten. Just imagine how much potato milk I saved from being consumed, by not consuming potato milk.
Some vegans are against organic agriculture, and there currently is a huge problem where the various regenerative agricultural movements have been astroturfed by the animal ag industry with the whole free range thing.
But it ignores that conventional industrial agriculture also appears to be sending almost the entire arthropod phylum into extinction, which is still worse than organic ag.
There are a lot of reforms that need to be made to the agricultural sector, and veganic farming/gardening is one of those needed changes.
There are a lot of things that are not perfect in this world. But convenience trumps all, which is why diets reflect country’s policies and climate for the most part. USA shoves corn syrup into everything simply because of its abundance and everyone loves sweet stuff. But in the long run it’s creating a huge problem with obesity and diabetes. Meat is on the same level.
For some climates meat comes off as a byproduct almost. Remaining plant matter from plants used for human consumption are normally used to feed cattle and other animals. Without animals all that would have been most likely burned. Even if there was a different way to repurpose that burning is the fastest and easiest thing and us humans love easy.
Take for example countries in which sheep herding is a dominant form of farming because pastures can’t be used for anything else. You can’t expect those countries to ignore local food source which would be mutton and not use wool as byproduct, and rely solely on imported goods so they can go vegan. It’s impossible combined with stupidity. Look at Mongolia. Short grass as far as eye can see. Tell them not to rely on reindeer and meat.
I highly doubt this argument about the agricultural suitability of different lands holds up under scrutiny. I’ve seen someone grow a small food forest on top of a layer of manure that was spread on an abandoned parking lot, in midwest climate conditions. We don’t need the ‘viability’ of what can be grown where, being dictated by modern industrialized monoculture agribusinesses, since those practices are part of the problem.
And again it comes down to the possible and practical part of the vegan definition. I don’t live in Mongolia, so I’ll leave it to Mongolian vegans to determine what is and isn’t feasible.
Put simply, promoting veganism won’t stop people from reducing, but promoting reducetarianism will stop people from going vegan
This is either brain rot written by someone who doesn’t understand propaganda or a psy-op and I can’t tell which. So if it is a psy-op, congratulations on making an effective one.
You could reduce meat intake and buy higher quality meat whenever financially feasible. Then you help fight the problem but can still look down on vegans
Or you could just not support abuse and murder. Also an option.
Small incremental changes are easier to make than big ones. It is also better to have many people reducing meat than just a few full vegans.
True, but my point still stands. Most people don’t go vegan overnight.
In my experience they often do go vegan overnight though. The key tends to be actually connecting the food on your plate with where it came from and accepting that animals are capable of suffering. Once that connection is made, animal products simply aren’t seen as food anymore and going vegan overnight is the only logical conclusion.
Some people may be further along the spectrum towards being vegan when this connection is actually made but regardless of if you are vegetarian, “only eat free range meat”, or an unapologetic meat eater, once the connection is made they are vegan.
You will get more people to join your cause with a positive message: i.g. “Do these small steps to start” than a negative one, I.g. “If you don’t go fully vegan, you are still part of the problem.”
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
So it is easier to convince people to reduce meat consumption, which than makes it more likely that people will go vegetarian or vegan later
And i actually feel like vegans on the internet can be too aggressive, alienating people they could get on their side
It’s kind of hard to approach this in a tactful way. I think a lot of why vegans don’t appreciate this approach is because it often doesn’t work in actual practice. I’ll give a personal example as an analogy - I used to be a smoker. I tried quitting at least 50 times over the time period I was addicted to nicotine. One of the tricks I would use was to reduce the amount I would smoke each day. It would help briefly, but what would always happen is that I would get to a point where it was too hard to reduce any further, and then after plateauing for a few days, I would rebound and smoke even more than I used to.
Reduction still played a role in my effort to quit, but there were a lot of other tricks I had to employ to make it stick, and the overarching point is that reduction as a goal went nowhere, but reduction combined with the intent to stop all together did eventually work.
And that’s what also happens with dietary changes. Reduction starts with halfway good intentions, but when it’s the goal it becomes a temporary self-soothe that simply ends up rebounding in the end. In fact the people who run wfpb health coaching clinics have stated in interviews that people are most successful when they go all in with the dietary changes - because it turns out that people often feel dramatic positive changes to their health within only days of going plant-based, and those positive changes reinforce their motivation to keep going.
And as this article points out, reducitarianism can never achieve justice. It’s like when suits-wearers promise to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% by 2035 or something. It’s better than nothing, but will never solve the problems that need to be solved.
https://www.surgeactivism.org/reducetarianism
Or vegans can just mind their own business and leave the rest alone. Claiming abuse and murder and yet still buy smartphones whose materials are sourced by abuse of the poor, drive around on liquefied animals and use plastics.
Or animal abusers can just mind their own business and stop abusing and murdering innocent animals?
Stop using medicine and vaccines. K? Thank you. Those rely on horse shoe crabs donating blood and that’s animal abuse. Not to mention other medicine testing. Oh also, stop buying organic, since you know that’s exploitation of animals. Only veggies with good old artificial fertilizer are to be used. We don’t want you looking like a hypocrite while criticizing others.
I’d rather be a hypocrite one out of ten days, than to systematically support animal abuse and murder to feed me - which can be done perfectly fine in harmless ways.
10 out of 10. You just think you are not.
No, the data definitely doesn’t support your position. Going vegan absolutely makes a hell of a lot of difference, even from just one person doing it.
https://thehumaneleague.org.uk/article/how-many-animals-can-you-save-by-going-vegan
Going vegan doesn’t mean you are saving animals. Without your demand for meat they would never get born in the first place. So not eating something that doesn’t get born doesn’t mean you saved them from being eaten. Just imagine how much potato milk I saved from being consumed, by not consuming potato milk.
Some vegans are against organic agriculture, and there currently is a huge problem where the various regenerative agricultural movements have been astroturfed by the animal ag industry with the whole free range thing.
But it ignores that conventional industrial agriculture also appears to be sending almost the entire arthropod phylum into extinction, which is still worse than organic ag.
There are a lot of reforms that need to be made to the agricultural sector, and veganic farming/gardening is one of those needed changes.
There are a lot of things that are not perfect in this world. But convenience trumps all, which is why diets reflect country’s policies and climate for the most part. USA shoves corn syrup into everything simply because of its abundance and everyone loves sweet stuff. But in the long run it’s creating a huge problem with obesity and diabetes. Meat is on the same level.
For some climates meat comes off as a byproduct almost. Remaining plant matter from plants used for human consumption are normally used to feed cattle and other animals. Without animals all that would have been most likely burned. Even if there was a different way to repurpose that burning is the fastest and easiest thing and us humans love easy.
Take for example countries in which sheep herding is a dominant form of farming because pastures can’t be used for anything else. You can’t expect those countries to ignore local food source which would be mutton and not use wool as byproduct, and rely solely on imported goods so they can go vegan. It’s impossible combined with stupidity. Look at Mongolia. Short grass as far as eye can see. Tell them not to rely on reindeer and meat.
I highly doubt this argument about the agricultural suitability of different lands holds up under scrutiny. I’ve seen someone grow a small food forest on top of a layer of manure that was spread on an abandoned parking lot, in midwest climate conditions. We don’t need the ‘viability’ of what can be grown where, being dictated by modern industrialized monoculture agribusinesses, since those practices are part of the problem.
And again it comes down to the possible and practical part of the vegan definition. I don’t live in Mongolia, so I’ll leave it to Mongolian vegans to determine what is and isn’t feasible.
This is just basic whataboutism.
https://www.surgeactivism.org/reducetarianism
This is either brain rot written by someone who doesn’t understand propaganda or a psy-op and I can’t tell which. So if it is a psy-op, congratulations on making an effective one.
Except it’s not? Half-measures get half-results.