(Via Digg). One of the main reasons I write books, podcast, and blog is in the hope that I’m helping longtime vegans to improve their rhetoric and become more persuasive. I think your ability to talk convincingly about the reasons to go veggie is about the most important personal asset you can develop when it comes to protecting animals.
Towards that end, this article in the London Guardian is a must-read. John Harris looks at how various environmental arguments for being veggie are getting stronger, and how the shift in rhetoric is bringing more and more people on board.
There’s only one problem that Harris doesn’t get into. As I write in Meat Market, there’s no doubt that the beef, pork, and fishing industries are genuine environmental menaces. The same can’t be said for chicken; in fact I’d be surprised if producing a calorie of chicken requires greater land use than that required for a calorie of vegetables.
I worry that if people buy into the argument laid out by Harris without understanding that chicken are ridiculously efficient compared to other farmed animals, there will be a backlash against vegetarianism down the road when people realize that this is the case. We can’t afford to trick people into going veggie, and that means not only giving people pro-veggie info, but also the information we wish wasn’t true. Link.
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