Vegan lifestyles keep countless animals from harm. But the number of animals you can save by changing your diet pales in comparison to what you can achieve through advocacy. You can save hundreds of times more animals through animal rights activism or vegan advocacy than you can save by merely being vegan.
Please understand that I’m in no way belittling the value of becoming vegan—you’re reading this, after all, on Vegan.com! Going vegan may be the single most rewarding lifestyle change you’ll ever make. There’s no disputing that it protects large numbers of animals over a lifetime. But if your goal is to protect as many animals as possible, you simply must bring activism into the mix.
I’ve spent most of the past twenty years writing nearly full-time on animal protection. Thousands of pages later, this essay on activism may be the most important thing I’ll ever write, since if it enables just a handful of people to become more effective activists, it will spare enormous numbers of animals from harm. In this essay I will share the key lessons I’ve learned from my decades of animal advocacy. I’m about to cover all the stuff I wish I knew back when I started out.
Every great animal advocate understands that animal protection is a numbers game, so they focus relentlessly on protecting as many animals as possible. With so few people involved in animal protection, and so many animals suffering so profoundly, we each must maximize our impact.
Intention is everything. If you set an intention to protect large numbers of animals, that’s what you will likely achieve. Never question your ability to make an enormous difference. Since the worldwide meat industry uses in excess of 70 billion animals a year, moving the needle just the tiniest bit will protect huge numbers of animals.
Animal Millionaires
Above all, activists need the courage to think big, so let me offer a concept that may substantially raise your ambitions. In countries where the currency hasn’t been wildly inflated, a “millionaire” is shorthand for someone wealthy—someone who’s amassed savings of a million dollars or euros or pounds or whatever. You can repurpose the millionaire concept to refer to animal protection, and instantly start thinking in suitably large terms.
An animal millionaire is someone whose activism has kept at least a million animals from harm. Admittedly, you can’t count the animals you save with the precision that you can count the money in your bank account. But you can nevertheless reach a point of high confidence that your work is protecting a great many animals. As we’ll see in this article, the goal of saving a million animals is not wildly ambitious. In fact, any serious activist can reasonably expect to keep a million animals out of factory farms and slaughterhouses, simply by choosing high-value projects and diligently working them through to completion.
Back in the 1970s, when the modern animal rights movement began, the first massively effective activist was a former high school teacher named Henry Spira. Henry obsessed over finding ways to “add a zero or two” to the number of animals his work would protect, and he constantly looked for ways to scale up his efforts. This mentality permeated all of Henry’s campaigns. You can read his biography Ethics Into Action, which recounts the campaigns Henry undertook that collectively impacted tens of millions of animals.
Henry was so effective largely because he always kept opportunity cost firmly in mind. Opportunity cost refers to the goals you can’t achieve, once you commit to doing something else. Whether we realize it or not, opportunity cost accompanies every decision you make. Having lunch with Scott rules out an afternoon hike with Sally. Getting take-out coffee five times this week means your budget may not allow going to the movies on Friday. Opportunity cost is a key consideration in every decision. For instance, if you choose to stay in your not-so-good relationship, you might lose the opportunity to meet a more suitable partner. Of if you quit a job you love for another position that pays more money, you could miss out on experiences that will prove more valuable in the long-term.
Focusing on opportunity costs can make you crazy if you let it, but it’s an essential way to maximize your time. Despite living in Manhattan, Henry never spent time trying to rid the city of horse-drawn carriages because he regarded the opportunity cost as prohibitively high. He instead put years into a campaign that ultimately convinced Revlon and other top cosmetics companies to stop testing their beauty products on animals. By being conscious of opportunity costs, Henry assured he’d have the time necessary to win campaigns that kept millions of animals from being poisoned or blinded by the cosmetics industry.
Paying attention to opportunity costs can restructure your life. I no longer spend much time reading novels, watching movies, or playing video games. My life still feels full and rich, and I get a great deal of pleasure doing animal protection work rather than seeking out entertainment.
Required Reading
Activism is largely about having conversations with people, finding common ground, and conveying information that inspires action. With that in mind, here are some topics every vegan advocate ought to delve into in order to have productive conversations about food choices:
- Cruelty in factory farming
- Health and nutrition
- Environmental costs of farm animal production, fish farms, and fishing
- Easy ways to eat more vegan foods
Additionally, every activist ought to have a working knowledge of animal rights and animal welfare, since fluency in these concepts can raise the level of any conversation pertaining to veganism and animal protection.
If I taught a university course titled Vegan Activism 101, I’d require my students to first pass a prerequisite class titled Food Politics 101. Food politics is a broad discipline covering the agricultural, health, social justice, animal rights, and environmental issues pertaining to food. You probably can’t become a remarkably effective vegan activist until you’ve read extensively about food politics, and have reached the point where you really know what you’re talking about.
What do vegan, keto, carnivore, paleo, and fruitarian diets have in common? Some of the most popular books on each of these diets are biased, selectively cited, and full of misinformation. Same goes with documentaries.
The vegan community tends to put MDs on a pedestal. We shouldn’t do that. Most people don’t realize that medical schools generally don’t offer any significant instruction on nutrition. While it’s certainly possible for an MD to become a deeply knowledgeable authority on nutrition, that study must typically be self-directed and occur outside of medical school.
Many MDs don’t understand nutrition more deeply than does your plumber. You can find MDs who, with an authoritative tone, make fallacious claims in support of all sorts of diets—including vegan diets. A reliable way to be certain that a health professional has substantial knowledge of nutrition is to look for an RD degree, which stands for Registered Dietitian.
As a result of the exaggerated health claims promoted by vegan books, movies, and doctors, many vegans believe the diet carries overwhelming health advantages. But the reality is that there’s no clear evidence that vegans live longer than omnivores. And vegans are certainly not immune to heart disease or cancer. In fact, these diseases have killed several of the vegan world’s best activists.
All too often, vegan advocates uncritically accept bogus claims they read in a book or saw in a movie, and then repeat this misinformation to anyone who will listen. Vegans aren’t alone in being profoundly misinformed on key topics surrounding food politics. Every other niche diet, from carnivorism to ketogenic to paleo, is filled with adherents making wrongheaded claims of every sort. But vegans don’t need to peddle junk science—doing so is entirely unnecessary. There are a number of powerful arguments for being vegan that are based on irrefutable evidence.
When trying to persuade others about the benefits of going vegan, it’s crucial to maintain the highest level of credibility, since if you’re proven wrong on one point people will become suspicious of everything else you say. So when it comes to food politics, it’s far more important to read a small assortment of highly accurate material than it is to read widely. You can assume that most books and articles related to food politics are full of misinformation, unless you have strong reason to know the author is credible.
It’s good for your soul to really know what you’re talking about. Activists who know their subject backwards and forwards come across with greater authority, and are undoubtedly more persuasive than those who haven’t immersed themselves in the literature.
The best starting point for your vegan reading may be my article, “Why Go Vegan?”, which distills the most powerful vegan arguments down to an essay that can be read in under an hour. Another essential short piece is the “Vegan Nutrition Guide” from Virginia Messina, MPH, RD. It’ll give you the information you need to eat a healthful vegan diet, while steering clear of the main dietary pitfalls. I think the best first book for new activists is Animal Liberation Now, which is an updated edition of Peter Singer’s classic text.
Counterintuitively, perhaps the best way to become a persuasive activist is to adopt an anti-vegan bias. Don’t trust a claim supporting a vegan diet just because you read it in a book or it’s promoted by a vegan doctor. There’s so much misinformation floating about in regard to food and nutrition that it’s wise to assume that any pro-vegan proclamations are false unless the supporting evidence is overwhelming.
The good news is that there are so many rock-solid arguments for going vegan (they’re all presented in my “Why Go Vegan?” essay) that there’s never a reason to resort to promoting questionable claims.
Winning over your listener has two requirements: you need to know what you’re talking about without suggesting that the person you’re engaging with doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The best vegan advocates are extraordinarily well informed and unfailingly diplomatic.
Assessing Your Strengths & Choosing a Mentor
If you want to do animal protection work, you should start by taking a personal inventory of your skills. Everybody is great at something. And whatever your particular talents, you can usually find an opportunity to plug a hole in the movement and make a unique contribution.
So why not take thirty minutes to reflect on and write down all the things you’re good at, or things you could be good at given sufficient practice or training? Some of these things may be what you studied in school, while others may be inborn qualities. Maybe you have fantastic organizational skills, or perhaps you’re a social butterfly who is great at making people feel appreciated. Your specific talents—even if they seem intangible—can often be put to great use.
Writing down your main abilities can provide powerful insights into how, exactly, to get involved in animal advocacy. By reflecting carefully on your skills and talents, you’ll find a way to apply them to something the animal protection movement desperately needs.
As you identify the things you’re best at, look around in the animal protection movement and try to find people with similar abilities who are doing impressive work. Most well-established activists would be delighted to mentor a newcomer to the movement, and there’s a great deal they have to teach. The things that Henry Spira taught me in the five years before his death dramatically enhanced my abilities to protect animals. Given how easy it is to find a mentor and how much you have to gain, I can’t imagine not making the effort to reach out to established activists.
Avoid Duplicating Work
Since nobody has unlimited time to devote to animal protection, it’s crucial that none of our time is wasted. The most important way to ensure that you’re not wasting time is to avoid duplicating work that others have already done.
There’s a great deal of pointlessly duplicated labor in the animal protection movement. One obvious example is that most big nonprofits have published their own guides about why and how to be vegan. These guides invariably required a lot of time to research, design, and publish. Yet most of these efforts aren’t impressive, because the skills that this sort of literature requires is generally not within the core competencies of the nonprofit that created it.
Here are a few other examples of duplicated projects:
- Multiple farm animal sanctuaries located in the same region
- Vegan cookbooks competing for the same niche
- Vegan TikToks and Instagram accounts
Suggesting there are too many farm animal sanctuaries, too many vegan cookbooks, and too many vegan social media accounts will doubtless make people think I’m belittling their work. But it’s important that activists stay vigilant about not duplicating efforts, so let’s take a closer look at the resources gobbled up by these projects.
Farm animal sanctuaries are extraordinarily resource-intensive, and each one requires a slew of expenses and expertise. Property must be bought and maintained. Boards must be formed—generally comprised of talented people willing to donate their time. Salaries must be paid. And of course the animals must be tended, fed, and given veterinary care. In light of all the fixed costs arising from each shelter, does it make sense for there to be more than one within a reasonable driving distance?
The same goes for vegan cookbooks. Figure that the time required to write, photograph, and publish an excellent vegan cookbook amounts to at least one year of your life. I’m being conservative here, since you’ve got to perfect upwards of 100 recipes, take dozens of professional-grade photos, and handle a staggering number of publication chores. Then, to give your cookbook the chance it really deserves, you must devote massive amounts of time to promotional tasks that include attending regional events, growing your social media presence, and seeking out media coverage.
In the 1990s, there were still huge gaps within the vegan cooking literature that needed to be filled. But now we’ve got hundreds of great vegan cookbooks in the marketplace. These include dozens of general reference cookbooks, countless books devoted to easy recipes, and several books apiece for top cuisines like Italian, Mexican, and Indian food. Shoot, we even have a half-dozen cookbooks devoted to vegan ice cream, and another half-dozen titles devoted to vegan cheeses.
And don’t get me started on TikToks and Instagram feeds. Granted, it takes very little to keep an Instagram feed going, so if this is just something you do for fun, then I’m all for it. But know there are already hundreds of people posting vegan food porn to Instagram. There’s a flood of vegan food photography competing for a limited number of eyeballs.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to make a dent in the universe through writing a new vegan cookbook, starting a sanctuary, or creating an Instagram feed. I’m just saying that there’s lots of competition and therefore a high chance of duplicating labor. For most people, it’s therefore far wiser to choose a form of activism with plenty of virgin territory, which will render duplication of labor unlikely. One form of activism—local activism—stands out in this regard and offers plenty of untapped opportunities to make a great difference.
Local Vegan & Animal Rights Activism
Of all the forms of animal advocacy, local activism may be the most important, and it’s certainly the area that is most neglected.
One person can literally transform the vegan-friendliness of an entire town or city. I’m not saying Tulsa, Oklahoma could quickly turn into a vegan Mecca like Portland, Oregon. But you can rapidly transform a place with pathetic vegan options into one that’s pretty good, or you could transform a city that’s already pretty good into one that’s outstanding.
There are three main fronts you can work on locally:
- encouraging non-vegan restaurants to offer vegan meals
- helping vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants thrive
- building the local vegan community in your city
Let’s now look at each.
Encouraging Non-Vegan Restaurants to Offer Vegan Meals
When it comes to vegan offerings, most restaurants have plenty of room for improvement. If you visit these businesses and do a little thinking, you’ll see all sorts of easy opportunities. Perhaps your nearest café doesn’t yet offer soy creamer, or your local bagel shop could offer vegan cream cheese.
Imagine what you could accomplish if you systematically approach every restaurant and coffeehouse in town and ask the manager for an easy-to-make improvement. Sometimes that would mean adding something new to the menu, while other times it may involve asking to make a prominent menu item vegan-friendly. For instance, your local Thai restaurant might make fresh curry pastes for their red, green, and yellow curries, with each paste containing a small amount of ground shrimp. If you could persuade them to remove the shrimp from, for instance, their red curry paste, the restaurant would instantly turn into a great option for vegans.
When college dining halls increase vegetarian dining options, meat consumption drops significantly—without harming total food sales. It’s reasonable to assume that persuading restaurants to add vegan menu items would produce similar results.
Restaurant owners obsess over their online reviews, so praising the best vegan options at local restaurants or noting room for improvement is a terrific way to inspire change.
Helping Vegan Restaurants Thrive
If anyone in the world deserves massive respect, it’s vegan restaurant owners. There’s no harder way to make a living than owning a restaurant, and vegan restaurants in particular are especially challenging.
Restaurant ownership involves an absurd assortment of responsibilities. Initial setup costs for the dining area and kitchen are high. You’ve got to find good cooks, friendly waitstaff, and dishwashers. The paperwork involving taxes, payroll, and city health inspections never ends. There’s buying food and dealing with customers and finding replacements when somebody calls in sick or abruptly quits without notice. Now add in the fact that few restaurants generate any real money, and many are constantly on the edge of failing. In fact, 30 percent of new restaurants are sold or go out of business within twelve months, and 60 percent are gone within three years.
And yet there are hundreds of vegan restaurants around the world, each of them taking on these overwhelming challenges in order to make it easier for people to eat healthful food that’s compassionately produced. If anyone could ever use a hand, it’s a vegan restaurant owner.
Because the work of keeping a restaurant going is so overwhelming, very few of these restaurateurs have the time and skills needed to optimize their online presence. There are at least a half-dozen Internet-related tasks that every vegan restaurant needs to take care of, or risk losing significant business. They must set up listings on Google Maps, TripAdvisor, and HappyCow. Facebook fan pages and Instagram accounts also matter. And finally, every restaurant should have its own Dotcom domain name and website. In cases when the name is already taken, just tack on the city, as in “JoesPlaceMilwaukee.com.”
Fortunately, it’s a quick job to cover these bases, by registering the business with the above platforms. If you have the time, you can do this essential but easy work for free. Just meet with the restaurant owners to confirm they want your help. Most will be grateful beyond belief.
Next, take some photos of the restaurant and its food. Confirm its operating hours, phone number, and other contact info. Then create profiles with Google Business, Happy Cow, Facebook, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Once you’ve set all this up, schedule another meeting with the owner and hand over control of the accounts. None of this takes much time, yet it could well make the difference between the restaurant succeeding or failing.
I also write restaurant reviews. Lots of them. Anytime I find a vegan restaurant I especially like, I find the place on Google Maps, write a review, and upload some photos of their food. I’ve been floored by the gratitude restaurant owners have expressed for these reviews. On several occasions when I’ve gone back after writing my review, I’ve been profusely thanked by the restaurant owner who has recognized me from my account photo associated with the review.
Reviews and social media assistance are a great way to help your local vegan-friendly restaurants grow and survive. And if you travel frequently, you can help vegan restaurants in this way every time you visit a new city. There are always businesses sorely in need of a little help. One time, when I found a vegan noodle shop in Thailand that lacked appropriate signage, I coordinated the design of a sign, and paid for its printing. The time and money I spent on this project was trivial, but it dramatically boosted the visibility of a terrific vegan restaurant that needed more customers.
Finally, if you are associated with a local vegetarian group, consider publishing a food guide for your city. If all you do is create a double-sided sheet of paper listing your city’s best options, that’s still a valuable resource. Whether your local foods guide is grandly ambitious or quick-and-dirty, you should find a way to post it online in order to maximize its audience. Just keep in mind that, since restaurants are always starting up or going out of business, you probably ought to revise the guide at the start of each year and include the year in its title. And keep print runs small so you’re not stuck with a bunch of outdated copies at the end of every year.
Building the Local Vegan Community in Your City
One of the easiest and most exciting local activism opportunities is using the Meetup.com platform to organize a monthly vegan dine-out or vegan drinks event. There are over a hundred different vegan groups in North America that use Meetup.com to organize these sorts of events. Vegan meetups held at local restaurants pay off in at least two ways. First, they are great for participants—building a sense of community while inspiring people to make greater commitments toward compassionate eating or vegan advocacy. Second, the money spent at these gatherings offers an important cash infusion to vegan-friendly restaurants.
If you can create a thriving vegan meetup that bounces between restaurants, the money at stake will go a long way toward inspiring these establishments to step up their game when it comes serving the vegan community. There are instances of non-vegan restaurants that have made permanent vegan additions to their menus as a result of the special items they’ve prepared for vegan meetups.
Be sure to collect emails for the people who come to your drinks or dining meetups. That way, if you ever decide to organize a special event, you can easily get the word out. Setting up an email list is a must for local activists, since it’s the simplest way to guarantee all your members will be notified if there’s something you need to share. Mailchimp offers free email services for small groups.
A website is still practically a must-have for a well-organized local vegan group. Many local organizers also set up closed groups on Discord, Telegram, or Facebook. That keeps out trolls and thereby minimizes moderation chores. These groups offer a wonderful way for your community members to interact, and to get the word out about local opportunities and events. When big bags of vegan cheese are deeply discounted at your town’s Grocery Outlet, for instance, you can expect a group member to excitedly share the news.
At the extreme end of difficulty, when it comes to local activism, is setting up a VegFest event in your city. There are dozens of VegFest events happening around the world. The biggest ones, like those in Boston and Toronto, attract more than 10,000 attendees. Most VegFests offer admission that’s either free or just a few dollars, with the bulk of the event’s funding supplied through charging food, book, and clothing concession stand operators.
How Much Can One Local Activist Accomplish?
It’s astonishing how much one activist, working only part-time, can accomplish using the techniques we’ve just reviewed. In 2013, Hillary Rettig started Vegan Kalamazoo. Here’s what she has accomplished in her group’s first five years:
- Grew the group’s followers from zero to 5,000 (in a city that previously lacked any sort of vegan community).
- Greatly expanded the range of vegan options available in Kalamazoo and surrounding towns.
- Spawned one other vegan group and contributed to the growth of several other local ones.
- Non-vegans frequently attend Vegan Kalamazoo events.
- Built a thriving Facebook group that has a well-established culture of kind and respectful behavior.
If your city or town lacks somebody doing what Hillary is doing, maybe you could become that person. It’s easy enough to get started. In fact, Hillary’s written an extraordinarily helpful guide to local vegan activism.
Asking Is Everything
When it comes to activism, educating and informing people isn’t enough. Your effectiveness hinges on your ability to make a variety of clear and inspiring asks. You can share mountains of compelling information, but no animals will be saved unless you inspire tangible changes in behavior. So the core element of many forms of vegan activism involves asking for things that are important but not overwhelmingly difficult. You should therefore pay attention to the number and variety of the requests you make. These asks can take every possible form, including:
- Suggesting a friend try Meatless Mondays or a dairy-free lifestyle
- Requesting your local pizzeria offer vegan cheese
- Asking your college or workplace cafeteria to offer more vegan meals
Generally, you want all of your outreach to be a one-two punch: you offer a piece of compelling information related to veganism, and then you follow it up with a suggested action that aligns with this piece of information. For instance, if you were to share a video showing calves taken away from their mothers, you might follow it up by writing, “If this distresses you, why not switch from dairy-based yogurt to soy yogurt, or to using a vegan coffee creamer?”
Activism is like life: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. This applies to in-person conversations with friends and family. It applies to your activism on social media. And it especially applies your community outreach efforts. So please keep the importance of making clear, easy, and inspiring asks in mind as we review some especially important varieties of vegan activism.
One-On-One Activism
The greatest mistake new activists make involves using a one-size-fits-all approach—they urge veganism and nothing less than veganism upon anyone who will listen.
You can certainly accomplish a great deal for animals by sticking exclusively to vegan rhetoric, but can increase your impact by making room for a broader set of possibilities. Many people are so new to the topic that they couldn’t imagine making an overnight switch to a vegan diet—but they are often eager to consider making smaller steps. Here are some incremental steps that somebody receptive to moving in a vegan direction might consider:
- Embracing Meatless Mondays
- Quitting dairy products
- Trying various meat, milk, and egg alternatives
- Giving a vegan diet a 3-week test drive
- Avoiding eggs from caged hens, or eating only pasture-grown meat
These are just a few of the countless possibilities, so how on earth are you supposed to choose what to suggest? That’s easy: you listen. Many activists—particularly those just starting out—haven’t yet cultivated the habit of listening. And that’s what all truly effective activists have in common: each and every one is a great listener.
How to Productively Discuss Vegan Issues
When you talk about food politics to people, they’ll usually tell you the things they care most about. Your job as an activist is to identify what matters to your listener, find common ground, and build a bridge. Sometimes this is easy work, and sometimes it’s more challenging.
You will often encounter omnivores who express profound concern for animals and great misgivings about the morality of using them for food. For these sorts of people, it’s sensible to talk about how easy it is to transition to a part-time or full-time vegan lifestyle. It may be wise to lend these people some of your favorite vegan guides or cookbooks. Asking these people what they’d find challenging about going vegan can put you in a position to offer helpful information and advice.
Above all, effective one-on-one activism relies on having conversations rather than arguments. Nearly everybody already cares at least somewhat about topics like keeping animals from harm, eating healthfully, and protecting the planet. It’s your job as an activist to ask questions that determine the topics each person cares most about, so you can offer helpful information that will enable them to better align their food choices with their existing beliefs.
Very few people you talk to will be ready to leap to a 100 percent vegan diet. It’s disappointing, but, while most people do care about animal slaughter and suffering, they often don’t care a heck of a lot. But maybe your listener does care about the very worst injustices meted out to animals, such as battery cages and gestation crates. Or perhaps your listener cares immensely about climate change. Or maybe it’s a desire to become more fit, overcome type-2 diabetes, or just drop that stubborn last five pounds. Whatever the case, the more you’ve read up on every topic related to veganism—particularly the things that don’t necessarily interest you—the better positioned you’ll be to make points that inspire meaningful behavior change.
The most valuable thing to keep in mind when having these sorts of conversations is to never present veganism as an all-or-nothing choice. If you frame vegan lifestyles as a binary choice, most people will take no action whatsoever.
Instead, consider it your job to constantly offer encouragement to people to take another step away from animal products. Jonathan Safran Foer talks about the importance of helping people take the first step rather than the last step. Foer’s advice meshes nicely with the foot-in-the-door technique, which is perhaps the single most effective approach an animal advocate can use.
The foot-in-the-door technique is based on sociology studies indicating that if you can get someone to take even a tiny positive step today, that person will be much more receptive to taking far bigger steps in the future. Switching to cage-free eggs today may lead to going egg-free next month. Likewise, committing to Meatless Mondays today might ultimately lead to full-time vegetarianism. With examples like this in mind, you can see how small wins today can cascade into big wins down the road.
The best activists never lose touch with reality. It’s going to take much longer than we would like to reach a vegan world. But the way there is to relentlessly yet invitingly encourage people to take whatever next step they’re ready to take. Never scorn people for where they fall short—instead, always applaud the good things they’re already doing and encourage them to take another step.
Social Media Activism
Social media offers one of the easiest ways to move people in a vegan diection. These platforms enable you to reach huge numbers of people, allowing you to spend your social capital in a way that influences people and inspires change.
Social capital is a crucial concept for activists, so let’s define it. The term represents the trust, friendship, and goodwill you’ve earned from the various people in your life. The amount of social capital we each have varies considerably from person to person. People who are kind and generous and who have loads of friends obviously have far more social capital than bitter, angry loners.
Social capital behaves just like money in the bank. Nobody has unlimited amounts. And every time you spend some capital, your balance decreases. When you have a lot of social capital, people are much more likely to pay attention to things you say, and act favorably on requests you make. Used wisely, you can spend your social capital in ways that protect a great many animals. But just like money in the bank, you can also misspend your social capital or let it fritter away.
I’ve seen many people on social media squander their precious social capital, despite having the animals’ best interests at heart. Whatever you do, avoid becoming “that vegan” who posts eight different graphic photos of animal cruelty every single day to social media. Nobody wants to see horrific photos in their news feed, and people who do this get blocked and reach nobody. Instead, use social media platforms the way they’re intended: give people inspiring glimpses into your life and the things you care about. Then, on rare occasions, drop in a carefully chosen vegan mention accompanied by a small but meaningful request.
So seek out news stories about the various benefits of going vegan, and share a link along with a well-crafted ask. The greater your variety of asks, the more people will say yes to one of them, so avoid making every one of your social media posts a repetition of the “go vegan” mantra. I like to work the phrase “why not…” into my asks, in order to directly request a specific change of behavior.
To get you started, here are five items I tweeted to the @vegan Twitter feed back in October of 2018:
- Even if you’re only a part-time vegan, you owe it to yourself to explore Middle Eastern cuisine. There are so many fantastic options! Link.
- Vegan sushi is simultaneously fancy and easy to make. Why not give it a go? Link.
- If you’d like to cook more vegan meals, get your hands on the quickest and easiest cookbook you can find. Start with one from the “Easy Vegan Cookbooks” section here: Link.
- One of the easiest and most satisfying ways to improve your diet is to explore the vegan options of a new cuisine: Link.
- If you’re not vegan, why not think in terms of going vegan in your kitchen? It’s the single biggest step you can take toward a vegan diet. Yet the commitment is relatively minor, since you still have the freedom to eat whatever you want when dining out.
While these tweets range over diverse topics, they have several things in common. First of all, they’re relentlessly positive and encouraging. Never lose sight of how much help and encouragement people need. Notice also each of these tweets suggest small and easy lifestyle changes. People who grew up on Twinkies and Hot Pockets need basic, sensible information to start moving in a positive direction. All of my tweets offer a new avenue of thinking for people who haven’t done much exploration of food, and four of the five tweets above offer links for more reading.
Sure, “Go Vegan!” will win over some people. But for many listeners, this request is too much, too soon. They’re more likely to respond favorably to simpler and less demanding requests. Remember that many people would regard something as basic as trying a Meatless Monday as a big deal.
Most importantly, notice that all of the above tweets have a clear call to action—two of them even include my favorite activist phrase, “Why not…?”
Get to Know Your Elected Officials
While you’re unlikely to ever talk about animal rights with the President, anyone lower down in government officialdom (including senators and representatives) is typically easy to meet with. Some of the most important animal rights work involves finding government officials willing to help write and enact legislation that will protect animals. Activists who do this sort of work must spend a lot of time cultivating relationships with key people in government. But even if your activism has nothing to do with this, a friendly chat with your local elected officials can pay off in all sorts of unlikely ways.
Many positions that elected officials take on various issues are a result of conversations with constituents. Most officials have set office hours in which they welcome constituents to visit for a conversation. Letters and emails also offer good opportunities to establish a connection with these officials. All sorts of good things can come out of approaching people holding public office, and speaking to them in friendly terms about opportunities to protect animals.
Anytime you reach out to someone in public office, always try to come up with a specific request that would make a tangible difference for animals.
Spreadsheets & Online Calendars for Social Media
Just as most office workers are totally reliant upon a handful of computer-based tools, activists can benefit from some of these same tools. This is especially the case social media activism.
The ultimate tool for activists using social media is a spreadsheet. If you’ve got a Gmail account, the Google Sheets web app is free.
What you can do is to find a bunch of links covering various facets of a vegan lifestyle, and post each one into a row of your spreadsheet. Now you’ve got a collection of useful links on a wide assortment of vegan topics. This will keep you from posting the same sorts of links time after time. You’ll consequently maximize your influence by posting a diverse variety of information and suggestions.
My vegan information page is a great place to copy some valuable links onto your spreadsheet. Any of your favorite vegan websites will offer additional resources of interest to non-vegans.
Once you’ve put together a spreadsheet of vegan links, start at the top and make a high-quality post about it to your social media accounts. Be sure to come up with a suggestion to take action. You can then change the color of that link on your spreadsheet, or put today’s date next to it, to indicate that it’s been promoted. Next time around, you’ll feature the next link on your spreadsheet. When you finally reach the bottom, you can bounce back to the top of your spreadsheet and start again, supplying different write-ups for each link to keep things fresh.
When posting on social media, try to include various things personal things about your life. If you don’t post daily, use an online calendar to remind you to to update your social media accounts with a new post on a regular basis. Any online calendar will enable you to schedule a bi-weekly or monthly reminder. When the day to post something arrives, you can either search the web for something new to feature, or you can pull one of your standbys from the spreadsheet I’ve suggested you construct.
Stay in Touch with Reality
When I first began doing vegan activism, I hoped to play a part in creating a vegan world. The vegan literature was a mess. Many of the top books contained authoritative-looking footnotes that—if you actually looked up the source material—didn’t check out. I took on the mission to clean things up. I believed that by making solid and accurate arguments, people would go vegan left and right. What I didn’t understand is that we live in a post-facts universe, and very few people have the education necessary to evaluate competing claims based on logic or evidence.
If you want to understand the state of humanity and the prospects for our collective future, don’t talk to philosophers, don’t talk to educators, and don’t talk to sociologists. Talk to someone who works a corporate IT desk. Here’s an excerpt of a post written by one such doomed soul:
There’s this lady in HR at my company that does the following when she sends me a screenshot of a problem she’s having with her computer:
- Print Screen > Open MS Paint > Paste > File > Print >
- Take black and white printout, write issue by hand on paper
- Scan to PDF > Email to herself > Open PDF > Save to desktop
- Attach file to new email > Send to herself > Forward me the email from herself.
It hurt me so much when I watched her do this for the first time.
Spending a career doing vegan advocacy won’t necessarily turn you into a misanthrope or an elitist. But, one way or another, eventually you’ll be forced to acknowledge that to sway the public, you’ll need more than stirring rhetoric coupled with meticulous attention to accuracy. Reason doesn’t persuade people who haven’t learned to think clearly.
Don’t Fall Into Despair
One of my animal activist friends often fell into despair during her protracted effort to get her city to tear down its antiquated animal shelter and replace it with an appropriate facility. Mandy knew that every year, scores of animals were being euthanized, not for lack of homes, but because her town’s shelter was too decrepit to attract people to visit and adopt.
Mandy and her husband built coalitions and acquired funding to replace the shelter. But time and again, at the last minute, they found their efforts thwarted by local politicians. Each of these setbacks felt crushing to Mandy. She often lost sight of the fact that she was doing her very best, and that her persistence would inevitably pay off.
We live in a violent and insensitive world, and the efforts we make to protect animals seldom produce immediate wins. One common Buddhist teaching can help activists overcome feelings of hopelessness: simply work to the best of your ability with no attachment to outcomes.
In the end, your effectiveness in animal protection will be a reflection of your character and the virtues you bring to animal protection. If you’re patient, diligent, and kind, and if you work steadily for years and decades, the impact you have will be massive. Most of your impact will probably arrive during the final third of your activist career. That’s because, as you gain experience, your effectiveness will constantly grow. As time passes, your expertise will enable you to better spot important opportunities, and you’ll have the skill-set needed to score quick victories.
Don’t be surprised if half of your total impact for animals occurs during the final 5 percent of your career. Your most valuable contributions will probably come when you push onwards despite feeling totally burnt out on activism. Embers burn hotter than flames.
Minimum Viable Products
If you decide to create something for the vegan community, let me offer a piece of advice. No matter what you’re making—whether it’s a book or an article of clothing or a food product—it’s usually wise to start out by releasing something small. This approach, known as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), is a fundamental strategy used by technology startups.
There are a couple of great advantages to starting with an MVP. First, it minimizes your losses in the event that your creation fails to find an audience. Second, it’s a low-cost way to enter a market and gain insights that can shape future releases that are more polished and perfected.
No matter what you intend to create, it can usually start life as an MVP. One of the bestselling books in the animal rights movement, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, started out as an essay of the same title. Only after it gained significant attention after being published in the New York Review of Books did Singer expand his piece into a book. Plenty of today’s best-known brands of vegan foods and beverages started by being sold out of a booth at their founder’s local farmers’ market. And many of the largest regional VegFest events are outgrowths of monthly potlucks and meetups that enabled the local vegan community to gain critical mass.
There’s no shame in starting small. In fact, it’s usually the smartest thing to do. No matter what your project or product, it’s nearly always possible to launch your effort as an MVP and grow in response to success.
Campaign-Oriented Animal Rights Activism
Now that we’ve covered a number of easy ways to make a difference for animals, let’s look at what’s probably the most advanced and challenging form of activism: launching animal protection campaigns.
Every effective animal rights organization thinks in terms of campaigns, which are large-scale projects with a specific desired outcome. Once launched, efforts on a campaign continue until its goal is won.
A campaign may be as simple as convincing Cornell University’s dining hall to create a dining station that serves exclusively vegan meals, or it might be as ambitious as convincing every supermarket in Germany to stop selling eggs from caged hens. Both these campaigns actually occurred and ended in victory, by the way.
You want to choose a campaign that’s simultaneously ambitious but winnable. Don’t select a campaign for the sake of raising public awareness. Instead, choose something that, if victory is achieved, will tangibly reduce animal suffering and slaughter. For instance , going after Nintendo for creating a cow character with a nose ring won’t help actual cows. Far better to instead launch a campaign seeking to eliminate nose ring use by dairies. Persistence pays off, and most worthwhile campaigns won’t produce easy wins, but will instead be won by months or years of grinding. You always want to choose a campaign that will over the vast majority of the public—in my example above, no compassionate person could possibly be in favor of using nose rings at dairies.
You can use social media to great effect. For several years, every few months I’d tweet my disappointment that Chipotle Mexican Grill added bacon to their pinto beans. Then one day, they reformulated that item to vegan. I don’t know if my tweets were responsible, but they were certainly a factor—it’s not as if companies are going to credit you for their decision. Regardless, I enthusiastically thanked Chipotle for making this important move. My small but persistent effort potentially kept thousands of pigs from slaughter and made the world a little more vegan-friendly.
Oftentimes, campaigns seek industry-wide change and begin by targeting the largest company in the sector. When Henry Spira sought to convince the cosmetics industry to eliminate the Draize test, he started by approaching Revlon, which was then the world’s top cosmetics company. As with every effective campaigner, he began by meeting top company officials privately and he did everything possible to win concessions through behind-the-scenes dialogue. But he had a public campaign ready, and only after all his attempts at private communication proved fruitless did he unleash his devastatingly effective “How Many Rabbits Does Revlon Blind for Beauty’s Sake?” campaign.
After Revlon surrendered, Spira graciously and publicly thanked the company and then moved on to the industry’s second largest company, Avon. Having witnessed Revlon getting its reputation trashed over blinded bunnies, Avon wanted no part of being on the receiving end of a similar campaign and quickly relented.
Resources for Organizing Campaigns
Campaigns are covered at length in Peter Singer’s Ethics Into Action and Mark Hawthorne’s Striking at the Roots.
If you want to do campaign-oriented activism on a state or city level, Humane World for Animals is a great resource. Visit the their statewide activism page to contact your state’s director to express your interest in volunteering.
Several other large nonprofits run corporate campaigns and need activists to help. In the USA, groups like The Humane League and Mercy For Animals both seek volunteers for their various initiatives. The Albert Schweitzer Foundation, which has succeeded in ridding Germany of battery cages, is always seeking volunteers in that country. Animal Equality works on similar anti-cruelty campaigns internationally.
To tackle government or company-based campaigns is by far the hardest sort of activism presented in this essay. Since this work requires a number of specialized skills, I won’t go into greater depth on this sort of activism. The groups above will give you the training you need for these campaigns if you decide to volunteer. They’ll also give you opportunities to do things like work on political or corporate campaigns, and participate in protests.
Money Stuff & Staying Afloat as an Activist
Ideally, every animal advocate would receive a generous trust fund. That way, they could focus solely on animals and never have deal with coming up with money to pay for household expenses or rent. But since trust funds are hard to come by, most activists must find a way to stay afloat financially.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of the most influential frameworks for psychological well-being ever invented, and it has much to teach aspiring activists. Take a look at Maslow’s pyramid, shown below. The idea is that the base layers must come first. You can’t, for instance, have a relaxed and joy-filled relationship if you don’t first have food, water, clothing, and shelter.
Some activists use their commitment to animals to justify refusing to take responsibility for meeting their needs lower down on the pyramid. Surprise, surprise—these folks invariably end up unfulfilled, resentful, and miserable. So it’s important to not let your animal protection work get in the way of providing for your basic needs.
I urge you to think of your activism as an expression of Self-Actualization. Since activism resides at the top level of Maslow’s pyramid, it’s best done only after the rest of your life is in order. Just like the flight attendant’s emergency speech instructs you to put on your oxygen mask first before you tend to your child’s, you’ve got to establish a reasonable level of security, comfort, and friendships in your life before turning your attention to animal protection. It is emphatically unwise to do animal activism when you can’t pay the bills and are facing eviction.
If you feel a serious calling to spend most of your time doing something that protects animals, here are the most obvious ways to fund your lifestyle.
- Start a vegan-oriented business or nonprofit organization to cover your financial needs.
- Join a vegan or animal-rights nonprofit as a paid staff member.
- Take an unrelated day-job that provides for your expenses, but that allows sufficient time for you to work on animal protection projects.
As somebody who has spent decades meeting his financial needs through option 1, I can’t recommend it for most people. Nor can I recommend option 2, since I think that most nonprofits are bloated and ineffective, and they typically don’t pay well either. I therefore think option 3 is the best choice, in terms of providing for your financial needs while still allowing the time necessary to help animals.
If you choose option 3, there’s obviously no single path in the business or public service sectors that’s right for everybody. But the following question, if asked constantly over a period of weeks or months, will eventually produce some useful ideas:
How can I use my skills to generate the money I need to live comfortably, while still enabling me to have substantial time to do activist work?
Some assumptions you have about employment might be wrong and holding you back in important ways. You might, for instance, think that lucrative work must be boring, or that you need to work full-time to produce an adequate income. Happily, there are plenty of people who are able to achieve a reasonable standard of living, without becoming wage slaves.
Your spending habits are at least as important as your income. Plenty of people who earn huge salaries nevertheless flirt constantly with financial ruin because they have extravagant spending habits. Beyond the sense of security that being frugal can provide, it’ll also probably enable you to begin saving money. And it’s by saving money and investing it wisely that you can ultimately become financially independent, and to devote as much time as you wish to animal protection.
Investing is, unfortunately, like singing. Unless you’re born with that particular gift, you’re better off letting others do it for you. I suspect that fewer than one in twenty people are born with the talent to be excellent singers or outstanding investors. Most successful investors have:
- a working knowledge of economics
- strong analytical skills
- a passion for doing research
- an understanding of hedging bets and risk management
- the patience to not cash out on good investments when they deliver a swift return
- intuitive gifts, and being able to follow their guts on intangible nuances
Unless you’ve been blessed with these qualities, your stock purchases are probably more a form of gambling than investing. Sure, you might win, but it’s like the lottery or a slot machine: the odds are always against you.
But don’t despair if you’re not cut out to be an investor. Instead, focus on a related field that anyone can grasp with a little study: financial literacy. Something like two-thirds of people don’t have any grasp of core financial literacy principles, which is why more than 60 percent of Americans don’t have sufficient funds on hand to cover a $1,000 emergency.
Financial literacy is easy to learn and requires no innate talent. I’m not usually one to recommend a Dummies book, but Personal Finance for Dummies has been through eight editions and seems to avoid the pitfalls of other books in its category.
Once you’ve accumulated some savings, consider hiring a Certified Financial Planner. These people have undergone a rigorous multi-year program that emphasizes investment planning. The core objective of this study is to maximize returns while minimizing risk. When you finally get your financial house in order, you’ll never again have to worry about expenses. You’ll thereby gain the ability to devote yourself as fully as you wish to animal protection.
Getting Hired at a Non-Profit
One obvious way to support yourself while devoting your life to animal protection is to work for a nonprofit that’s aligned with your goals. In theory, a nonprofit could provide the perfect place for you. In practice, you’d better be careful.
Speaking generally, nonprofits don’t tend to be as competently run as companies, and animal protection nonprofits in particular are often strikingly ineffective. Employees can be demoralized and backbiting. Quite often, there’s a striking division between employees who joined because they care greatly about animals and those who came on just to earn a paycheck. There’s something bad for the soul about working for a group that’s spending lots of money but not making meaningful progress.
I don’t mean to scare you away from working in the nonprofit sector—but do pay close attention to what you’re getting yourself into. Here are some things to keep in mind.
Nearly every nonprofit publishes a mission statement, which describes what the group strives to accomplish. You should look up the mission statement for any group you’re contemplating joining, and ask yourself how well it aligns with your own goals. Now look at what the group has accomplished recently as it relates to their mission. Nearly every nonprofit publishes its latest victories on its website. How many animals are likely to benefit from these accomplishments? Are you impressed?
Next, take a look at the financials. Most nonprofits publish their financial statements online, and it’s also easy to look up both worker and executive compensation. One of the more galling aspects of the animal protection nonprofits is they often plead poverty to donors while paying gargantuan salaries to top staff. I wouldn’t accept a job at a nonprofit before finding out what the executive team earns. This information is easily obtained online.
If you decide to seek employment at a nonprofit, here are a few key jobs:
Development. This is the person or team responsible for raising money. Nearly every nonprofit has a development director on staff. Their primary work involves regularly communicating to top donors, creating mailings and other financial solicitations, and grant writing. Larger nonprofits usually have at least one assistant to the development director, who helps with organizing key fundraising projects like galas. If you look around, you’ll find all sorts of books and certification programs for people interested in this nonprofit development. It’s relatively easy to break into this profession, undoubtedly because the work is both demanding and tedious.
Office manager. This person is often the face of the organization, since they’ll answer phones, greet visitors, and otherwise be the primary point of contact with the public. This is a good entry-level job that, if done well, can deliver a lot of impact. This position is ideally suited to people with strong social skills.
Undercover investigators. One of the most effective opportunities for animal protection nonprofits involves hiring undercover investigators who will gain employment at factory farms and slaughterhouses, and then film conditions. Large nonprofits like Humane World for Animals, PETA, and Mercy for Animals have sponsored undercover investigations at dozens of facilities, which have uncovered horrific systematic abuses that have in turn led to major media coverage and sometimes criminal charges.
In addition, nearly every nonprofit hires accounts, graphic designers, social media influencers (God help us), and web developers. Expertise in any of these areas can get you in the door, either as a salaried employee or as a contractor.
No matter your initial role at a nonprofit, from there you can potentially get yourself into a position to receive specialized training in more animal-focused niches overseen by the group’s campaigns coordinator.
Becoming a Donor
Donating is hard—and doing it effectively might be harder than making money in the first place. Plenty of organizations want your money but few will spend it wisely. Empathy and emotion may drive our motivation to protect animals, but effective philanthropy demands jettisoning sentimentality and becoming hardheaded about making the greatest possible difference.
Generally, when organizations attempt to raise funds by tugging on your heartstrings with stories about specific animals, it’s an indication that your money may go further elsewhere. In a world with more than 70 billion farm animals slaughtered every year, we can’t afford the inefficiencies of trying to rescue animals one-by-one. What we need are large-scale changes of eating and lifestyle choices, brought about at the lowest possible cost.
I therefore recommend putting your money somewhere other than farm animal sanctuaries. While these groups do important work, the cost of keeping even one shelter going is extraordinary, and I believe that of all the vegan-oriented nonprofits in existence, these organizations protect the fewest animals per dollar spent. A large animal sanctuary might house 200 animals a year, while costing several hundred thousand dollars a year to run. Meanwhile, the activism required to persuade one high school student to go vegan might cost just $10 or $20. A young person making a life-long dietary change will easily prevent the slaughter of a thousand chicken and fish.
What’s more, farm animal sanctuaries are the animal protection movement’s easiest-to-fund type of organization. There’s a misleading sense of accomplishment that comes from “adopting” a specific cow or turkey. This feeling that you’re definitely helping one animal in particular inspires donations from huge swaths of people. In fact, the overwhelming majority of funds raised by farm animal sanctuaries come from meat eaters! So we might as well let the meat eaters of the world keep these facilities going, while we seek to donate our personal funds to greater effect.
When it comes to choosing your animal protection donations, supporting smaller groups can enable your money to go further. Generally, I think smaller and more local organizations are the way to go. A few hundred dollars can make a huge difference to what a local vegetarian society can accomplish, whereas a donation of that scale would hardly be noticed if it was sent to PETA or Humane World for Animals.
There’s no easy way to accomplish this task, but if you’re going to donate a lot of money it’s crucial figure out which groups will spend it effectively.
Avoiding Burnout
Doing activism long-term requires not getting hung up emotionally on things that make you unhappy. When I was new to activism, I expected a lot of push-back from meat eaters, but that rarely happens. Sure, periodically someone tweets a photo of a dead pig at me with a “mmm bacon” caption, but it’s easy to shrug off these knuckleheads.
Where non-vegans are concerned, I think the thing that causes activists the most grief is when their loved ones have no interest in the vegan concept. In cases like this, try to keep in mind that while you have enormous control over how many people you can steer toward a vegan diet, you have virtually no control over who exactly you end up influencing.
No matter what you say, some people will just never be interested in making more compassionate choices. And it may well be the case that one of those people is your father! If that’s the way it is, the sooner you accept that reality and redirect your activism energies to people who are more receptive, the happier and more effective you will be. After all, it really doesn’t matter for the animals whether the next person you persuade to go vegan is your best friend since kindergarten or the lady down the street.
Integrity and Being Well-Informed
The majority of unpleasantness we’re likely to encounter by doing vegan advocacy tends to come not from meat eaters but from our fellow vegans, particularly online. Many vegans are not just misinformed on key issues, but also totally unreceptive to reconsidering their points of view.
One place where this is especially evident concerns Vitamin B-12. Back in the 1980s an influential vegan advocacy book claimed that vegans could meet their B-12 needs by not washing their vegetables. This is doubly dangerous advice, since not only is it risky to eat food that hasn’t been properly cleaned, unwashed vegetables don’t even carry significant amounts of B-12. Yet this myth has persisted for decades, and I fear it’s impossible to eradicate.
Another major point of misinformation within the vegan community concerns protein. In this case, early vegan advocacy books countered misinformation that vegans risked grave protein deficiencies with misinformation of their own, suggesting that it’s almost impossible for vegans to become deficient. That just isn’t the case. The reality is that while it’s incredibly easy for vegans to get sufficient protein, it’s also easy to fall short if you don’t give the matter attention. An otherwise healthful vegan diet consisting mainly of vegetables and brown rice is likely to be on the low side where protein is concerned, if protein-rich vegan foods like nuts, beans, and tofu aren’t part of the mix.
I’ve learned over the years not to argue with people about nutrition. Few people have the open-mindedness to accept new information once they’ve decided on a point of view. So any protracted back-and-forth you have on topics like B-12 or protein is likely to become increasingly frustrating with each new exchange. There’s nothing that will prematurely age you more than making one attempt after another to make a clear and simple point, and to have every one of your attempts refuted by another round of misinformation.
In the case of online forums, I tend to correct bad information with a short post linking to reliable sources. That way, there’s a good chance other people who read it will be swayed. Then, I go away, and—crucially—let my opponent have the last word. Reasonable people rarely get the last word, and that’s the way of the universe.
Vegan advocacy teaches you that the vegan world is full of unreasonable people. And these people are incapable of changing their point of view when confronted with clear and compelling evidence.
Speaking of difficult people, set high standards for yourself and the people you work with. Avoid the temptation of collaborating with activists who have a history of behaving dishonorably. Doing so will inevitably lose you the support of any fellow activists they’ve cheated. You’ll silently lose crucial allies without knowing why.
Self-Care
Animal rights activism carries intense emotional costs and hazards. This is especially the case for activists who constantly encounter disturbing images and information. I have therefore written a free short eBook titled, Self-Care for Activists, which is available on Kindle, iBooks, Nook, and Google Play. I hope you’ll check it out. Hillary Rettig’s The Lifelong Activist is another book that offers advice on how to avoid the emotional pitfalls that accompany long-term animal advocacy.
The cruelty that animals suffer can make you crazy if you think about it too much. So, then, the solution is to not think about it too much. The best piece of advice I’ve heard on the topic comes from veteran activist Joe Espinosa. Joe has handed out more than half a million vegan advocacy booklets at universities across the Midwestern United States. His advice is: “Do more, care less.” This brings us back to Henry Spira’s maxim of trying to find a way to add a zero or two to the number of animals you protect. You need not throw your own happiness down the toilet in order to keep millions of animals from suffering.
Taking massive efforts to protect animals absolves you of any responsibility to expose yourself to the horrors they face. You can instead simply focus on doing your work, confident that you’re preventing as much cruelty and suffering as one person can.
Factory farming is an enormous and imposing castle built on the shakiest of foundations. It is going to collapse in the foreseeable future, and you have a key contribution to make. So start small, think big, and figure out how to add some zeroes to the number of animals you protect.
