good question, but I really don't know the answer. I think people are just so used to their ways and it takes too much effort for them to change their lifestyle. it also took me many years from seeing the horrible documentary about factory farming on TV and becoming completely vegetarian. I had to keep confronted with these things over and over again to get more and more disgusted. we are all so used to eating meat - because it was put on our table by our parents, not even by our own choice!
and then there are also a lot of people who really don't care about anything much besides themselves, or who are quite dumb... some of them are lurking around this forum.....
one thing I find absolutely incredible is that vegetarians actually have tu justify themselves in front of meateaters. I mean - why do those who do not support cruelty have to defend their lifestyle to those who eat killed animas? it should be the other way around - and the least I ask of a meateater is thet he leaves me alone and respects my food. but that is often too much to ask!
I find the attitude similar to the attitude of smokers who just will not understand that they are the ones who bother other people. the whole outrage caused by the discussion of outlawing smoking in public places and restaurants comes from a very similar selfish mentality and a refusal to realize that the person that harms others health is the one that has to stop doing that and not the other way around.
Once again I think you stated it really well. You're absolutely correct. Meat-eaters and others who unnecessarily exploit other living beings never have to answer for their actions. Morrissey has often said the same thing about idiot pop stars. They never have to answer for what they say, whereas he's always having to explain himself. It's an astonishing double standard.
I liked the example of cigarette smokers because it gets to the reason I asked my question.
Speaking only of my frame of reference, the States, I can tell you that cigarette smoking in my lifetime, while still a huge industry, has taken substantial beatings in the public's consciousness over the years. Smoking isn't banned, of course, but in a few decades who knows? In places like Los Angeles and New York it is actually against the law to smoke inside restaurants. More than that, if you talk to most cigarette smokers, even the unapologetic ones, they don't actually contend that smoking isn't harmful to themselves. Some dispute that secondhand smoke harms people, but the overwhelming majority of smokers I know actually say "Do you mind if I smoke around you?" They're not just prohibited by law. Now there's a stigma attached to smoking which has started to become internalized even by the most inveterate smokers. True, there's a grey area (as in: lung cancer grey): nobody is quite sure how harmful smoking really is, but we know enough. We know it can be lethal to the smoker, and common sense says if smoke can harm the smoker it can also harm the bystander (even though mere inhaling of smoke isn't exactly how smoking kills). The point is nearly everyone has accepted that smoking is harmful.
How did this happen? How in the world did a small minority of people who were fighting an uphill battle at least as daunting as fighting the fur or meat industries, if not more so, succeed? Big tobacco doesn't mess around, as we all know. (Even my using the stock epithet "big tobacco" to mean the tobacco industry shows how common knowledge of their evil is.) Billions were spent, and still are spent, to discredit the people who want cigarettes off the market. Huge forces have been mustered by the powerful who want us all to think smoking's not bad for us.
Here's a clue how the activists succeeded. Many people, myself included, started to hear reports trickle in that mmmmmmmaybe smoking was bad for you. And then we sat at someone's bedside while they breathed with the help of a machine in their last miserable months before succumbing to lung cancer. What was it that convinced us? Science. Science convinced us, albeit a popular distillation of hard science. Common sense convinced us, too: the correlation between smoking and lung cancer is right in front of our noses. It's pretty obvious that smoking is harmful. We've all heard about chain smokers who live to be 100, but most people's experiences aren't like that. The exceptions prove the rule. And the "rule" has been accepted by the vast majority of people in this country. Even smokers accept the truth. This isn't just socialization, either. Most people can give cogent, if unspecific, explanations as to why smoking is bad.
If you've read this far, please indulge me in a little leap back to the subject matter. If you are trying to convince people not to eat meat, why in the world would you resort to any argument that goes beyond what science has already proven-- that cutting out meat (and dairy) and eating vegetables pays huge dividends for our health? The number of heart attacks it causes in humans would by itself put it in the same category of smoking as a cause of widescale death. Just as everyone knows someone who's died of lung cancer, we also know old people whose blocked arteries have left them dead or disabled. And there are the related, sound arguments you made above, too. I mean, there is more than enough evidence to turn people away from eating meat just by talking about the health of human beings. As far as compassion goes, fur is already stigmatized and lots of regular types I know also look for cruelty-free bath products. Compassion with regard meat eating is harder, because most people see it as natural and normal.
So with all this being the case, I still find it amazing that anyone would resort to the argument that slaughtering chickens is like the holocaust, or holding the belief that anyone who says human beings are a superior species to badgers is a "racist". I mean, okay, to believe that is fine-- people can believe what they like as far as I'm concerned-- but in the larger scheme of social transformation the public argument for a massive change in how we live should always be based on appeals to people's sense of verifiable, concrete facts and not
highly questionable leaps of logic. I'm not going to labor the point, since you and I have already staged this debate in another thread (which you may remember), but as you know I neither advocate cruelty to animals nor buy any of the arguments that animals have the same rights as humans.
I suspect the counter argument would be that what I'm calling "fact" is debatable. The equality of rights between human animals and non-human animals is merely a historical prejudice which will one day be dissolved, just as two hundred years ago non-whites and women were thought inferior. First, I don't think this will happen. I'm happy to debate that but for now I'll flatly say that. At the very least I'll just point out that science has not proven that animals experience any of the higher mental functions humans possess, and I'm fairly sure science has tried to do just that. Second, and this is more important, choosing the more far-flung, less stable, less proven, more controversial argument of compassion for animals-as-equals-to-humans is not desirable from the most basic criterion there is: effectiveness. Arguments that smoking ruins jackets, costs money, makes you freeze smoking outside restaurants, is just the result of brainwashing from the cinema, and causes you to look foolish may all be true arguments but they're not nearly as good as the more immediate one:
smoking will kill you, stupid!
The difference being that in debating vegetarianism, while there are secondary arguments that go along with the main argument-- meat is unhealthy for you-- the secondary set of arguments also has the effect of turning the unconvinced
away from your argument, in fact exposing you to outright ridicule. It actually militates people into aggressively opposing your position. The history of the failure of the last forty or fifty years of liberal causes in the United States is really the story of that mistake being repeated over and over. The masses still associate Vietnam protestors with Jane Fonda the same way they associate dissenters in the current war with Michael Moore. On a smaller scale, on this site you've got people who sneer at vegetarians because they've been told a day in the meat industry is like 9/11 or that chickens are good mothers. Result? Pissing contests. Entire arguments based on sanity and reason fail because they become distorted into popular positions which argue from the weakest points, not the strongest; make often irrational appeals to people's sensibilities, sensibilities that are in any case way too broad and variegated to be relied upon for massive change; and alienate rather than convince the largest, most critical portion of the population, namely the huge mass of everyday people without whose help our societies will never normalize what will be-- even if it
appears as human self-interest-- the enlightened and ethical treatment of animals.