The Least We Can Do: Communicating the Animal Rights Message

Natasha & Luca, “That Vegan Couple,” social media influencers

If you’ve ever watched toddlers learning how to walk, you’ll notice how unsure they are of where their feet will land. Despite looking unbalanced, they eagerly put one foot in front of the other. A toddler’s enthusiasm for learning to walk is admirable, and in time, their clumsiness is replaced with confidence and balance. With practice, experience, and many failed attempts, walking becomes fluid and natural. This is akin to most people’s introduction to animal rights activism. Once their blinders are removed and they’ve recognized the agonizing reality of suffering and violence to which they have unknowingly contributed by eating and using animals, a deep heart connection is often made with the animal victims, and a strong sense of urgency to rectify injustice takes over. This sense of urgency often begins with awkwardness as the new vegan learns to navigate uncharted territory. Over time, confidence, skill, and greater awareness are developed.

That’s certainly how we felt when we decided to go vegan at age thirty-one. We found it difficult to reconcile that we hadn’t known the truth sooner. How could we have been so ignorant about what we ate? Alongside feelings of shame and guilt was the need to do something: to immediately take action and let everyone else know about the truth we had just woken up to. This moment of awakening is a powerful and serious event, yet most of us aren’t quite sure where to start on our newfound path. Just like the toddler learning to walk, new vegans tend to take their first steps awkwardly. Sometimes overenthusiastically, other times painfully, they put one foot in front of the other and try to master the art of communicating the truth to people who don’t often want to hear it.

We went vegan together after watching an incredible speech on YouTube by an activist named Gary Yourofsky. “Best Speech You Will Ever Hear” changed our lives. After watching it, we sent an impassioned email to all the people in our contact list telling them about the speech, the fact that we had become vegan, and that it was our moral obligation to share this life-changing and lifesaving information with them. The responses we got from that email back in 2011 were an exact representation of what we would experience in the coming years as we continued to advocate for animals. A few people replied congratulating us, telling us that it was an admirable decision, but not something they could do. One person—a former vegetarian—wrote back and dismissed everything we had said because this was in no way the “best speech” they had ever heard. Another person wrote back in absolute tears; after watching the speech, which contained animal exploitation footage, she was shocked to her core, and thanked us profusely for waking her up and helping her choose vegan. And that was it. The vast majority—99 percent of people we personally wrote to—ignored the email. They simply didn’t respond or acknowledge it in any way. Their silence was far more frustrating than the former vegetarian’s comment about it not being the “best speech” ever. We noticed how quickly our annoyance turned into anger. How could those people be so ignorant and selfish to ignore the very thing that just changed our lives forever? We tried reminding ourselves that we had been those people only a few days earlier, but still, their silence cut deep. The challenge was on—how could we communicate the vegan message in a powerful enough way that nobody would ever ignore us again?

The truth is, we couldn’t. We’ve learned over the years that people will still ignore you no matter how perfectly, politely, or politically correctly you try to speak about veganism. The vast majority don’t want to hear it and will try their hardest to block out the truth. Once when we were performing outreach in Boston, an elderly lady yelled at us: “Shut up, I don’t want to hear anything!” A month before that incident, a young man cried with gratitude after a powerful conversation that no doubt changed his life. The lesson is, no matter how people react, say it anyway. Outreach is a powerful way to effect change. Even when people react angrily, the message they hear may be something they pause to reflect on and consider later on.

We find that many new vegans are shut down by their loved ones about their decision to go vegan, and as a result, they are disheartened and stop talking about veganism to anyone. But it’s important to remember that our job is not to make sure every single person we speak to goes vegan. Our job is to simply plant seeds and trust that seeds eventually sprout. Irrespective of how the conversation goes, a seed is planted, and that person can’t un-know the truth. The challenge is to walk away from each conversation with the ability to detach from the outcome. If we mentally and emotionally invest in the outcome of every conversation, we may be at risk for a breakdown. In order to make vegan advocacy sustainable for our mental health in the long term, we must simply focus on the seed that was planted, not if or when it will sprout. The question many people ask is, why bother planting seeds? Why bother having those uncomfortable, difficult conversations with people who don’t want to hear about veganism? Why put ourselves in a position where so many non-vegans will disapprove of our actions and see us as preachy, angry, pushy vegans? The reason is that going vegan is not the most we can do, it’s the least we can do. This has been our tagline for years now, and we say it because it perfectly sums up what we want to convey to the world. Not paying other people to needlessly slit the throats of innocent animals so we can eat their bodies and secretions is merely the least we can do. Not paying other people to rip the skin off defenseless animals is the least we can do. Not paying people to torture and mutilate terrified animals to test products we purchase is the least we can do. Not participating in the largest slaughter of sentient beings every single day is the very baseline. If we can’t see that ripping a baby away from his mother at birth just so we can have a slice of cheese is morally unjustifiable and totally unnecessary, then we have a major problem on this planet. If we do wake up from the somewhat hypnotic trance of carnism and go vegan, we must realize that it’s not the most we can do. It’s just the beginning.

From the victim’s perspective, it’s not enough for us to simply not participate in the violence. The victim would want us to actively intervene. We must take the next step by advocating for animals and working toward their liberation. We need to fight for them the same way we would want someone to fight for our lives, the way we would fight for the lives of our beloved cats and dogs, and the way we would fight for our children, parents, and partners if they were the ones being trucked to execution. That is the power of being an animal rights activist, and not just a vegan. The more we believed that going vegan was not the most we could do, but the least we could do, the stronger our activism became and the more determined we were to plant the seeds of truth and awareness. There are countless ways to plant these seeds, as we have learned from our many forms of activism over the years. From our perspective, it’s a numbers game. We saw that emailing all the people we knew about veganism only gave us one immediate positive reply for a change of heart. If we want to have thousands of positive replies of change, we need to reach many, many more people than those in our contacts list. The power and magic of social media gives anybody with an Internet connection the ability to share the truth about animal agriculture and exploitation, and help people transition to a vegan life. Just like our carnist blinders were removed by a video on YouTube, social media is largely how we help other people remove their blinders. It is the easiest, fastest, and most effective way we know to reach the largest number of people around the world with the vegan message. In five years, we’ve had more than 23 million views on our YouTube channel alone and millions more on our Facebook and Instagram posts. Using social media is the key to spreading the animal rights message as fast as possible.

Not everyone wants to be in front of a camera, or is cut out for making videos. Even if you are comfortable in front of the camera, it’s still a skillful juggling act to balance entertaining your audience while speaking about the serious topic of mass slaughter. Luckily, using social media as a tool for animal rights activism doesn’t rely solely on making videos. The simple act of sharing other people’s videos and writing your own captions is incredibly powerful and effective. Social media works with algorithms—basically, the more interaction (likes, comments, shares) a post gets, the more the algorithm favors that post and continues to promote it. Therefore, sharing great videos from other activists with your followers not only ensures your audience will see the video, but also adds to the exponential growth and popularity of that video, thus maximizing how many non-vegans will see it.

An interesting transition we have made over the years is taking our online activism to the streets and then back online again. In short, the focus of our online activism has always been to educate people about all things vegan related. But this conversation was very much a one-way dialogue. We would make a video and post it online, but we weren’t conversing with anybody in real time. Once we started getting more involved in street activism and outreach in public about what happens to animals for food, clothing, entertainment, testing, and the pet industry, it became a two-way dialogue. But speaking to just one person at a time was not an efficient use of time, so we started to film our outreach conversations and upload those videos to social media. All of a sudden, a conversation with one person could reach the hearts and minds of thousands of people with a click of a button. The impact of this has been phenomenal. No matter how the seed was planted and received, everybody watching the outreach video is learning. Non-vegans watching the video are hearing how nonsensical carnist objections to veganism sound, and they’re also learning new information about why veganism is so important. Vegans watching the outreach videos are learning how to answer carnist objections, and, perhaps most importantly, they are seeing other vegans doing more than just being vegan. They are seeing other vegans get active and advocate for animals. This fosters courage and confidence in not-yet-active vegans to speak out, and it helps boost the participation of those who are performing outreach and attending animal rights events.

During a Q&A session after an activism workshop we led in Detroit, Michigan, one of the audience members asked us what we thought the worst thing a vegan could say during vegan outreach. Our answer was “saying nothing at all.” To stay silent is to consent. There is no right or wrong way to say that we have a responsibility to stop killing innocent beings. There may be more effective ways to communicate our message and to ensure that seeds sprout later on, but even then, the most strategic, compassionate, respectful approach can still be met with resistance and anger. So, when we help vegans become activists and equip them with outreach tools in our activism workshops, we encourage them not to overthink their outreach. Waiting to become the “perfect” activist with all the right answers before having a conversation might mean you’ll never have the conversation. There is no such thing as a perfect conversation, and the animals can’t wait for vegans to master all the answers to all of the questions they will face.

We encourage people to speak with conviction and passion, strength and compassion, but most importantly, to just speak. We can have more of an impact on people if they feel our words are coming from our authentic, heartfelt selves, rather than a finely polished script using all of the “right” words. Speak for the animals the same way you would want someone to speak for your life. The extraordinary ripple effect of being a animal rights activist can’t be underestimated. First and foremost, it helps to educate the public and create the change we need to liberate our animal cousins. Second, it’s incredibly empowering for vegans. Many of us often feel helpless and hopeless, but getting active helps us feel like we are doing more than simply not participating in the violence. We’re actively helping to stop it, and this is incredibly empowering.

Animal agriculture is a mammoth, trillion-dollar industry. To the individual vegan, taking on this industry can seem like a David versus Goliath task. But the power is in realizing that we don’t have to go into battle with Goliath directly to stop the unnecessary violence in the animal agriculture industry. This is a clear-cut example of power to the people. Consumers decide what industry produces because industry responds to consumer demands. As educators and activists, we focus our attention and energy on reaching and changing consumers, who will in turn change what industry produces. Over the years, part of our role has been not only to educate non-vegans about the fact that, as consumers, they are directly paying for violence toward animals, but to also empower vegans in how we can use the supply-and-demand economic theory to our advantage when reaching out to non-vegans.

We personally have found—and have heard from countless other activists—that the sense of helplessness is significantly reduced when becoming an active vegan. When we surround ourselves with likeminded people, united by the goal of saving lives and creating lasting change, it generates a powerful connection that helps us rise together and push the animal rights movement forward.