Moby went vegan in 1987, back when most people had no idea what the word meant. He’s spent decades as the only vegan in rooms full of some of the most famous people alive, and he has never once treated it as a side project.

“There is nothing more important in my life, including my life, than working on behalf of animal rights.”

The full interview is available to watch now on my YouTube, and there’s a lot in there I haven’t put in this post, so if you’re interested, you’ll love the full video.

A confession

Before we got into it, I realised I owed Moby an apology.

He recently played a show in Pula, in Croatia, where I live. The venue was a 2,000 year old Roman arena, and the show was incredible. There was one problem, I couldn’t afford a ticket.

But luckily for me, the arena is very old and has huge gaps all around it, so you can stand outside and watch the whole thing. So that’s what I did.

“I pirated you in real life.”

Moby forgave me. I’ll take it.

“I’m a vegan”

Moby doesn’t stand still on stage. He sprints from one side to the other, non-stop, at an age where most people start to slow down. I asked him where he gets the energy.

“Every night someone will come up to me after the show and be like, ‘Where do you get your energy?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m a vegan.’ It’s that simple.”

It’s the first thing he thinks about every day.

“Every day, without fail, I wake up and I ask myself that simple question. What can I do to end the apocalypse for animals?”

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How does it help animals?

Moby plays to audiences that he says are 98% made up of people who aren’t vegan. On this tour he made a bold choice, he decided to stop playing graphic footage on the screens during his shows.

“I’ve removed the graphic footage because I want to reach people. The people I’m playing to are 98% not vegan, so I want to inspire them with love, with warm feelings for animals.”

He was honest that he second-guesses it.

“I hope it’s not cowardice on my part, but I want to reach people. It’s much easier to reach people with their connection to animals than their aversion to blood and guts.”

He still values the hard-hitting films, it just comes down to who’s in front of him.

“I really appreciate movies like Dominion and Earthlings that are hardcore and unflinchy, because that’s the truth of it. But for a very general audience, especially people in their 30s and 40s, the moment you show that to them, they shut down.”

“Maybe it’s different if it’s a 16-year-old drummer in a speed metal band. Show him Earthlings and he’ll become a vegan. But a 42-year-old who’s there with his fiancée, there’s a chance I’d rather draw them in.”

Then he told me a story about a record label pushing back on him years ago, when he was opinionated about everything from Britney Spears to election interference.

“Someone at one of my record labels gently pushed back, in the best possible way. They said, ‘Yeah, it’s great that you’re so opinionated, but how does that help animals?’ And I was like, ‘Fuck, you’re right.’”

Nowadays, he has a test for anything he does in public - Does it help animals? He’s watched the same shift happening across the movement, with many people moving from anger to strategy.

“When we start out, all we want to do is scream. We want to stand outside slaughterhouses and throw fake blood, we want to burn fur coats, we want to tear down the system. At least I did. And then I realised, okay, I’m angry all the time, but I’m not helping animals.”

He doesn’t dismiss more direct, aggressive action, he still thinks some of it can be meaningful. But he feels a lot of it might be down to another reason.

“The only criteria for activism, from my perspective, is one thing and one thing only. Does it help animals? That’s it.”

“A lot of people have been like, oh, that other stuff made me feel good, but it didn’t necessarily help animals.”

I really align with him on these points. His thoughts remind me a lot of my first ever post here on Substack.

How far we’ve come

I asked him a silly question about his favourite flavour of vegan ice cream which surprisingly led to quite an interesting story about when he first went vegan.

“When I went vegan it was so obscure that no one knew how to say the word vegan. And there were only two vegan restaurants in the entire world. Angelica’s Kitchen in New York, and maybe one in the UK.”

His friends didn’t make it easy.

“My friend Damien every week would come over to my apartment with a slice of pizza and a can of Coca-Cola and eat it in front of me. And I’d just be like, oh fuck you. When are they going to invent vegan pizza? Guess what? They did. So fuck you, Damien.”

Then the vegan world caught up. Pizza, chocolate, milks, and finally ice cream.

“On that day, brothers and sisters, the angels sang hallelujah. The heavens opened and there was a heavenly host singing hallelujah, vegan ice cream.”

There’s one flavour he still won’t touch, from a company in LA that made it as a dare.

“They had one durian flavour. No one ever ordered it. I never did because I’m a big sissy.”

Then this important reminder I think we should all be more aware of.

“In 1987 no one knew what a vegan was, and now we have vegan senators, vegan mayors, vegan governors, vegan movie stars. There’s so much work to do, but every now and then I think it’s encouraging just to think how far we’ve come.”

No infighting

I asked Moby to close on why we need to stick together. He brought up a talk he once gave at a Direct Action Everywhere conference.

“I’ve been vegan for 39 years. That means at some point everyone in this room was eating hamburgers and bacon while I was vegan. And I don’t judge you, so therefore you do not judge each other.”

Then he named the enemy.

“We know who the enemy is. It’s Burger King. It’s McDonald’s. It’s Cargill. It’s CAFOs. It’s industrialised animal agriculture. When we fight amongst ourselves, they fucking win. So, no infighting. Support each other as much as you can.”

I couldn’t agree more. Infighting is an important issue our movement needs to fix, which is why I did a presentation on it at the International Animal Rights Conference.

Watch the full interview

In the full interview Moby tells the story of Tucker, the rescue cat who changed everything for him. He talks about his friendship with David Bowie, including a vegan barbecue that went about as wrong as a barbecue can go. He describes what he saw in the eyes of a pig at an Animal Save vigil, and his theory on why we brutalise the animals who are indifferent to us. And he explains how he handles hate, from the New York Times to death threats.

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Here’s what they said:

I find this article very condescending and lacking cultural context. The idea that coming to veganism is the ‘logical’ step is obviously rooted in your own experiences and biases. It is culturally insensitive in my opinion to uphold veganism as some moral or ethical superiority as eating meat is part of many people’s culture. For example, many North American Indigenous peoples have reciprocal relationships with animals where people and animals give to each other; in one form this giving from the animal to the person is their body for consumption. This is not an evil or morally tainted act, it is culture. Just because you have a different cultural understanding of meat eating doesn’t make it morally superior than someone else’s.

They also told me to “research white veganism”. I’ve spent years reading and thinking about this concept of “white veganism” that gets thrown around in these sorts of discussions. I’ll write a piece on it soon.

To be fair, it is true that we vegans can sometimes lack nuance in our messaging. I know I have. I wrote about it here when discussing that Billie Eilish interview that broke the internet a few months back. There are people around the world who genuinely can’t (currently) remove animals and animal products from their lives. They may be indigenous communities living in extremely rural areas, for example.

I think it’s quite obvious that my writing is targeted towards the average English speaker who can make changes for animals, not towards the tiny fraction of people living in situations where they have no choice. It’s always disappointing when people use these communities or poor communities as a shield to defend their own lifestyles.

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But it’s culture

Let’s talk about the crux of the argument, culture. I’ll start by saying something highly controversial:

Setting a bull’s horns on fire and chasing them through the streets of Spain, or stabbing them to death, is culture.

Torturing dogs in Yulin, China, because people believe it makes their meat taste better, is culture.

French foie gras farming, where they violently force feed ducks and geese to enlarge their liver before slaughter so they can eat it, is culture.

Trapping and killing whales and their infants in the Faroe Islands is culture.

Forcing roosters to rip each other to shreds in cockfighting across Latin America is culture.

Human sacrifice is culture.

Cultures that abuse others deserve to be confronted, and most people agree when it comes to those examples. You’ve seen the dog meat footage and felt sick. You’ve watched a bullfighting clip and thought “how is this still legal”. We can see the violence for what it is and we condemn the practices.

But it’s MY culture

What happens when the spotlight turns to the violence we take part in ourselves though? Suddenly, culture is sacred. Suddenly the person who raised the criticism needs to “educate themselves”. Challenging culture is racist, ignorant, or an example of colonialism now. Interesting.

What’s even more interesting is that each of the following statements can and has been used to defend things like torturing dogs and burning bulls, but also to defend using, killing and eating animals for meat, dairy and eggs:

“It’s my culture.”

“Telling me this is wrong is racist, coloniser behaviour.”

“You’re trying to force your modern values on me.”

“You only think this is wrong because of your culture. It’s all subjective. You can believe I’m wrong, but you shouldn’t try to stop me from doing this.”

“I need to protect my culture from people like you who want to take it from me.”

Is the person defending bacon any different from the dog farmer, or the bullfighter? Yes, of course they’re different. But at the core, they’re using all the same lines to try and excuse the violence they participate in.

No matter how you dress it up, being violent to animals when you have the option not to is violence for pleasure. Be it taste, habit, convenience, or yes, culture. It’s all for a personal preference, and for pleasure.

“I like how it tastes”

“It’s how I was raised”

“It’s convenient, it’s just what everyone does”

All lines that are used for the various violent practices we listed earlier and the use and consumption of animals and animal products.

Learning from the past

Culture and tradition have been used to excuse all sorts of horrific things throughout history. Most people look back at all of this and wonder how anyone ever defended it. So then, why are we still making the same mistakes today?

Why is it that when new information arrives, information that asks us to change so we can do better by the animals we share the planet with, we reach for culture and tradition as an excuse?

Why can we speak out against some outdated, violent traditions and cultures, but not others? Why is it when our own actions are the focus, all of a sudden culture becomes untouchable, and we jump to things like accusations of racism to defend ourselves?

In my opinion, these are questions anyone who thinks of themselves as a decent person should consider. I’m not here to chastise anyone, this isn’t an attack. I’m just holding up a mirror, and hoping people will take a closer look at the reflection.

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Well, first he said he was going to knock me out. The comment about taking my teeth came later. “Look forward to taking your teeth” were his exact words. I’m not sure what he’s going to do with them though.

His problem with me? I made a video about sheep and the wool industry.

I didn’t realise wool was a subject random people were willing to threaten violence over. Turns out it is. And even more surprising, some vegans were on his side of the debate.

I recently posted this short video responding to a guy mocking the idea that wool is cruel. He runs through the usual lines: sheep need shearing or flies lay eggs in their wool, the maggots eat their flesh, they overheat, they get branches stuck in them.

He then shows a clip of the shearing and goes, “does this look cruel to you? Looks about as bad as clipping your toenails.”

I responded and made the point that these sheep have been bred to grow far more wool than they naturally would, and that the health problems everyone lists as the reason for shearing are problems we created. We shouldn’t be patting farmers on the back for fixing something they caused in the first place.

Half a million people watched it and there were thousands of comments. A lot of them were similar to the messages now sitting in my inbox.

“Ur a pussy dude tryna act like u care about animals for clicks worrying about sheep and shit.”

Am I acting like I care about animals for clicks, or am I worrying about sheep? It can’t be both.

They came in like that for days. “You’re a dumbass.” “You’re an idiot.” “You’re a moron.” Some were slurs I won’t bother repeating.

One guy, Kevin, opened with “you’re an idiot.” When I said that wasn’t a nice thing to send a stranger, he told me to cry harder. His bio said he was an ex-marine, so I asked what his mates in the marines would make of his behaviour. He called me a sensitive little bitch. Kevin not representing that famous marine mental fortitude very well.

I didn’t expect this

I always expect pushback from the general public when I post, after all I am posting to try and challenge norms in most of my work. What I didn’t expect was that some of the pushback came from vegans.

One person who identifies as a vegan of several years said:

“Not shearing does them harm. Wool is more sustainable than man made fibres... Die hard radical vegans give the rest of us a bad name.”

Another said:

“these idiots are stupid, it’s more cruel not to take off the wool.”

He thought I was arguing against shearing. So he straw-manned me from inside the movement and went off to call the wrong people idiots.

And one more, just honestly unsure:

“Don’t sheep just drop the fleece naturally, or has that been bred out now?”

It seems even some vegans don’t actually know how sheep ended up like this, so when it comes they’re unsure, or worse, end up defending something we should be against.

Yes, sheep really do need shearing

A domestic wool sheep needs shearing. Leave one unshorn and bad things happen. Flies lay eggs in the wool, the maggots hatch and eat into the flesh, and the sheep can die slowly and in agony from it. They overheat. They get weighed down, exhausted, snagged in bushes and fences, and can die there. All of this is real. A farmer who says “I need to shear them or they’ll suffer” is telling the truth.

So no, the answer is not to stop shearing the sheep that are alive right now. Obviously. Anyone who thinks the vegan position is “let the current sheep grow their coats until maggots eat them” has misunderstood it completely.

Why are sheep like this?

Wild sheep don’t have this problem. They grow the coat they need and shed it themselves. The sheep farmers breed for wool can’t. They’ve been bred, over generations, to grow far more wool than any animal would naturally carry, and to keep growing it with little to no shedding.

Take the Soay, a primitive breed barely changed from a wild sheep. They grow a light coat and shed every spring, no humans needed. A Merino, the world’s most common wool breed, grows about three times as much and can’t shed any of it. And at the far end, breeds like the Devon and Cornwall Longwool have been bred so heavy that a single animal can carry up to twenty kilos of fleece. Up to twenty times what a Soay grows. None of them chose this. We did it to them, on purpose, over thousands of years, because more wool means more money.

When we started breeding sheep, we bred the ones that produced the most wool, again and again. Do that for enough generations and you get an animal that physically depends on humans to survive. This was the original genetic modification. The people doing it had no idea about genes or DNA, but that’s what selective breeding is. We built an animal with a permanent health condition, on purpose, because the condition makes money.

So when a farmer shears a sheep, what problem are they actually solving? The animal only needs rescuing from a situation they are continuing to cause.

They don’t do it for the sheep

A farmer shears a sheep to sell the wool. The welfare part is a side effect, just a nice story to give the appearance of a loving industry.

If you doubt that, look at how these industries behave when welfare and profit pull in opposite directions. The vast majority of animal products come from factory farms, because that’s where the money is. Pack chickens, pigs and cows into sheds by the tens of thousands, cut every corner you can, because it’s cheaper to produce that way.

Wool is no different in principle. It’s resource extraction. The sheep is a machine for growing a product, and shearing keeps the machine running. If shearing was only for the comfort of the sheep and had no bearing on profit, they wouldn’t shear the sheep.

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Don’t stop shearing, stop breeding.

So what do I actually want?

I don’t want the shearing to stop, I want the breeding to stop.

You don’t fix this by letting living sheep suffer. You fix it by not creating more sheep that need saving from a problem we invented. Stop breeding them and within a generation the problem is gone. No sheep left to overheat, get flystrike, or depend on a man with clippers to stay alive.

When someone says “but sheep need shearing,” we can agree, but then ask the obvious question: Why does a domesticated animal need a human to survive at all? Because we made them that way, for profit. So let’s stop.

And wool, of all things, is the easiest possible place to start.

Wool isn’t a necessity

Wool is somewhere around one percent of all fibre used worldwide. We’re not clothing the poor with it. It’s a niche, expensive, luxury material.

I’m vegan. I want a world that doesn’t use animals as resources at all. And I know that on the way to that world there’ll be plenty of situations where people genuinely don’t have a realistic alternative. I’m not naive, I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But wool is not one of those situations. Not even close. Billions of people have access to alternatives that are just as suitable and usually cheaper. The only reason it carries on is fashion, and habit.

“You want genocide”

Now, the objection I got more than any other. “So you want a sheep genocide? You want to exterminate them?”

Genocide. Extermination. Big words for “stop breeding suffering animals into captivity.”

The most-liked comment on my post put it like this:

“In order to protect the sheep, we need to not have sheep. He’s not pro sheep, he’s pro no-sheep.”

Yes, I’d rather these sheep weren’t bred at all. Not because I hate sheep, the opposite. Because I don’t want an animal brought into existence in a body designed to make them suffer, just so someone can profit from what grows on it. Wanting to stop animals being born into that is a sensible ethical position. It’s pro-sheep.

Nobody is being wiped out. Nobody is being harmed. There’s non-existence, and there’s existence, and choosing not to bring a suffering animal into existence hurts no one. You can’t take anything from someone who was never born. There’s no sheep sitting in the void, robbed of the life they never had.

Also, the “you want them dead” crowd never stopped to consider that these sheep are going to be killed. The farmer they’re defending kills every single one of them the moment they’re worth more dead than alive. They’re upset with me because they think I’m the one who wants them dead, but it’s actually the industry they’re sticking up for doing the killing. I’m saying we should stop breeding them into a life of health issues that ends on a slaughterhouse floor.

One commenter got halfway there on his own:

“You’re right about dogs. Selective breeding is wrong. But stopping sheep farming would condemn them to a painful death. They would literally go extinct.”

He already agrees it’s wrong when it’s dogs, he just hadn’t finished the thought.

Here’s the comparison I made in my follow-up video: Pugs were bred to have flat faces. They can’t breathe properly and they suffer from it, and more and more people are now saying we should stop breeding them for that exact reason. Is that a pug genocide? Or is it just refusing to keep making animals that suffer for our benefit?

If it’s reasonable for pugs, it’s reasonable for sheep.

And if you want to talk about force, look at which side is actually forcing something. Breeding hundreds of thousands of animals into a body that can’t survive without you, so you can sell what grows on them, is the forceful, violent act. Stopping is the merciful one.

Back to the guy who wants my teeth

Strip out the threats, and this guy’s argument was the same as everyone else’s:

“Rather a sheep be sheered than die of disease. But perhaps you prefer they die a slow painful death than live fully, you sick c**t. Never worked a farm a day in your life have you? Don’t talk about things you have no clue about, city boy.”

I told him what I’d told everyone. Shear the sheep that are alive now, stop breeding more. Why would I want a sheep to die slowly?

“Then what happens to sheep if we stop breeding them?”

If we stop breeding them, the sheep that suffer from these health issues and dependence on humans stop existing. That’s the point.

He didn’t have anything of substance for that, so he moved to:

“I wish I lived in the states I’d knock you the f**k out for being so stupid. F**k you from all of us in England.”

I’m from England too. So I told him: I’ll be in Birmingham city centre on the 1st of August for an animal advocacy event, talking to the public about exactly this. Come and say hey.

He replied thanking me for that information, before finishing with:

“End of convo, you’re vile. Look forward to taking your teeth.”

The invite still stands. I’m hopeful that I’ll keep my teeth during our chat, but if you’re interested in seeing what happens come down to the We The Free Solidarity Day event in Birmingham on August 1st.

Did you know sheep were bred this way? What do you normally say when people bring up the wool industry and shearing?

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That’s what I told Paul Bashir and Tobias Leenaert, right before letting them loose on each other. Okay it wasn’t that dramatic, but these two advocates do hold polar opposite views on how to change the world for animals.

Paul is the co-founder of the vegan outreach group, Anonymous for the Voiceless (AV). He’s personally done over a thousand “Cube Of Truth” outreach events and estimates he’s spoken to some 30,000 people on the streets. His position: veganism is a justice issue, vegan activism is the moral baseline, and the most effective thing you can do in an outreach conversation is hold the person in front of you directly accountable.

Tobias is the author of the book “How to Create a Vegan World” and has been an animal advocate for 25 years. His position: veganism is a means to an end, not the end itself. Masses of reducers drive supply and demand, supply and demand create system change, and system change is what actually frees animals. He believes in incremental approaches that focus on where people are at, rather than where we’d like them to be.

I know them both personally, and I know they’re in this fight for the right reasons. They just disagree on almost everything about how to get there.

At the end of this discussion, they set each other homework. Paul agreed to read Tobias’s book. Tobias agreed to join a “Cube of Truth” event and test Paul’s outreach protocol himself. I’m actually writing this on a bus to Amsterdam, where I’ll be filming Tobias testing out the approach, and hosting the follow-up discussion. I’ve got some great questions for both of them that will take this discussion to the next level.

This post covers the moments from round one that you’ll want fresh in your mind before round two.

A billion dollar question

I asked Tobias to clarify his most contested position, and he didn’t soften it:

“Say you give me ten million dollars, or a billion dollars, for a large advertising campaign. I think I would share a reducetarian message rather than a vegan message. At this point in time. Maybe not in ten years or twenty years. But we know from studies that the uptake of such an ask is bigger than when you ask people to go vegan. And if we have many people following up on that ask, we can drive demand and supply and create system change.”

His logic runs like this. The plant milks in your supermarket aren’t there because of vegans, they’re there because of reducers. Every reducer makes the alternatives better and cheaper, which makes consuming vegan easier. This creates what he calls “a fertile breeding ground” for activists like Paul.

Paul wasn’t having it:

“That’s literally all the vegan movement has been about since it began. I don’t see how now is any different to 30 years ago. Most of the vegan movement is reducetarian messages and welfare messages. I don’t know why you feel like there’s even more of a need for that.”

And this is where round one kept circling. Tobias says the movement needs more reduction messaging, Paul says the movement is already drowning in it.

“They’re actually harder to talk to”

Paul says roughly 80% of the people AV talks to have already come across some kind of plant-based or reduce message. And according to him, that doesn’t make them easier to reach, it makes them worse:

“They’re actually harder to talk to than regular non-vegans who have never come across the message before. The reason why is because they feel entitled. They feel like they’re already doing enough.”

Vegetarians got it in the neck especially:

“All these vegetarians should be going vegan in droves. But I don’t see that happening. I see them being very pompous when we talk to them. They turn their nose up and feel like, who are you to tell me any different? I have been vegetarian longer than you’ve been vegan.”

Tobias agreed that the complacency effect is real, then acknowledged the actual dividing line between them:

“I think the difference between you and me is that I see a large share of reducers as a win. I don’t think we need to convince people one by one to go vegan. If we have a certain percentage of people that are a certain percentage vegan, the system will topple and things will take care of themselves.”

One of them sees a reduction as progress, the other sees a reducer as someone who’s been handed a licence to stop listening.

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“Sometimes the best thing to do for animals is not to talk about them”

This is probably the line from the whole conversation that will bother the most vegans, so I want to give it its full context. Tobias:

“You might very much disagree with this, Paul, but sometimes I think the best thing to do for animals is not to talk about them. If we know that people will get triggered, they show reactance, and reactance is a really important thing. With many people, when you use certain tactics like guilt, they get reactive, they go looking for ways to defend their position, and sometimes even start eating more meat.”

He backed it with the argument he kept returning to throughout the conversation:

“If I imagine myself as the pig in the crate, looking at the activists, I wouldn’t care if the activist talks about justice. I would care about whatever gets me out of the crate. It could be slower, it could be less direct, but as long as it moves the needle.”

Paul’s answer was that this entire framing underestimates people:

“I think we can speak to people’s intelligence and we can speak to their character and assume they can understand that they should change right now.”

And he rejected the idea that the people Tobias wants to reach in his way are unreachable directly:

“If someone is even slightly open, they would be the kind of person that you would argue should be given a softer message. And if they’re even somewhat open, our outreach protocol would crack them open.”

Tobias, for his part, thinks writing people off as “not ready” is a cop-out:

“Saying the ones who are not ready are not ready, I think that’s kind of lame. We can do a lot better than that. We can find ways to reach people who, in your view, are not ready for your message.”

Keep that exchange in mind. We’ll find out if Tobias still feels the same on this point in round two after he attends the AV outreach event and tries out Paul’s protocol.

An MMA fighter who hated the conversation

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Paul said something that I think comes more from a place of frustration than anything:

“Who cares what non-vegans say? Non-vegans are constantly trying to tell vegans how to do activism. Vegan activists who have done this for any significant amount of time know not to take their advice.”

And he had a story to back it.

He was doing outreach with an MMA athlete, a grappler three times his size who, in Paul’s words, could have snapped him like a breadstick. The guy’s girlfriend was vegan and apparently hadn’t been able to convince him of anything. He gave Paul excuse after excuse. Free range, small farms, paying more for organic. Then he said the thing that would make most vegan advocates back off immediately:

“When I feel this kind of pressure, when someone tells me I need to do something, it pushes me away.”

Paul’s response:

“Instead of backing off, I went even harder. I doubled down.”

They stayed in contact afterwards. The follow-up message Paul got:

“He told me he hated that conversation. But since that day, he’s been vegan.”

It’s an interesting story, and Paul is right that it exposes something real: what people say about your activism in the moment and what your activism actually does to them can be two completely different things. The man told Paul, to his face, that the approach was pushing him away, but it seemed to be doing the opposite.

But there’s a problem. When the pressure works, you get a message afterwards from the person telling you they went vegan. This is awesome. But the people that your pressure pushes away just leave, and you never hear from them again. Did they make a positive change, or did they double down, or even become anti-vegan? We don’t know, but what we do know is that there’s more risk with high pressure advocacy.

Paul’s inbox will likely only fill up with the wins. Tobias made a version of this point in the moment:

“It’s a nice story. You can’t build a whole theory on it. I don’t agree that, ‘oh, who cares what meat eaters say’. They’re the audience we want to reach. We should care about them. They might not always say the truth, but there are ways to get at the truth. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

“We already tried it”

There’s one more exchange to flag before round two, because I have a feeling it’s going to come back.

Every time Tobias suggested AV could reach more people with different hooks, Paul had the same answer:

“We have done your approach. We had an environmental message and a health message in AV for three years. People were showing up to Cubes for years just saying whatever they wanted to say. We learned that was actually not the most effective way to get people to go vegan.”

AV did run the multi-message approach at global scale and abandoned it deliberately. But I can’t help but notice that the evidence is what the organisation experienced and concluded from the inside, by listening to what the people they speak to are telling them. Paul spent a good chunk of this conversation warning us not to trust what people say about their own feelings. This is a point I hope to explore in round two.

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Where I stand

I came up through AV. Paul reminded me of it on the recording, and he’s right, I was part of the organisation when the outreach was open season and I attended the workshop where the protocol was first presented. I’ve stood at many Cubes. I know exactly what it feels like to have those conversations, and I know the pull of the direct approach, because the direct approach is honest in a way that feels like it honours the animals.

These days, if you’ve read anything I’ve written here, you’ll see I am probably a blend of the two positions, but I lean more towards Tobias’s side. That’s why I think I’m in a good position to referee it. I’ve lived in Paul’s world and that’s my natural state too. I’m a fiery, direct person and straight shooting is my favourite way to talk. But through researching what’s most likely to move people based on the best data we have, rather than doing what makes me feel good, or what feels right to me, I think behavioural nudging is likely more suitable for creating change in the general public as opposed to demanding change outright.

What happens next

At the end of round one, they made each other a promise. Paul would read How to Create a Vegan World. Tobias would come to a Cube event and run the AV protocol himself, on the street, on real people.

Both of them kept it, and I’m headed to Amsterdam right now to film Tobias testing out the protocol at the Another Dam Week outreach event, and the follow-up discussion.

You can watch the full original discussion here. It goes much deeper than this post, including the truffle pasta dilemma Tobias entertained in front of me, the smoking study Paul pulled up mid-debate, and where they landed on comparing this to the fight against human slavery.

Watch it before the follow-up drops. Then tell me in the comments: who do you find yourself agreeing with more, and why?

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If you really cared about animals, you’d push for an end to all of their exploitation, not just the worst of it. I used to make arguments like that a lot, but factory farming might just be one of the most important things for animal advocates to focus on.

Matthew Glover co-founded Veganuary, one of the biggest behaviour change campaigns our movement has ever produced. He’s been advocating for animals for over 15 years. And his new project, Project Slingshot, does something that might make some vegans uncomfortable: it doesn’t ask anyone to go vegan. Actually, it doesn’t mention the word at all.

Matthew’s reason for that might surprise you:

“I actually think we’re going to create more vegans by not asking people to go vegan than actually asking people to go vegan.”

On Veganuary, he said:

“I still think Veganuary is great and we want it to grow. So it’s not that I personally have dropped the idea of promoting veganism.”

Matthew still supports Veganuary and vegan messaging, despite trying a different strategy. I feel it’s important to clarify that before we get into the rest of the interview.

This post covers the highlights of our conversation. I saved a few questions for the video, the last one I asked him is especially interesting and his answer deserves a full listen. More on that at the end.

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Meeting people where they are

Depending on the country, between 70-90% of meat, dairy and eggs comes from factory farms. Most people are funding that without really realising it, without understanding it, or without thinking about it enough.

But what’s interesting is that most people in the West already think factory farming is a problem. They’re not on the fence, they’re against it. Matthew’s Project Slingshot is aiming to meet them there.

There’s a term in psychology for this, stage matching. If you’ve got an ask, you work out where the person you’re talking to actually is, and match your ask to that stage. Project Slingshot’s read is that the public is already at the stage of disliking factory farming, so that’s where they’re meeting them. They’re working where people already are and building from there.

So the message isn’t “go vegan.” As Matthew explained:

“We’re not here to tell you what to eat. We trust your intelligence. Go and do your research. We’re just here to tell you that you’re being lied to.”

Their strapline is “Don’t buy it.”

And according to Matthew, dropping the vegan demand changes how people respond.

“People are less defensive when they’re looking at our content. They’re more open-minded. They’re coming to us and then they’re asking us, ‘No, actually, what should I eat? How should I avoid factory farming?’”

He called it a Trojan horse. Bring people in with satire, wit and transparency, let them arrive at the obvious conclusion themselves, and you’ve got someone who feels like they worked it out rather than someone who feels cornered.

It’s already working

Slingshot is piloting in London, and its first campaign targets the use of gas chambers to kill pigs in the UK. They made an explainer video about it and showed it to 18 non-vegans, filming their reactions.

“Out of 18 people, all of them agreed that it was inhumane. But by watching it, they started questioning, can killing animals ever be humane? Many of them started saying, ‘I’m going to go vegetarian, I’m going to go vegan, I’m not going to eat pork anymore.’”

No one was asked to go vegan, but some seemed like they were heading towards that direction anyway.

Then there’s the political side. They built a petition to ban the gas chambers that’s already passed 30,000 signatures. They also built an email your MP tool. You put in your postcode, it finds your MP, and a pre-written email goes out. The responses started coming back.

“Over 50 (MPs) have actually responded. A lot of these politicians are saying, ‘We weren’t fully aware of this. Thanks for letting us know. I’m going to raise a question.’”

The leader of the Lib Dems has come out on their side. So has the leader of the SNP in Westminster. Even Nigel Farage’s team has responded. They’ve also had over 7,000 emails sent to the CEO of McDonald’s.

“Our job is to be this upstream narrative pressure engine that’s putting pressure on the system.”

Matthew described Slingshot as a radical flank, but a professional, creative, well thought through one. The idea is to make enough noise that the door opens for other organisations to walk through and negotiate.

Making factory farming toxic

So how do you actually do this? Matthew was blunt about one thing first. As a movement, we haven’t always looked as good as we could.

“Top notch, world class design from now onwards. That’s what people will see.”

Then there’s the structure. Every campaign follows the same three beats:

1. The industry lie

2. The “Don’t buy it”

3. A satirical reality

On the gas chambers campaign, that reality reads: the pigs get gassed and you get gaslit.

Satire is built into all of it, it’s a core part of the strategy.

“We can have fun making fun of the opposition, because they don’t know how to handle it when people are taking the piss out of them.”

Their strategy is to point at the corporations behind all of this, companies like Hook 2 Sisters, Avara and Cranswick.

“These are the bad guys. It’s their fault, not yours as an individual.”

This allows the public and the animal advocates to focus on a common enemy.

And they want to bring in celebrities. Their first big video, featuring Diane Morgan, Jen Brister, Dr Amir Khan and Matt Pritchard, pulled in 2.9 million views.

The end goal is a kind of social shift.

“I want to get to a point where it’s embarrassing to say you work at Cranswick in the same way as it’s embarrassing to say you work at Philip Morris tobacco.”

“I’m abolitionist at heart. We all are.”

In our circles, “let’s focus on factory farming” is the kind of thing that gets you branded a “welfarist” who’s letting the animals down. But Matthew isn’t a welfarist.

“I’ve been promoting veganism for 15 years. I’m abolitionist at heart. We all are.”

If factory farming ended tomorrow, a lot of people would stop consuming animal products. Not because they’d been argued into it, but because they wouldn’t be able to get them at any reasonable price. Plant based options would be the obvious, available, affordable choice. The end of factory farming would drag a lot of farming and animal exploitation down with it.

Matthew spoke about a shared movement goal: ending factory farming in the UK by 2040.

“We need a united front within the movement.”

I agree with him on this. I think this sort of strategy should be taken seriously in abolitionist spaces.

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Don’t shoot your own allies

Some vegans see a non-vegan (or vegan) campaigning against factory farming and immediately go after them for not going far enough. I brought up a recent example of Gary Yourofsky speaking against this sort of thing.

Engage the people who aren’t vegan, sure, but don’t tear someone down while they’re doing something good.

If someone is willing to spread a message about gas chambers and “Franken-Chickens”, they should be the last people we attack, not the first. And underneath all this is something simple about how Matthew sees people.

“I actually believe most people are inherently good. It took me 37 years to go vegan myself. I don’t think I was a bad person, I was misguided.”

And his ask to the vegans who are sceptical of his strategy is modest.

“Just give us a break. Let us do it. If in two years’ time we’ve been always on the underground talking about these issues and we’ve never made a difference, then fine, it didn’t work.”

He’s been here before. Veganuary got hammered at the start too. “It’s just one month, you’ve got to go vegan for life”, all of this sort of criticism. But much of the criticism quietened down when people saw Veganuary was actually doing a lot of good.

Watch the full conversation

In the video we get into a lot more, including how Slingshot is actually landing big non-vegan names where so many of us have failed, and the long game of taking this from London to the EU and the US.

But the part I’d really watch for is the last question I asked Matthew. I asked him if the him from 15 years ago, the one going on demonstrations and leafleting on street corners, would look at what he’s doing now and call him a sellout. His answer is great, and I recommend you watch the full interview.

I used to think talking about factory farming was a cop out. These days, I’m thinking that going hard on factory farming could be a solid strategy for getting us closer to the end of most animal exploitation. What do you think?

If you found this useful, share it with an advocate you think should see it.

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That’s one of the top comments under Tobias Leenaert’s recent Facebook post, sarcastically mocking his recent article suggesting Gaz Oakley (the recently announced ex-vegan influencer) could still be an ally despite no longer being vegan.

The Vegan Strategist

The team is bigger than the label

I’m always interested to see the vegan community’s response when a vegan celebrity jumps ship…

Read more

3 months ago · 72 likes · 24 comments · Tobias Leenaert

Another commenter announced they now partake in domestic abuse of their husband, for health reasons, but requests to please make a post about how much of an ally they still are. Someone else asked if a feminist who beats his wife every day is still a feminist. Racists in anti-racist movements, child abusers in anti-child-abuse groups. Scroll the thread and you’ll find various versions of the same comment.

Before we get into it, I’d like to share something very relevant: I used to make these exact arguments myself. For years. I also criticised Tobias specifically. I would say things like “he’s just a welfarist” and a “fake vegan”. Actually, I said these sorts of things about anyone who promoted any message other than “go vegan”, or anyone I decided was being “apologetic”. I’m not writing this to look down on anyone, and if you read to the end I think that’ll be clear. I’m also not writing it to let Gaz Oakley off the hook, I criticised his decision in my last post. I’m writing it because I know these arguments well. They used to be mine.

“Would you say that in this situation?!”

The argument usually goes like this. Someone suggests something pragmatic, in this case, that a person who isn’t vegan, Gaz, could still be useful to animals. The response is to swap the animals out for humans.

“You’d never call a racist an ally to Black Lives Matter.”

“You’d never welcome an abuser into a group for abuse survivors.”

“So why would you do it for animals? Aha, gotcha. You’re a speciesist. You hold animals to a lower standard, and that’s exactly why animals are never going to win.”

I remember how satisfying it was to use these arguments. And if you ask:

• Should we use strategic, incremental activism?

• Should we aim for and take welfare-level wins along the way?

• Should we ally with people who aren’t fully on our side, who might even be participating in or profiting from the thing we’re trying to end?

You’ll get “no, no, and no.”

But that’s where things start to fall apart. Because the movements people are using to make these comparisons actually did all three. Almost every successful movement in history did all three.

How they actually won

Take the issue that gets used the most: slavery. After years of using the types of arguments we just talked about, I had a very rude awakening when I learned the actual strategies of slavery abolitionists.

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The campaigners who founded the British abolition movement in 1787 made a choice at the very start. They didn’t campaign to end slavery, they campaigned to end the transatlantic slave trade, the shipping of people, while slavery itself stayed completely legal. That was the strategy. Go for the smaller, winnable ask first. Slavery itself wouldn’t be abolished for another 46 years.

It gets even more interesting. In 1806, they passed a bill that dramatically reduced the trade. They got it through partly with the votes of slave owners, because it happened to serve the slave owners’ business interests. Allying with the people committing the atrocity, everything the comment section says you should never do.

And when the movement finally turned to slavery itself in 1823, the organisation they founded was officially called the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery. “Mitigation” and “Gradual”. In the name. One of the most important anti-slavery organisations in history put “make slavery less bad” before “end slavery” in its messaging, and spent years campaigning for legally enforced welfare improvements for enslaved people while slavery continued.

Imagine a vegan organisation today calling itself the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Animal Exploitation. You already know what the comments would say, but that organisation ended slavery in the British Empire.

Even the final victory came with huge compromise. The 1833 Act handed £20 million to slave owners as compensation. Around 40% of the government’s entire annual budget was paid to over 40,000 people for the loss of their “property”. The freed slaves got nothing. Most of them had to keep working unpaid for years under an “apprenticeship” system. The abolitionists took the deal, because the deal ended slavery.

But it’s not just Britain, and it’s not just slavery.

Frederick Douglass, a man who escaped slavery himself, allied with and campaigned for Abraham Lincoln. The same Abraham Lincoln who had enforced laws forcing escaped slaves to be returned to their owners, who promoted shipping black Americans out of the country, a man Frederick Douglass himself publicly called the white man's president. And he worked with him anyway, because he understood that this deeply flawed ally was the fastest road to ending slavery.

Martin Luther King Jr. stood next to Lyndon B. Johnson as he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson had spent twenty years opposing every single civil rights measure that came up for a vote. He once called the push for this legislation a farce and a sham. He then passed watered-down civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960, which many advocates of the day hated. But those weak bills built the road to the real one, and the movement worked with him through all of it.

The suffragettes accepted a law in 1918 that gave the vote only to women over 30 who owned property. Younger women, poorer women and working women were all excluded. They took the partial win, kept fighting, and got the full one ten years later.

I could keep going, but the point is that the world we live in now, where it’s unthinkable to consider a racist an ally to anti-racism, was built by people doing the exact things many vegans now condemn in the animal movement.

Reaping the rewards of strategies we oppose

So here’s the interesting situation, and I don’t know if there’s a name for it.

The vegans attacking these pragmatic viewpoints and strategies, like I did not so long ago, are actually reaping the rewards of the strategies they now oppose for animals. The reason the comparisons to slavery, feminism and other issues work is because they’re shocking. The idea of a racist being part of the solution to a group opposing racism? Unthinkable. And that’s because those movements were so successful. They were successful because of incremental wins, welfare-level changes, and alliances with deeply imperfect, even complicit people. The strategies worked so thoroughly that people can no longer imagine a world where they were ever needed.

The vegans opposing the use of these strategies now, are using the results of the strategy to argue against the strategy. I find that last sentence tricky to get my head around, even though I wrote it, so let me try and make it clearer:

1. Most successful social justice movements succeeded at least in part by using pragmatic strategies, often compromising and making imperfect alliances along the way

2. This led to racial and sexual discrimination, for example, being punishable by law, as well as other issues, and created a society that largely condemns many of these issues

3. As a result, the society we now live in couldn’t imagine ever compromising or making imperfect alliances. Those movements were so effective at changing society that it seems unthinkable

4. Modern-day advocates argue against compromise and imperfect alliances in the animal movement by asking if you would ever do that for say issues pertaining to racism or sexism, when the reality is that did happen, and the only reason they find the thought so repulsive is because of the success of said movements that used those strategies

5. In conclusion: they’re using the results of the strategy to argue against the strategy

We can’t have it both ways.

Either we stop making those specific comparisons, because we reject how those movements actually got to where they are. Or we keep making them, and we accept that the only reason we can, is that those movements did exactly what people like Tobias are suggesting we do now.

When those movements were in their infancy, when the thing they opposed was normal, legal, and practised by almost everyone, they compromised. They took partial wins and they worked with people complicit in the harm. The animal movement is still in its infancy right now. Over 95% of the world participates in the thing we oppose. We are where they were when they did all of this.

To be clear, I’m not saying we can never compare animal issues to human ones. I just did. This entire article is built on those comparisons. The comparison between the victims is valid. A pig’s suffering doesn’t matter less because she’s a pig, that’s the whole point of rejecting speciesism. What doesn’t always track though is when we’re comparing across time. The “gotcha” statement of “you wouldn’t do this with racism” for example takes today’s attitudes to racism, attitudes that only exist because the movement already won (mostly), and applies them to a movement that hasn’t won anything close to that. If we’re going to compare, it should be like for like. Compare us to the abolitionists of 1787, not to the anti-racists of 2026. And the abolitionists of 1787 did a lot of what people like Tobias are suggesting.

The strongest version of the objection

I want to discuss the best counter-argument to all of this.

Someone could say: “There’s a difference between working with imperfect people and celebrating them”. Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon B. Johnson were flawed men moving toward the cause. Gaz is moving away from it. He didn’t just fall short of veganism, he left it, publicly, while participating in the harm itself.

I think that’s the real reason it stings so much. But notice what the objection has become. It’s not “you can’t ally with imperfect people”, it’s now an argument about how we treat one specific person who left. And that’s a much smaller claim. It doesn’t touch welfare wins, it doesn’t touch strategic alliances. It’s basically just a disagreement about Gaz Oakley’s Instagram.

And even on that smaller question, I’d ask: what does treating him as an enemy actually achieve for animals? I write more on how to respond to ex-vegans here.

Here’s what I think it achieves: not much good. I’m disappointed in Gaz too, but what concerns me far more than Gaz Oakley is the multibillion-dollar animal agriculture industries that spend hundreds of millions every single year on marketing and PR, designed and implemented by teams with decades of experience in manipulating the public into buying their products and turning on vegans. I think that’s where most of our energy should be going.

So why are some so focused on Gaz instead? I think it’s because, unlike those industries, Gaz is a real face with a real name. We can see him, we can DM him, we can attack him online as one individual person. He’s a face of something we disagree with. The industry has no face. But in the grand scheme of things, his influence is a grain of sand compared to what we’re actually fighting.

And he could become a useful tool for them, if we keep pushing him that way. Or he could keep being a tool for the animal movement. Gaz said himself, in his own post, that he still opposes factory farming. Guess where the majority of that funding, advertising and psychological manipulation we mentioned comes from? You guessed it, factory farming. So we have a choice: push him to the point where the only place he feels accepted is among agriculture interests and the people who support them, or hold onto the fact that he could still be useful to the animals. Encourage that and show him the way. That’s probably the stuff we should be DMing him.

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What allies can do

Allies aren’t just people we tolerate. They can be tools for good, if we allow it.

Liv Boeree is a poker champion, and not a vegan. She saw a single post about a pig in a crate and couldn’t shake it. So she pledged 20% of her next tournament winnings to factory-farmed animals, then won $2.8 million. She donated $560,000 of it. And the money was just a small part. She started talking to her huge following about factory farming, and she got Lewis Bollard, one of the most important funders in our movement, onto the main TED stage. Possibly the first talk in TED’s history dedicated entirely to factory farming, because one non-vegan decided to open a door.

Lewis Bollard then went on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast (1.3m subscribers). Dwarkesh isn’t vegan either. He pledged to match $250,000 in donations to fight factory farming, and his audience, tech people, most of whom had never engaged with animal issues in their lives, met it within two days. The Stripe CEO Patrick Collison threw in another $250,000 match. Within weeks the fundraiser hit $2 million. That’s about 1% of what the entire global movement raises in a year, from one podcast episode hosted by a non-vegan.

Anyone who takes issue with this has probably never tried fundraising for animal causes. It’s incredibly hard. Practically everything we want to do for animals requires funding, and, as Lewis Bollard pointed out, the entire global budget for farmed animal advocacy is smaller than what one New York museum spends in a year. These people didn’t go vegan, but they moved real money and real attention to the animals anyway. I don’t think we’re in a position to turn away friends like that, even if we (and the animals of course) would rather they were also vegan.

I don’t like it either

I want to be honest about something else. This softer messaging, the welfarism, the reductionism, the allies, I’m not a huge fan of it. I don’t like it. Also, I know Tobias Leenaert personally, and it’s not his preference either.

I have seen what we’re doing to these animals. I’ve seen the pain in their eyes. I’ve been undercover, and I swear some of the animals looking right back at me were begging me to help them. But I couldn’t. It breaks my heart to think about it.

So yes, it feels wrong to suggest incremental change, reductionism, welfare. It feels wrong to consider someone funding anything like this an ally. But there’s a difference between feelings and reality. It might not feel right for you. It doesn’t for me, which is why I don’t do it in my advocacy. But I still acknowledge it as a valid strategy. There is historical precedent for the success of these strategies, and we have decades of research in psychology and human behaviour that give them a lot of backing. There can be a distinction between:

• What you like

• What you’d personally do

• What you can acknowledge probably works

Not every strategy will fall into all three categories, and that’s okay.

A compromise we accept

If you still think compromising for the greater good is never acceptable, I want to give you one example that I think most vegans already agree with.

Undercover investigators.

Investigators get jobs in slaughterhouses, on farms, inside hunting groups, to document what happens there. And that work requires them to do things to animals that they are completely against. Things they’d never otherwise do. It goes against everything they believe. But they understand that a compromise has to be made for the greater good. To expose it, to change the world, they have to go into the belly of the beast.

Most vegans understand this. Most vegans benefit from it. A huge number of vegans went vegan because of these people and the footage they brought out. It shifted their entire paradigm. To turn on investigators and say “you shouldn’t do that, it’s against vegan principles”, when the only reason we hold vegan principles is their work, would make no sense.

Telling the people using the best research we have on human behaviour and movement strategy that they shouldn’t do it because it clashes with your principles is the same move. It’s telling the investigator not to investigate.

Where this leaves us

Compromises have to be made, and we’re not always going to like it. It’s dirty, it’s messy, because life is dirty and messy. It’s nearly impossible to go through life applying our principles religiously to every single situation, especially if we actually want to change anything.

And to be clear, the principles are valid. I hold them. This isn't about abandoning them, and it isn't about abandoning our feelings either. I get very angry too. It's about channelling that passion and emotion into what is likely to get the best outcomes for animals. Public anger is a powerful tool, but it works best in a world where the majority already agrees with us. That's the world these strategies are trying to build. No one can say that these strategies offer a 100% foolproof way to win for animals, but we should at least view them as valid strategies to try and win.

If pragmatism and uncomfortable alliances are what it takes to reach a world where exploiting animals is so unthinkable that nobody would ever do it, where the comparisons made in that comments section at the start actually work, because the job is finally done, isn’t that something we should consider? It seems the movements we keep using in our “gotchas” answered that question a long time ago.

Have you used these comparisons yourself? Where do you stand on it now?

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He made the controversial decision to have chickens on his homestead. He has spoken about the great lives they have and how happy he is to provide that for them. On a recent podcast, he also raised the idea of eating invasive species, framing it as environmentally justified.

At first, he wasn’t eating the eggs from his chickens. He was giving them to friends and neighbours. That changed. He announced recently that he had been eating eggs, and fish, in his “no longer vegan” announcement. Gaz drifted from being environmentally conscious and ethically minded, to what appears to be less ethically minded, but still environmentally conscious. That drift is what I want to get into today.

Why did Gaz Oakley become ex-vegan?

Firstly, it appears that Gaz was genuinely vegan, and is now ex-vegan. If that take seems crazy to you, I recommend reading my other article “The Truth About Ex-Vegans: A Shift We Can’t Ignore” before this one.

There is speculation as to why Gaz decided to no longer be vegan, and there are many accusations. Many are accusing him of only making content on vegan food to get rich and famous off the popularity of plant based cooking, and that he has now bailed out because it’s less popular.

I don’t find this very compelling personally. In the world of content creation, there are far easier and less controversial ways to build a name and platform that can earn you a lot more money than vegan or plant-based content.

Another accusation that seems to be gaining momentum is that Gaz Oakley is becoming some sort of fascist. That he’s headed down the “far-right pipeline”. I don’t find this particularly compelling either. Gaz has become increasingly passionate about self-sufficiency, localism, and "natural living", but these aren’t “fascist” or “far-right” interests. I’ve mostly seen these sentiments echoed by progressive activists who speak on indigenous issues and the impact of colonisation on food systems.

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Gaz Oakley had his ethical lines drawn, but he crossed them. He claims he did this due to health issues (which remain unspecified), but many suspected this move was on the horizon as he continued venturing further into “environmentally friendly living”. I’m not convinced by the “health issues” rhetoric (although I’m happy to be proven wrong and will wait for Gaz’s elaboration, if he ever makes one). What I think we’re actually seeing with Gaz Oakley is what I call “unrestricted environmentalism”. Environmentalism at the expense of sentient beings.

The danger of environmentalism

The environmentalism movement has grown exponentially over the last 10-15 years. It has great cultural relevance, so much so that politicians debate on it and use various arguments for and against to try and win voters. As an animal advocate, I often see attempts to paint veganism as environmentally destructive in order to try and argue against going vegan.

Some of the biggest influencers out there use these sorts of environmental anti-vegan arguments. I doubt it’s because they wholeheartedly believe the arguments are correct. Even a small amount of research proves them wrong. I’d guess it’s more because they know these environmental arguments appeal to many people. This shows how environmentalism really has transcended from activism and academia into the general public discussion.

But there’s a huge problem with environmentalism, environmentalism without limits specifically. Because if it has no limits, then there is no limit to what can be done in the name of “saving the planet”.

Eugenics for the planet?

An intervention that could reduce the human population would be net positive for the environment, for example. I wonder how Gaz Oakley would feel about such an intervention. Say it’s something like education on procreation, encouraging people to have less kids. That seems relatively harmless. I’m sure many people would support it (especially anti-natalists).

But lets get more controversial. What if it’s an intervention that reduces the human population specifically in the most environmentally destructive parts of the world. The worst CO2 emitters per capita are Palau (an island country near the Philippines), Qatar and Kuwait. The worst countries in terms of air quality, biodiversity, deforestation, fisheries, water, and waste are India, Myanmar and Vietnam.

So, how would you feel about an intervention that specifically targets lowering the population in those regions? Uncomfortable, maybe? I imagine some of you feel this is too close to eugenics, and I see where you’re coming from. But if we’re looking at it strictly through the lens of environmentalism, without limits, it’s a great strategy.

And what if these interventions were invasive, non-consensual. For example, getting birth control in the water supply or the food, or worse, introducing deadly viruses to these countries. To reiterate, reducing the population would be net positive for the environment, reducing it in the most environmentally destructive parts of the world would be even more positive for the environment… but the ethical issues are clear to see here.

Thankfully, very few people believe it’s okay to violate someone’s bodily autonomy or kill them for the environment. But when we change the species, some people appear to argue the opposite. Some believe it is okay to violate someone’s bodily autonomy or kill them for the environment, so long as they aren’t human.

Environmentally friendly violence

Time and time again we see these arguments for homesteading and regenerative agriculture. All we need is to do away with these large factory farming systems and return to a more humble, environmentally friendly food system. And while factory farming is the world’s most urgent moral emergency, that doesn’t make environmentally friendly use of animals a good thing. Environmentally friendly exploitation and killing of individuals with personalities, emotions and a will to live, human, or other animal, is still exploitation and killing.

Plant-based diets have been proven to be more environmentally friendly than their animal-based counterparts, but if they weren’t, I don’t think that would automatically make it okay to continue with an animal-based food system. I don’t see the point of “saving the planet” if saving it means living in an unjust, violent society where exploitation and harming the innocent is justified in the name of environmentalism.

If an environmentalist is happy to exploit and kill animals to “save the planet”, but wouldn’t do the same to humans (even when it could have an even greater impact in “saving the planet”) then I’d ask them to elaborate on why. A cow, pig, or chicken is sentient, has a personality, feels emotions and pain like a human.

Are they as intelligent as us? Well, that depends on how you measure intelligence. Can you communicate with your unborn child? No. Chickens can. But if we’re defining intelligence in the ways we normally define it in society, then no, these animals aren’t as intelligent as we are. That’s what some people cite as the reason to treat animals worse. The reason it’s okay to exploit and kill them for things we want from them. “They aren’t the same as us, they aren’t as intelligent.”

But we don’t apply that way of thinking to less intelligent humans (thankfully). We don’t exploit and kill those with developmental disabilities, for example. Good people generally understand that someone being less intelligent than us doesn’t mean we should take advantage of them, and that includes other animals.

Another very common reason people give is,

“Well, they aren’t human”

We mentioned eugenics earlier, and how it’s wrong to try and control the birthrate or kill certain populations for environmental reasons. The argument was basically,

“You were born in the wrong country and it’s polluting too much, therefore it’s okay for us to reduce your population”

Well, this is also close to eugenics logic. The “they’re not human” argument is basically saying,

“You were born as the wrong species of animal, you’re not human, therefore it’s okay to exploit and kill you”

Or to make the eugenics logic more clear,

“You weren’t born with the genetics and DNA I think is important, you’re not human, therefore it’s okay to exploit and kill you”

I don’t think I need to go into detail as to why this line of thinking is dangerous and wrong. It echoes some of the world’s most destructive, violent ideologies and their proponents throughout history.

Self-sufficiency, localism, and “natural living” are not inherently bad concepts. Environmentally conscious people who want to feel more connected to life while doing their part for the planet are not all bad people. But without limits, these concepts almost always lead to exploitation and killing. Giving an animal a nice paddock and love while they’re alive only makes the betrayal more evident when you inevitably hold that knife to their throat.

I hope those exploring the self-sufficiency route like Gaz Oakley realise this before it’s too late. Environmentalism at the expense of sentient life creates a worse world, not a better one.

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is an independent researcher and Substack writer who spent the last few years doing something most of us haven’t: fact checking anti-AI headlines. Andy is so confident in his research that he offers $300 to anyone who can find a significant error in his work. He’s already paid out once on an old post from when he was just starting out, and he stands by everything since.

This post covers the highlights of our conversation. We got into an interesting discussion near the end where one of his answers surprised me, it might surprise you too. I’ll leave that for the video, it deserves the full context and explanation from Andy himself.

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“You’re showing up to a gunfight with a knife”

AI in animal farming is currently a $2 billion global market, and it’s growing at about 15% a year. That’s a conservative estimate. These industries are using AI to optimise feed, maximise output, and make animal agriculture more profitable. Meanwhile, some in the animal advocacy community won’t touch it.

Andy didn’t hold back:

“If they’re not using AI, I think at this point they’re at a disadvantage. And that would make me incredibly sad as someone who really wants our team to win.”

Andy has been vegan for ten years so he’s not coming at this from the outside. His point isn’t that AI is perfect or beyond criticism, it’s that refusing to use it while the other side scales up is, in his words, kneecapping ourselves.

The “AI uses a 500ml water bottle” claim - where did it come from?

This story was everywhere. Euronews, Forbes, the Washington Post. The claim made is that every ChatGPT conversation uses a 500ml bottle of water. It spread fast, appealing to the growing number of people feeling uncomfortable with AI.

Andy traced it back to its source, and the methodology doesn’t hold up.

“The article itself was assuming you’re sending like 10 to 20 prompts per email. And if you actually look into the methodology, there’s a lot of weird stuff going on. They seem to be assuming AI is running on hardware that was six years old at the time, and AI hardware becomes incredibly optimised, incredibly fast. Every five years or so, the average energy cost of doing the same thing on an AI chip drops by a factor of about a hundred.”

There’s more: they were also counting water used offsite, including water evaporated from lakes at hydroelectric plants, as part of the cost of the ChatGPT prompts.

“The (hydroelectric) plant would be there otherwise. The lake is also capturing a lot of water from rain. There are all these weird questions.”

Add it all up: calculations based on the wrong hardware, assuming people are sending ChatGPT 10-20 more prompts than needed to write an email, and attributing non-direct water use. When correcting for these errors, the real figure is closer to one millilitre per prompt. Not 500ml, one.

One hamburger = tens of thousands of ChatGPT prompts (in water)

This is a comparison I wanted Andy to talk about because I think it’s something the animal advocacy movement really should know.

“If you look at the cost of beef, especially where beef cows are raised on alfalfa, which is an especially water-hungry plant, the cost of any one beef burger is on the order of at minimum tens of thousands of chatbot prompts, even if you divide by the number of people eating the cow altogether.”

He was careful to flag he wasn’t engaging in whataboutism. He doesn’t say “you’re vegan so ignore everything else”, his point is more specific:

“Of all the people in the world, if vegans are feeling especially guilty about these incredibly tiny amounts of water that AI can add to your footprint, I think you’re kind of missing the bigger picture. It would take something like at least a thousand chatbot prompts per day to raise your daily water footprint by 1% because most of our water footprint isn’t actually in our homes. It’s mainly in the food we eat. The most efficient way to cut your water footprint is to be vegan. Those cuts matter a lot. Saying ‘never use AI’ is almost like saying ‘if you want to save money, buy one fewer gumball per month.’”

Golf courses vs. data centres

You’ve probably seen some scary headlines about AI data centres being built in deserts and other areas short on water. Andy made a comparison that gets almost no news coverage.

“Golf courses in America are currently using significantly more water than all the data centres in America combined, and generating way less tax revenue per unit of water. In Arizona, nearby golf courses use something like 30 times as much water as all data centres in the state.”

And then he brought it back to agriculture:

“Something like 20% of Arizona’s water is used to grow alfalfa, which is mostly used for animal agriculture, either in the US or shipped overseas. Almost all actual water issues are downstream of agriculture. It’s very easy to find other things that completely dwarf AI use almost wherever you go.”

Why doesn’t agriculture get the same scrutiny? Andy’s take was blunt: that farmers occupy an almost untouchable place in our culture. I agree, they’re almost viewed as gods to the average person. We don’t criticise the people who grow our food, and anyone who does faces the wrath of lobbyists and the public. This is something animal advocates understand better than most.

How to use AI as an advocate and where Andy draws the line

I asked Andy: what does he use AI for, and what lines won’t he cross?

On the lines he won’t cross:

“I don’t use it for any kind of social companionship. That specifically freaks me out quite a bit. I think the world in general is a very lonely place, and I worry that it really corrodes something fundamental to the social fabric.”

On the echo chamber trap:

“It’s very easy to make AI argue for anything you want. It’s still quite sycophantic. I think trying really hard not to use AI as a weapon that just hammers your opponents and instead asking it to challenge you is really important. Where might I be wrong here?”

That last point is something I feel strongly about for advocates. Before your next debate, online or in person, put your argument through an AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude or Google Gemini, and ask it to challenge you. Ask it where you’re weakest, ask it what the best counter-arguments are. This is something you literally couldn’t do before AI unless you had access to a seasoned advocate willing to spend at least an hour stress-testing your positions. Now you can do it anytime, any day, for free, and it takes a few minutes.

Andy put it well:

“There have been so many times when I’m writing something and I realise via AI that a central argument I’m making is incorrect. Every single time, it feels like a gut punch. You have to acclimate to that over time. At its best, AI can hopefully be a stress test of that impulse in ourselves, to resist just wanting to win any debate regardless of how correct we are.”

Is AI going to be net positive or negative for animals?

I saved this question for last in our conversation, and Andy gave an honest answer that I have a lot of respect for.

“I have absolutely no idea. The Industrial Revolution was on net just incredibly good for human lives, and I think it was just so clearly net bad for animals in terms of our new ability to farm animals at scale and factory farm them. If AI is just a continuation of that pattern, I can see so many worlds where factory farming just gets much more entrenched. It’s going to matter a lot what we actually do with it.”

And then this, which I think is a great takeaway from the whole conversation:

“I really need animal advocates thinking about this incredibly consequential new technology. If we’re seeding that ground and we’re all saying ‘oh, but it uses a few drops of water every time’, I think that’s a catastrophic mistake. Even if you use AI and come away hating it, it’s just so important to at least understand it. We really, really need you on the ball here.”

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Watch the full conversation

In the video we explore these topics much further, getting into AI plagiarism, whether AI can genuinely be used to debate animal ethics, and the topic where Andy’s thoughts surprised me: who actually benefits from people being afraid of AI?

That last part gets a bit conspiratorial, I’ll let you make your own mind up. But I think you’ll enjoy hearing Andy’s take, and seeing where our opinions differ.

Andy’s Substack is at blog.andymasley.com, I recommend checking him out if you want all the data, and subscribe to stay informed. He plans to start writing on animal related topics too, which I’m looking forward to.

If you found this post useful, share it with an advocate you think should see it. I understand the concerns around AI, I share some of them too. But as animal advocates, we’re already at a massive disadvantage. We’re fighting for the most oppressed, most disregarded, exploited, abused beings in the world. I don’t think we can afford to be leaving such powerful tools on the table, especially when the other side is already using them against animals.

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In the post, I was holding a sign. It read:

“You can’t wear the title ‘environmentalist’ and not be vegan.

You can’t wear the title ‘feminist’ and not be vegan.

You can’t wear the title ‘animal lover’ and not be vegan.

Well, you can. But you also have to wear the title ‘hypocrite’.”

And oh was there backlash. “I better not run into you in Manchester" was the comment left by my ex-colleague, one of many angry visitors to this post. It got a bit hairy. What was my response? I doubled down. I argued with everyone. I thought the backlash proved I’d hit a nerve, and I’d hit the nail on the head. I felt vindicated.

I was wrong.

One friend did go vegan off the back of that post, which is great. But looking back in hindsight, she is a dog photographer and already connected to animals, she was probably some way there before she saw my sign. For everyone else? I’d held up a mirror, called them a hypocrite, and watched them do what most people do when you attack their identity: defend themselves aggressively and leave.

Billie Eilish just did something very similar, and I find myself in a funny position of agreeing with what she said, but wishing she hadn’t said it in that way.

What Billie Eilish said

An interviewer asked Billie for a hill she would die on, she said:

“Y’all not gonna like me for this one. Eating meat is inherently wrong.

Sorry. You can eat meat, go for it, you can love animals, but you can’t do both.”

I’m vegan. Obviously, I’m biased when a celebrity speaks up for animals. I love that she’s not afraid to use her platform to speak up for them, and I am so appreciative of her for doing it when so many don’t for fear of it harming their career. I want more people with huge platforms to say something. But I also understand why people are pissed. As much as I’d love to just raise the flag and get behind Billie with all my vegan vigour, these things aren’t as simple as she made it sound, and I think glossing over the nuance is at least a small part of why some reacted badly.

Is eating meat inherently wrong?

For the hundreds of millions of people who eat meat and animal products for habit, tradition, and pleasure, Billie is 100% correct. Breeding animals, using and killing them for those things is inherently wrong, no matter how “high welfare” the farm is. Saying that though, the vast majority of animal products come from factory farms anyway. Factory farms are, in plain terms, massive torture centres. If someone is consuming animal products simply because they’ve always done it and they like it, they’re supporting that extreme violence to animals for pleasure. This is a reality that’s difficult to face, but it’s reality nonetheless.

But what Billie said felt very absolute and had none of that nuance or context. For some small number of people in the world, removing animal products would come with serious consequences. I’m a vegan, and I don’t want a single person dying by switching to a plant-based diet or going vegan. That’s not the goal. The goal is to build a world where animal-free eating is accessible, affordable, and the norm. But the world isn’t there yet, and I think pretending the situation is any other way isn’t useful. We need to be aware of the difference between the “ought” and the “is”. I speak more on that point here.

On the second statement, that you can’t love animals and eat them, she’s mostly right. People who consume animal products while claiming to be animal lovers will say, when pressed, that it’s for nutrition, for health, for survival. But that’s not really true for most. Most people eat animal products because they’ve always eaten them, because everyone around them eats like this, and because they like it. That’s it. There’s no deeper reason, it’s just what they do.

And if that’s the case, if someone is doing this to animals simply for habit and pleasure, not because they have to, then I don’t understand how they could really call themselves an animal lover. People love dogs and cats, sure. They’d never dream of doing to a dog what happens to a pig or a chicken every single day. But how most people actually behave towards farmed animals like cows, pigs and chickens is closer to violent indifference, and nowhere near love. I’m not sure how someone can both be an animal lover and support acts of violence to the most defenceless, gentle animals for their own pleasure or habit. So Billie is right, despite there being some nuance when it comes to people who simply have no choice.

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But I don’t think the missing context or nuance is what got most people so angry with Billie’s statement. I think it’s something entirely unrelated to what she said, and more related to who she is, and how she said it.

The privilege problem

Billie Eilish is a multi-millionaire. She will never, for a single day of her life, have to think twice about food. She can literally click her fingers and have anything she wants in front of her within minutes. Whatever she wants, prepared however she wants, by professional chefs and nutritionists.

The single mother of three working two jobs and trying to get food on the table by 6pm is not in that position. She is not choosing between ethical options. She’s choosing between what’s available, what’s affordable, and what her kids will actually eat. This is not for a second to infantilise anyone. My own mother is a single mother of three, and she raised us vegetarian from birth then later vegan. But we can’t ignore that someone with more resources and a more comfortable living situation has more time and capacity to look into all of this and make changes.

So for Billie to announce, from wherever she’s announcing it, that the way most people live their lives is immoral… I understand why so many people lost it. The backlash is overblown, and a lot of the critiques about nutrition, tradition and “our ancestors” are silly. But the driving force behind it? Completely understandable. People are sick of being judged by celebrities who absolutely do not understand their life, who never will, and who no longer have to think about any of the problems they face every day.

The animals are the ones paying the highest price in all this. But if the messenger makes ordinary people feel sneered at before they’ve even thought about the animals, the animals lose again. And the celebrity part is only half of it, because underneath all of this is a deeper problem, and it’s one I learned the hard way in my own work.

The psychology behind it

There’s a lot of research in human behaviour and psychology dedicated to one very specific problem: how do you change someone’s mind without triggering their identity defences?

The moment you attack what someone eats, what they wear, what they believe, they stop thinking and they start defending. The logical argument you’ve made becomes completely irrelevant. You’ve triggered something primal, and now you’re not having a debate about ethics or animal rights, you’re having a fight about who they are as a person.

The controversial sign I held in my post didn’t really make people think about veganism. It made them think about defending themselves against me. That’s exactly what Billie’s statement did, but on a global scale. Millions of people who have dogs, who rescue cats, who genuinely believe they’re kind, heard that as a personal accusation. And their response was rage, when what Billie probably wanted was reflection.

What could actually help

What if Billie had done something to accompany the message? Billie is no stranger to philanthropy. She supports various programs that focus on food inequality, animals and progressing plant-based food systems. But that feels a little disconnected to how she appeared in the viral clip we’re talking about. Imagine if she’d dropped a program. Something like a partnership with a meal delivery service or a resource to get people going on the plant-based train. Something that says: “I believe this deeply, and I know my position is privileged, and I’m using that privilege to come down off the stage and actually help you get there.”

I think that would’ve changed things. It says: I see the gap between my life and yours and I’m not standing here judging you for not being where I am. I’m putting real money into helping you close that gap, because I genuinely care, about the animals and about you.

Even something like: “Yes, I believe this and I know it’s easy for me. I have every possible resource at my disposal. So here’s what I’m doing with those resources. Here’s where you can sign up. Here’s your first month free. Because I want to show you it’s possible, not just tell you it’s necessary.”

I think that might have landed differently. At the very least, it softens the blow. Instead, what many people got from her statement was judgment without support, and they responded accordingly. This is not to excuse the many terrible and overblown reactions at all, by the way. But in explaining and understanding them we can learn better ways to have an impact for animals, and isn’t that what we care about at the end of the day?

A little irony here

I criticised Billie once before. Years ago, when she jokingly told vegans to “shut the fuck up.” She was young and it was clearly a throwaway comment. I made a bigger deal of it than I should have. I was defensive, protecting my identity as a vegan and standing up for my community. Looking back, it was a silly video to make really. Now here I am criticising her again, this time for being a bit too flippant in the other direction. The difference is that this time, I think it actually matters.

I’m not annoyed by Billie’s comments, I agree with her. I’m glad she’s speaking out, I’m always glad when someone with massive influence uses their platform in defence of animals. I just think the approach, judged purely on whether it’s likely to actually move people closer to a more animal friendly, ideally vegan position, might have done more harm than good.

Just like my sign.

The goal isn’t only to be right, or to say the right thing as loud as possible. The goal is to move people. And moving people means communicating in ways that are most likely to have a positive impact, not just announcing that they’re immoral.

The frustrating thing is that most people already agree with the basic moral point. They don’t think violence to animals is good. They don’t think hurting gentle, defenceless animals for no real need is something to celebrate. The gap is not usually that people lack all compassion. The gap is that food, culture, family, comfort, habit, and identity are wrapped around the issue so tightly that the second you pull at one thread, people feel like you’re pulling at them.

I think we need to be firm, but humble. Strong in our beliefs, but accessible. None of this means watering down the truth, but how we carry that truth into the world matters. Show people you’re not above them. That’s the version of this I’d love to see from a big celebrity, and I think it’d have a much more productive outcome. What do you think?

P.S. As always, I wrote this article as a reminder to myself as much as anything. We’re all imperfect advocates doing our best, and I’m no exception. I have deep appreciation for Billie, and for anyone willing to stick their neck out for animals.

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“Vets are the only doctors who eat their patients.”

Offensive? I’m sure many vets would be annoyed by this. True? I’d wager that some farm vets have literally eaten the animals they’ve treated and speaking generally, most vets do eat animals. I don’t think it’s only vegans that find this a little strange, so what’s going on here?

Danny the vet

A British MP stands up in Parliament and makes a heartfelt case for animals. He’s speaking out against animal testing. He talks about fear and distress. How despite being less intelligent, animals experience the world emotionally, not just physically, and that it should matter to us.

He talks about chickens he’s personally treated who were clearly in distress, and makes a direct comparison to how we experience distress ourselves. It’s a moving speech. The clip has over a hundred thousand views so far. And good, it deserves it.

The MP is Danny Chambers, danny_the_vet on Instagram. He’s a vet by trade. He got a bill to stop puppy smuggling passed in Parliament. He clearly cares about animals. He also eats animal products, and supports animal agriculture.

He has posts on his Instagram where he’s eating meals and products containing eggs and milk. He also made a post wishing sheep farmers good luck with their lambing. Lambing, for anyone who isn’t sure, is when mother sheep give birth to lambs who are then slaughtered at a young age for Easter. Danny seems to be okay with the system of breeding, confining and slaughtering billions of, his own words even, sentient animals.

Here’s someone making a beautiful, intelligent case for animal sentience in one context, and completely ignoring it in another. My raw reaction to this was to just call him a hypocrite and stop there. An understandable reaction I think.

But I think the raw reaction ignores something more important. I don’t think this is just an example of personal hypocrisy, the truth is actually a lot darker. I think Danny Chambers, and many vets like him, are a product of a system built to produce this outcome.

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Animal lover to animal producer

Why do most people become vets? Probably because they care about animals. I think that’s pretty safe to say. But then, the training starts.

In the UK, every veterinary student has to complete something called Extra-Mural Studies (EMS). It isn’t optional, it’s written into UK law. As part of their studies, students have to do 10 weeks of “animal husbandry” placements. At Edinburgh’s Royal School of Veterinary Studies, one of the most prestigious vet schools in the world, students have to do at least one week of dairy work, and at least one week of lambing specifically is recommended.

Lambing, the thing Danny posted about, is built into the recommended training at the most prestigious school for veterinary training. Are you starting to see the problem? These are people who went into veterinary medicine because they wanted to help animals, but before they’ve even qualified, they’re legally required to work with industries that breed and kill them. And it isn’t just a British thing.

In the US, veterinary graduates have to have skills in “food animal” practice. Schools that don’t teach this lose their accreditation. Across Europe, for many countries food animal training is a minimum requirement for veterinary qualifications. In Australia and New Zealand, farm placements are mandatory. In Canada, vet schools follow similar standards.

Most vets who graduated anywhere in the Western world have been trained to work alongside farmers and view these animals through the lens of production. Not as individuals. As animals assessed by their productivity, their reproductive cycles, their market value. The issue isn’t that farmed animals are treated worse than dogs or cats. The core issue is that they are denied the basic respect of being seen as someone, not something.

This is the unholy alliance at the heart of all of this. A profession built on people who love animals, forced by law, by training, by industry money, to serve the people who exploit animals. In the human context, this would be like med school students being forced to work for businesses that keep people in captivity, use and kill them for profit. I know this isn’t a realistic example, but it’s a similar logic and highlights the disturbing reality of the situation.

Follow the money

It gets even more disturbing when you look into the money. The numbers vary depending on whether you’re looking at veterinary medicines, animal healthcare, or veterinary services, but the pattern is hard to miss. Farmed animals make up a huge part of the veterinary economy.

Globally, animal healthcare is heavily shaped by pharmaceutical sales, with one market report putting pharmaceuticals at around 59% of revenue. These are not separate worlds. Medicines, services, breeding, disease control and production are all financially tied together. Would you like to take a guess at which industry is giving them most of this business?

The UK veterinary medicine market was valued at $2.6 billion in 2024. Farm animals accounted for over 58% of that revenue.

Again, this isn’t just Britain.

In the US, the veterinary medicine market was valued at $13.61 billion in 2024. Farm animals dominated with a revenue share of nearly 60%. Globally, across a veterinary services market worth $145.65 billion in 2024, farm animals account for around 58%.

A profession that attracts people who care about animals has strong financial ties to industries that breed, use and slaughter them for profit.

What this actually does to people

I’m not saying all vets are bad people. I’m saying the system they’re trained in and financially supported by is designed to make one set of animals “patients” and another set of animals “production units.” And when you’ve been trained that way, and you’re being paid that way, that becomes your normal. You stop seeing it, and rarely question it.

Imagine you’re a twenty something year old starting a degree to become a vet. Once you find out that you need to train by working for farmers, are you motivated to tear down the system? Or are you more likely to buy into the idea that these are necessary and normal things to do to animals, and that you’re helping “feed the country” by making farmers more profitable?

Give up your life’s aspirations, or do as you’re told, follow the rules and get your degree. I think we know what most do, and it’s hard to blame them.

Think about what this vet training would do to your relationship with farm animals specifically. You’d learn to assess their productivity and the economics of keeping them healthy. You’d learn to recommend interventions that keep animals alive long enough to reach slaughter weight, or fertile long enough to maximise breeding cycles. The animals you’re “caring” for are seen as property. Production units. Their lives have a market value, your job is to protect that value and maximise it.

Is it any surprise an animal lover ends up seeing these animals as products after this sort of training? The system that vets live and work in has never asked them to connect the dots. The system gives them every incentive not to connect the dots. It gives a very clear framework: some animals are patients, some animals are livestock. And that framework was built into their training before they ever qualified, reinforced by the industry that funds their profession, and in Danny Chambers’ case, protected by the political environment he now operates in.

So what do we do with this?

I don’t think the answer is to attack Danny Chambers or people like him who speak in defence of animals, but are inconsistent about it. I’ve written before about why the predictable vegan move, “you care about this animal but not that one, you’re a hypocrite”, probably isn’t helpful. I stand by that.

I think a useful thing we can do is keep pointing at the design. If people think this is about individual hypocrisy, their identity tends to get tied up in it and it just becomes about defending themselves. I think highlighting the system behind it all could be a more effective way to spark change. Showing people how they’ve been misled, manipulated and deceived by industries and corporations that simply want to profit from them. It’s more personally rewarding to attack with insults and accusations, you feel like you’re making a difference, but in reality it can make people more entrenched and less likely to listen.

Danny Chambers and many in the veterinary profession have probably thought carefully about animal sentience. They just don’t apply it consistently. They’ve probably never thought about why that is, or the system that brought them to that place. That’s something we can help with.

Have you ever had this sort of conversation with a vet? How did it go?

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“I’ll pay for your food if we get something healthier”

And that’s all it took to provoke such anger and insult. It starts to make more sense when you realise where Jon was standing when he interacted with this man - outside a McDonalds, as the man was heading in to make an order.

The myth of unique hostility

Many vegans and animal advocates hold the belief that animal advocacy is uniquely triggering to people. Probably as a coping mechanism to help process the aggravation we face from many in the public due to our work. We are insulted, demeaned, sometimes even physically attacked when advocating for animals.

But I feel a sense of relief knowing that this actually isn’t exclusive to animal advocacy. It’s just part of bog standard, predictable, human behaviour. Jon Buret isn’t trying to get people to eat vegan, he’s trying to get them to eat healthily. But he receives a similar if not worse reaction than some animal advocates get. Why is that? Well, although our goals are different, the triggering mechanism is similar. Both his mission and the animal advocates’ mission trigger reactivity.

Projection: a shield for the mind

When Jon asks if someone is willing to eat healthier, some translate this as judgment or criticism for eating unhealthily. They know fast food is bad for them. Deep down, they feel a sense of guilt or shame for eating it. They’re likely already feeling defensive about it, and they project that feeling onto any discussion concerning their choice. Big negative reaction incoming. And remember, this is despite the offer to pay for their meal!

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It’s a very similar mechanism with people who consume animal products. In 2026, especially in the West, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t considered how their diet affects animals at least once. There have been farm and slaughterhouse exposés on TV, famous documentaries, and many countries have well-established advocacy groups. Not to mention, some groups and individual advocates have achieved public notoriety from public debates, protests and social media.

Here’s where that pesky projection strikes again. Many are aware they are paying for cows, pigs and chickens to be bred and confined in nightmarish factory farms. Depending on the country, roughly 90-99% of animal products come factory farmed animals. Animals suffer in these places, forced to live in close proximity to sometimes tens of thousands of others. Disease and injury is rife. Many sick and injured animals will die right there on the farm. Survivors are roughly handled, forced into trucks and driven to slaughterhouses where they have their heads cut off. But not before they’re electric shocked, shot in the head, or thrown in a gas chamber. Many know they fund some, or all of this. That’s why bringing it up, even in a non-judgmental, kind way, even offering to pay for a vegan alternative, is likely to trigger projection and reactance.

Now look at how animal advocates operate. We rarely offer to buy anyone’s food, which would at least have a chance of softening the blow or mitigating this projection. But even if we wanted to buy meals for everyone, farmed animal advocacy is the most underfunded charitable cause in the world. So yeah, not a practical strategy. But it is worth noting that we don’t bring people anything of material value in our advocacy. We try to encourage moral clarity and get people to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing. We focus on how change benefits the animals, not them.

So when you see the negative reaction Jon Buret sometimes gets when offering to literally pay someone to eat healthier, is it any surprise we as animal advocates receive negative reactions too? To be clear, I’m not saying we should start talking about the benefits of eating a healthy plant-based diet. I’m also not asking for some ultra-wealthy philanthropist to start buying everyone vegan food (although that would be pretty cool). I’m writing this to highlight that animal advocates are not alone. We are not uniquely triggering.

Many people just don’t like to be told the things they like are bad, and love to be told the things they know are bad are good (or aren’t that bad).

Propaganda loves the path of least resistance

Take a look at the largest animal agriculture propaganda campaigns. They barely have to try. Slogans like “Got Milk” promoted by various celebrities say nothing about the plight of the dairy cow. In the dairy industry cows are repeatedly impregnated via artificial insemination, where a farmer restrains a cow, inserts his hands in her anus and vagina, and injects her with bull semen. They separate her from her calf not long after birth. This leaves many cows and their calves distressed, desperately calling for one other. They’re slaughtered when their milk production declines. “Got Milk” doesn’t even attempt to justify any of this. It just says “milk is good, I’m a celebrity, trust me”. And that’s all it takes for millions of people to feel good about drinking milk, despite many knowing what goes on in this industry.

Or take a more insidious campaign that came from the bowels of animal agriculture propagandists, the soy misinformation campaign. To this day, many people still believe that soy contains estrogen, and that consuming it results in a lowering of testosterone and feminisation in men. It’s complete nonsense. Soy contains phytoestrogens, which operate entirely differently to mammalian estrogen. They do not affect testosterone, and they do not feminise men. Somewhat ironically, there is something many men consume that contains actual mammalian estrogen, can you guess what it is? Cow’s milk. The claims against soy, particularly soy milk, are an inversion of reality.

This anti-soy propaganda was debunked years ago, but the misinformation persists, why is that? Again, because people want to believe it. They want to believe that consuming animal products is good, and that animal-free options are bad. Why? Because we’re creatures of habit. This is what we’ve always done, and we’re attached. We can’t imagine life without the products we’ve known and loved since forever. And just as important, we crave acceptance and social cohesion. Hardly anyone wants to be the first to stand up and speak against the many, especially when the many is almost every single person around us. Our family, friends, work colleagues. We don’t want to paint a target on our back, or become the “weirdo”.

And don’t even get me started on the most recent pro-meat propaganda campaigns successfully scaring people with claims that all vegan food is “ultra-processed junk”. Again, an easy to dispute claim taken on and believed by millions because of this motivated reasoning. Just to briefly debunk this as we’re here now: not all vegan food is ultra-processed, but ultra-processed food isn’t inherently bad anyway. If someone is struggling and only has $5 for a meal per day, for example, they’ll struggle to get anything that meets their nutritional requirements in one meal without some form of processing. They could get an ultra-processed meal drink like Huel, which would be significantly better for their health than many non-processed alternatives, for example. The obsession with processed/ultra-processed foods is just more fallacious propaganda trying (and succeeding) in keeping people supporting industries that exploit and kill animals, against their better nature.

People know these industries are bad, and the industries know that if they just keep going with this stream of misinformation, just enough to confuse people, they’ll stick to what they know. They’ll avoid the “scary” change to animal-free food. The propagandists know exactly what they’re doing, and too many people allow them to keep doing it.

By the way, I’m not sitting on an ivory tower, riding a high (wooden) horse, looking down on anyone when I say these things. We all do things we know are wrong, and we all do things to fit in. But it’s rarely the case that this behaviour leads to supporting some of the world’s worst atrocities on some of the world’s most innocent and defenceless beings; pigs, cows, chickens and the other animals trapped and suffering in our food system.

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Staying “in the pocket"

So what to do about all of this? As advocates, we need to remember not to take everything personally. When someone is upset with you, remember, this isn’t unique. They would’ve probably been equally upset if you offered to buy them a healthier meal outside of a McDonalds. Any number of other things could’ve triggered a similar response. Remember that we’re dealing with complex human psychology, and when challenged, many people will begin projecting their feelings onto you. Being aware of this fact can help you stay calm, “in the pocket” so to speak, and on track with your goal. If you can remain calm and avoid giving in to the urge to meet them in anger and argument, you have a far higher chance of breaking through this negativity and getting to a more productive discussion.

If you’re reading this and you’re recognising yourself in some of these patterns, well firstly thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, and I hope you’ll reconsider some of your lifestyle choices to help us make a better world for these animals.

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A note from my past

Before I get into the debate, I want to tell you something about myself that I think is relevant. My mum has been an advocate for veganism for years. She was saying all the right things well before I made the change. But for a while, when I was still vegetarian, her advocacy sort of had the opposite effect on me. The more she pushed, the more I dug in. It’s not that I thought she was wrong, but being “told what to do” triggered my ego and stubbornness.

I came around eventually after more reading and making my own conversations, as well as having some digestive issues with dairy. But the seeds she planted were probably always there, I just needed to feel like the decision was mine. I say this because I think something similar happened with the two people I’ll talk about in this post, Dr. Pete and Vidur, and I think it’s a lot more common than we realise.

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The debate

Philosopher and vegan advocate Dr. Jack Symes just appeared on Jubilee’s Surrounded. One vegan, twenty meat eaters, four claims. Jack did well across the whole show, but two exchanges stood out to me for different reasons than the obvious ones.

The obvious standouts were the combative ones like Brian, who showed off about his philosophy degree but then argued that factory farmed animals should be grateful for existing. Or Gerard, who after trying to make Jack compare cows to Holocaust victims later revealed his true intentions in the post-debate interview where he said he’d “start consuming more meat to offset the vegans”. Truly a modern day Einstein.

But the two that stuck with me were a bit quieter than that. Dr. Pete, an emergency medicine physician, was apparently the only meat eater willing to come onto our post-debate livestream (another agreed but dropped out). And Vidur was the final debater Jack chose to bring back for a longer conversation. He seemed to agree with almost everything Jack was saying.

Dr. Pete

Pete was one of the more reasonable debaters on the show. During the debate he made one argument that I found disappointing, when he tried to use the “suffering is inevitable though” argument to try and lessen the severity of what we do to animals. I’m not sure if he was saying that to play up to the camera, but after hearing him speak in our livestream discussion, that doesn’t appear to be what he actually believes.

Pete is a Greek Orthodox Christian and says he eats a fully vegan diet for roughly two-thirds of the year already, as part of his religious fasting. So this is a guy that knows how to eat vegan, he’s been doing it for decades. On the post-debate stream away from the more aggressive Jubilee debate environment, he said:

“I’ve never felt small or underdeveloped as a result of eating that way. In fact, I’m 42, I have four kids, I’m a medical doctor for a long time. I feel like the vegan diet has allowed me to go through stages of development more slowly, to keep my energy and my vitality a lot longer than most people.”

So he has thirty years of experience showing that eating a vegan diet works for him. But when I asked him directly, “You seem to have all that worked out because you’re already doing it two-thirds of the year... why not go the whole hog?” his answer was:

“You can’t fast from something that you do not desire.”

Which I translate as him saying that if he doesn’t give in to his desires to consume animal products, restraining himself from them for his fasting period won’t mean anything. He doesn’t defend eating animal products as morally right, or a nutritional necessity, he almost considers it as a vice that he needs to give in to so he can have the virtue of “fasting” from it.

Surely then the ultimate show of spiritual strength would be to “fast” i.e. eat vegan, for every meal? Especially as Pete agrees that animal suffering is real, and that he thrives on an animal-free diet most of the year. He came pretty close to the truth near the end of the stream:

“I almost feel like sometimes these bogus arguments that my fellow meat eaters bring up is really them just saying: when it comes down to it, I just can’t do what I know is right.”

He said this about the other debaters, but he could have easily been talking about himself.

Vidur: agreeing himself into a corner

Vidur was probably the most philosophically trapped person in the debate. Jack chose to bring him back for an extended one-on-one, and it’s easy to see why. He was engaging in good faith, asking honest questions, and seemed to be handling the arguments seriously rather than deflecting or losing his composure.

He admitted that he wouldn’t kill an animal himself, that he felt “morally weird” about eating meat, that the suffering involved in animal farming wasn’t justified by convenience, that he understood the moral obligation to be vegan, and that the ethical case for veganism was one he mostly agreed with.

But when Jack asked him to just try going vegan for a week, Vidur’s response was:

“I know I won’t succeed in that because I have tried it before.”

Jack kept pushing, and Vidur kept retreating into the same position: yes to the principle, no to the practice, with no real explanation of why. Eventually, Jack said: “You feel the moral obligation. You want in theory to go vegan, but it’s merely just your habit.”

Vidur’s response was: “I do not want to go vegan, but I do want to take certain steps.”

He backed himself into a corner. He doesn’t want to want to go vegan, but he can’t find a principled reason not to, so he’s left making excuses about habit, comfort, and a lack of willpower.

The pattern

Pete and Vidur have both done the intellectual work, arrived at the logical destination, but refused to get off the train. Pete has a religious framework where he treats vegan eating as a seasonal discipline rather than an ethical commitment. It allows him to feel good about eating animal products for four months of the year while feeling spiritually coherent. Vidur is just honest about the fact that he can’t make himself change, even though he thinks he should.

Both are more self-aware than most of the other debaters, but that almost makes it more frustrating. The person who tells you meat eating is fine because “that’s the natural order” or “plants have feelings too” is not someone you can win over right away. You don’t expect them to change in the moment. But Pete and Vidur have already done a lot of the work. The logic isn’t the problem, something else is.

I think most of the reasons people give for not changing even though they agree with the reasons to change are simply generated excuses to try and cover for what is just akrasia (a word I learned while writing this post). It means having a weakness of will and acting against your own better judgement. It’s also what Jamie Woodhouse, who joined us on the post-debate stream, identified as one of the most under-appreciated stumbling blocks in vegan conversations:

“You can hear all the arguments, you can agree with all the arguments, you can see the facts, you can feel they’re compelling, but you still can’t bring yourself to act.”

What this means for the conversation

Which brings me back to my mum. She was right all along. Her arguments were sound, her concern was genuine, and her consistency over the years showed she meant what she was saying. But the way she delivered it, persistently, directly, with the implicit message of why haven’t you changed yet made me resist.

It wasn’t because I thought she was wrong, it was because it felt like I was being shamed or forced into it. I wasn’t, I just felt like it wasn’t my decision, and this triggered my ego. I was being stubborn. Looking back at my stubbornness here, I have to admit akrasia was probably a key factor too.

Pete and Vidur are intelligent people who’ve arrived at veganism, intellectually speaking. But they’ve not done the internal work, the part where you stop negotiating with yourself and just start. That’s not really something you can argue people into, unless they’re one of those rare types that value formal debate and logic above all else, and put emotion entirely aside.

Most people come at a problem with emotions first, and logic second. If you make them feel powerless, pressured, or persuaded, they can become reactive. This is when we start seeing a blend of akrasia, triggered egos and stubbornness. Finding the balance between advocating for animals and meeting people where they’re at is hard, but that’s where we need to be.

The most any of us can do is make sure the information is clear, the door is open, and the seeds are planted. I think Jack did a good job of this during the debate. What happens after that isn’t really up to us, but we can at least make sure the ground is as fertile as possible.

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The reaction was immediate. Outrage in the comments and people tagging Vivera demanding they explain themselves. I get it. There’s something jarring about that image. Vivera is a brand providing an alternative to all of this, and there it is, pulling out of the exact kind of facility the brand is supposed to represent a departure from. The irony isn’t subtle.

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Who actually owns Vivera

But here’s the thing, Vivera has been owned by JBS since 2021. JBS. One of the largest meat companies on the planet. JBS owns product transport vehicles and they brand them for advertising. Some will be branded with Vivera, some will have meat brands and products on them. Sometimes the products inside will match the branding, sometimes they won’t.

This isn’t buried information. It’s not a corporate secret tucked away somewhere. It’s freely, easily available. And yet, for many of the people expressing outrage at that lorry, this ownership apparently hadn’t been a dealbreaker. They’d kept buying Vivera products. They’d made peace, consciously or not, with the reality that their Vivera vegan meat purchases were putting money into the hands of a company whose core business is the slaughter of animals.

That’s not a criticism, by the way. I think that decision is largely correct.

Why most vegans keep buying

Most of us who’ve been vegan for any length of time have accepted this uncomfortable reality: if you want vegan products to be affordable, accessible, and on the shelves of every mainstream supermarket, you need large companies to make and distribute them.

Small, fully ethical, founder-owned vegan businesses are obviously amazing. I support them where I can. But they are not going to shift the food system. The companies with the logistics, the shelf space negotiations, and the supply chains are. And those companies are going to be the same companies already operating at scale in the food industry, which means non-vegan companies. Meat companies, dairy companies etc. Corporations with no particular ethical commitment to veganism beyond identifying animal-free food as a growing market.

Richmond vegan sausages. Alpro. Vivera. The list goes on. We buy them, and most of us don’t lose sleep over it. Because we know that a vegan product existing inside an imperfect system is still better than it not existing, or existing only as a £9 artisan product available in one shop in East London.

The real question

A Vivera branded lorry leaving a slaughterhouse is obviously terrible optics for the brand and the products, there’s no denying that. But realistically, it’s only vegans and vegetarians who care. It’s just down to a personal preference that vegans and vegetarians may hold, that they would prefer that animal-free product branded transport vehicles only carry animal-free products.

From what I can see, this situation doesn’t impact anyone else. It won’t put meat eaters off trying Vivera products (if anything it might encourage them to try them), and it doesn’t cause any harm to animals that wasn’t already being done.

Getting angry at Vivera’s branding team, or demanding a statement that will inevitably say nothing, isn’t the same as engaging with the actual question: should you be buying products from companies like JBS at all, and if yes, under what conditions do you decide that’s acceptable?

The harder conversation is whether you are comfortable buying animal-free products from non-vegan companies. The lorry is just a lorry. What matters is what you decide to do with the reality this lorry forced in front of you. Personally, I’ve made peace with the reality (and the irony) that it’s likely going to be non-vegan companies that bring about the massive food system change the animals need. How about you?

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Vegans, instead of asking what they were eating or pointing them toward resources, start a pile-on. “Well, veganism isn’t a diet, so you clearly didn’t understand what you were doing.” Or some variation of that. It’s smug, it’s unhelpful, and it misses the point.

There’s a difference between being right and being effective, and I think this could be doing damage.

The is/ought problem

There’s a concept in philosophy called the is/ought distinction, and I think it loosely applies to what I’m highlighting today. Basically, there’s a difference between how things are and how you think they ought to be. And you can’t just jump from one to the other without doing the work in between.

Language is a good example. Words mean what people generally understand them to mean. That’s how language works. You can make the case that certain words ought to mean something different, or that you ought to use certain words over others, but you can’t just assert that and expect everyone to fall in line. If you skip the work in between, you create friction, distractions and confusion.

A lot of what I see from vegans online (myself included in the past) is exactly this. Taking how things ought to be and asserting it as if it’s already how things are, with no acknowledgment that there’s a massive gap in the middle that needs to be bridged. And instead of bridging it, we end up creating unnecessary arguments.

The words we’re fighting over

A few things I see a lot in vegan spaces:

• “Don’t say meat, say flesh”

• “Don’t say meat-eaters, say non-vegans”

• “Veganism isn’t a diet”

• “The correct definition is…”

The thinking behind these points is that using mainstream language somehow undermines veganism or makes it look like a diet, and veganism looking like a diet is a huge problem.

I get where it comes from, I used to say things like this all the time. But I’m no longer convinced this is as big an issue as it’s made out to be (with some caveats that we’ll get into later). I actually think making these suggested language changes and hyper-focusing on definitions can create more issues for our advocacy.

Note: Just for anyone unaware, the definition of veganism by The Vegan Society is:

“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”

Say I want to talk about the meat industry’s use of gas chambers to kill pigs. An important topic, and the kind of thing that can genuinely disturb people and make them reconsider what they’re funding.

I could write: “What most non-vegans don’t know is that the pig flesh industry uses gas chambers to murder pigs.”

What happens? The comments section fills up with arguments about the word “flesh” and whether killing an animal constitutes “murder”, as well as some annoyed at being labelled “non-vegan”. And the gas chambers? That point is buried under these arguments about semantics.

One of the first rules of persuasion is to speak the same language as the people you want to persuade. As in, use words they recognise and understand, not words that will likely confuse or trigger them.

Instead, I could write: “What most people don’t know is that the meat industry uses gas chambers to kill pigs.”

It’s the same information, but in language people already understand. There’s less unnecessary friction, and now the conversation is actually about what I wanted it to be about, the pigs and the gas chambers.

Even,“what most meat-eaters don’t know is that the meat industry uses gas chambers to kill pigs” could work here, although this post invites more hostility than saying “most people” simply because it feels more targeted.

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This is the is/ought problem I mentioned earlier in action. You can feel that terms like “flesh” and “non-vegan” are more accurate or preferable words based on what you personally believe, and you can work toward a world where that’s how everyone talks. But if you assert it while trying to make a completely different point, you’ll most likely end up derailing your own message.

You can’t fight every battle at once, you have to pick the ones that matter the most. The ones that are likely to have the biggest impact.

Why diet should be the priority

Here’s something I don’t think gets said enough: human consumption is by far the animal’s biggest issue.

Ending animal agriculture and the consumption of animals would end the vast majority of animal exploitation. The scale of it with the factory farms, fishing, the slaughterhouses, the sheer number of lives involved. There’s nothing else that comes close. So if we’re trying to figure out where to focus our energy, I think the answer seems quite obvious.

Veganism isn’t just a diet. I know that. But the way some vegans react when someone describes it as a diet, you’d think it was the worst thing that’s ever happened.

“It’s a justice movement and everyone needs to understand the true definition of veganism right now.”

Does everyone need to understand the full scope of veganism from the very beginning? Why? If someone has eliminated animal products from their diet because they believe it’s wrong to harm animals, they’re doing one of the most impactful things they can do. Does it matter whether they’ve read the Vegan Society’s definition? Or done in-depth research on the founders of veganism and how they defined it? I’m not convinced it does.

If someone is ready to change what they consume for animals, don't shove them back just to win a definition fight.

But what I do think matters is when people think veganism is purely a health or environmental choice, because those reasons tend not to stick. People make exceptions for themselves all the time when it comes to their own personal benefit. Plus, someone can consume animal products while being healthy and environmentally friendly (say they eat one piece of cheese a year, or something like that).

But when it’s about the animals, something bigger than yourself, this tends to keep people committed. There is no animal-friendly way to breed, exploit and kill animals. So while I’m not that concerned with people seeing veganism as a diet, I do think the ethical focus is very important.

What’s the actual worst case?

Let’s play this out. Worst case scenario: veganism becomes widely understood as simply an ethical diet. People stop eating animal products because they believe it’s wrong. Animal farming collapses. Slaughterhouses close. Factory farms disappear.

What exactly is the problem here?

Do we really believe that in a world where people no longer consume animals or animal products for ethical reasons, they’d still be fine with animal testing? Killing animals for leather and fur? Still happy to support zoos that breed animals for profit? Still buying into the pet industry, breeding and trading animals for entertainment?

Do we honestly believe that people would extend moral consideration to “food animals” like chickens, pigs, cows and fish, but somehow stop and draw the line at all these other animals?

If we’ve actually managed to get people to connect with animals on that level, enough to change the most habitual, deeply ingrained behaviour there is, I think we’ve probably done the hard part.

I worry that this focus on people “misrepresenting veganism” could be more about protecting the identity of the vegan, and the movement, than about protecting the animals. If I’m being honest, back when I used to staunchly defend the definition of veganism I do think a lot of it was driven by my identity and a small obsession with being right, rather than what actually did or didn’t work to help animals.

Start helping

Back to the person who quit for health reasons.

Telling them they weren’t really vegan and don’t understand the movement doesn’t really help. It definitely doesn’t help the person, it’s unlikely to help the animals, and to outsiders, it makes vegans look like an unwelcoming and pedantic bunch.

What actually helps is addressing their concerns. Pointing them toward resources like Challenge22, reminding them why it matters and encouraging them to try again with proper support this time. That’s the difference between being right and being effective.

Even if we think the person is lying about their issues, providing this useful information helps others who may be watching on the sidelines. Dr Matthew Nagra is good at making videos that achieve this. In the video below, he calls out lies from an individual, while countering and providing information on her claims that soy disrupts hormones.

At some point we have to ask ourselves, are we just trying to maintain a club with strict entry requirements, or are we trying to build a successful movement? As you can see, Dr Nagra does the latter. His aim isn’t simply to entertain vegans, he’s trying to be persuasive and advocate for a way of eating that helps animals.

In the past, I’ll admit that I fell into the former category. I thought I was doing what was best for animals, but in a lot cases, I was probably just doing what felt best. And that tended to be more appealing to other vegans, rather than making change for animals.

I discussed this in detail in my first ever Substack post, “It’s Time Vegans Stopped Playing Alone in the Corner”, which you can read below.

So what should we be doing?

I think a lot of vegans assume that spreading the “true vegan message” is the most effective strategy, mostly because it makes sense to us. We understand it, we find it compelling, so naturally so should everyone else, right?

But that’s not how persuasion works.

I think the most effective thing you can do, especially right now, is to get people to change their behaviour. Specifically what they eat and buy. Getting them connected to why it matters for animals, and building momentum. As that grows, as animal-free consumption becomes the norm rather than the exception, we’ll have a much stronger platform to talk about the broader movement. And people will actually be ready to hear it.

But if we spend our energy arguing about definitions with people who are already moving our way, or lambasting people who are having issues and need support, I think we’re choosing to be right over choosing to make a difference. And I know which one I’d rather be doing.

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The man behind the moment

The man in question is John Davidson. Back in 2019 he was awarded an MBE by the Queen of England for his incredible work in education on Tourette’s syndrome. Notably, he had a tic and shouted “Fuck the Queen” in front of her. As much as I feel for anyone suffering with this condition, you can’t ignore the humour in that.

The recently released film “I Swear” is about the story of his life, which is why he was at the BAFTAs in the first place. And that story is about living with a severe and rare form of Tourette’s syndrome called Coprolalia.

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A condition that betrays you at the worst possible time

Coprolalia only affects somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of people who have Tourette’s at all. We’re talking about a minority within a minority. And what it means in practice is that his tics (which by definition are things he has absolutely no control over, if he could control them they wouldn’t be tics) often manifest as insults, slurs, and targeted attacks. Both verbal and physical.

He has lunged at family members. He has physically attacked people he loves. Not because he wanted to. Because his brain made him do it and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

And the cruel irony of this specific type of Tourette’s, is that the tics are often triggered precisely by knowing that you shouldn’t do something. The more you know you absolutely cannot say or do a thing in a given moment, especially in front of people, especially when the stakes are high, the more likely your brain is to make you do exactly that.

It’s not always random. It’s targeted by the knowledge of what would be the worst possible thing. He knew he was in a room full of people. He knew he was on television. He knew two black men were on that stage. And that knowledge is likely exactly what made the tic happen, completely out of his control.

This is not hard to find out. You don’t to read a medical journal. A ten second Google search on this man’s name tells you everything I just told you. Or, you know, you could watch the film that was literally made about his life.

And yet, the response has been disgraceful.

Viral post after viral post calling him a racist. People saying Tourette’s is no excuse for racism. People saying if anyone ever says that word to them, disability or not, they will physically attack them. People saying if he is that disabled he shouldn’t be allowed at events like this. He shouldn’t be allowed out in public.

Let that sink in.

Feeling it doesn't make it true

I understand why people reacted the way they did. We have all grown up being told that this word is a weapon. That if a white person uses that word, it’s out of hate. When your nervous system has been wired your whole life to respond to something with pain and anger, you don’t always stop and think first. The emotion arrives before the thought does.

But, and this is the thing that genuinely concerns me, the emotion took over so effectively for so many people that basic critical thinking just went out the window entirely.

Think about what it would actually take for this to be intentional racism. Think about it. A man sitting in the audience at the BAFTAs, on live television, in front of hundreds of people physically and millions online, would have to decide that the best moment to express his racism was by shouting the N word at two black men on a stage loudly enough for everyone to hear. Why? What would be the reasoning there? What would be the point?

The whole thing collapses the moment you look at it for five seconds. But people didn’t look at it for five seconds. They were upset and then they found words to match the feeling, and that was that.

We see this happen every single day

Here’s why this matters to me as an animal advocate. Because I watch this happen to us constantly.

When I tell people that the dairy industry kills cows, that the pork industry gasses pigs to death, that cows bred for beef are shot in the head with a bolt gun and have their throats slit, the first response in so many cases isn’t curiosity. It isn’t “wait, is that true?” It’s a flat out denial. “That’s not right.” “That’s misinformation.”

And where are they getting their certainty from? How are they so confident I’m wrong? Often from something their mum told them once, something they vaguely remember hearing, or just a feeling that it can’t be that bad because they’ve been buying this stuff their whole lives. Surely, someone would have told them.

Instead of spending five seconds verifying what you’ve just said to them, or taking a minute to check your account and see you’ve been looking into this for years, that you clearly care deeply about it, and it would be logical to at least consider that you might know things they don’t, they just declare you wrong. And that’s it. Conversation over.

In both the Tourette’s advocacy and animal advocacy cases, you have people who have been given a story about the world that feels true to them, and when something challenges that story, the emotion arrives before the thought does. The defence immediately goes up.

They're choosing not to think

But with animal advocacy specifically I think there’s something extra going on. There’s motivated reasoning.

With the Tourette’s situation, people got it wrong because their emotions were triggered and their critical thinking got left behind. With our work it’s different. When people dismiss what we say about animal agriculture, a lot of the time they don’t want to know. They’re not only failing to think critically, they’re actively choosing not to.

Because thinking critically would mean having to face something uncomfortable. It would mean acknowledging that something they enjoy, something their whole family enjoys, something involved into every celebration and tradition and almost every meal they’ve ever had, causes serious harm to animals. And then it would mean deciding what to do about that. It’s a lot. So instead the brain finds a shortcut. “You’re lying”, “it’s misinformation”, “you’re one of those vegans”.

That motivated reasoning is the wall we keep running into. And it’s a big one. The emotional attachment people have to their food, their habits, their family traditions, their identity is incredibly powerful. More powerful in many cases than our passion for change, simply because there are more of them, and because protecting something you already have tends to feel more urgent than gaining something you’ve never experienced.

We are the underdogs. We have always been the underdogs. And I think it’s fair to say we’ll continue to be the underdogs for a long time yet.

Stop hitting the wall

Slamming your head against someone’s defensive wall doesn’t really work in my experience. You end up with a headache, and the wall barely has a scratch on it. What does work, at least sometimes, is finding the cracks in the wall.

We just had a perfect example of this. The story about the Punch the monkey went everywhere. Punch is a baby monkey living in a zoo in Japan. He was abandoned by his mother, and a video recently went viral of him being bullied by other monkeys, before running to his stuffed monkey toy and clutching it for comfort.

It’s a heartbreaking clip. People were furious. Genuinely, deeply upset. And that’s the moment not to lecture, not to make people feel bad, but to expand on their concerns. You care about this monkey? I care about this monkey too. You know how this baby monkey was rejected by his mother? Did you know the dairy industry routinely separate babies from their mothers? Lets talk about it.

That’s the approach I genuinely think we have a good shot with. Using the thing they already care about to build bridges to the things we want them to understand. It’s slow. It’s frustrating. It requires a patience that honestly some days I don’t feel like I have (and those of you who follow me on X and Threads have seen the many times I don’t have it). But it seems like one of the best ways to avoid emotional reactivity and introduce new information productively.

The people online calling John Davidson a racist without spending even ten seconds looking him up, unfortunately they are the same people we are trying to reach. We are operating in a world where emotions come before facts, and where in many cases the truth is completely overshadowed by these emotions. But we have to continue regardless. The animals need us to stay in the pocket, undeterred and persistent.

Stay strong out there.

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Edit: I highly recommend watching this video by Shayla, a black woman suffering with Tourette’s who makes educational videos about the condition, and who made a video on this situation.

“I was eating a burger and looked down to see my dog looking up at me, and it hit me - the cow I was eating was no different to the dog I loved.”

It’s a beautiful, poignant realisation. And the most important part? It’s a realisation that person made themselves. The most powerful, transformative change usually comes from someone having these epiphanies of their own accord.

And that brings us onto the problem of the predictable vegan.

The predictable vegan trap

Early in my animal advocacy I fell into a predictable pattern. I still do sometimes. It’s like a default mode. So while you read this post, bear in mind that I’m partially writing it as a reminder to myself. I’m right here in the trenches with you, still making mistakes and learning from them.

So, here’s how the “predictable vegan” usually goes:

“Hey meat eater, you spoke out against this thing, but you pay for animals to be abused in the meat industry! You’re a hypocrite!”

Or to simplify it a bit:

“You said you’re against animal abuse but you’re not a vegan, you’re a hypocrite!”

When you see a meat eater speaking up about animal abuse, it’s usually something that’s socially unacceptable or frowned upon.

At best, it’s someone abusing an animal out of neglect or indifference. For example, someone who thinks they’re playing with their dog, but in reality the dog is terrified. At worst, it’s a horrible person abusing an animal for their own sick satisfaction.

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When our arguments miss the mark

Despite how it might look, the predictable vegan take, “you can’t really care about this issue if you aren’t vegan”, isn’t actually correct.

People who aren’t vegan can and do care about some issues that affect animals. And instead of helping expand their circle of care to more animals, accusatory vegan messaging often ends up scolding them at a vulnerable moment.

It’s basically shaming them for caring and speaking up. And that’s probably at least partly why many people’s response to this sort of thing is,

“Fuck off vegan.”

Authority changes everything

Many people who aren’t vegan would intervene if they saw someone mistreating an animal. This isn’t something to be scolded.

But when there’s an official authority overseeing and giving a stamp of approval to the mistreatment of an animal, in farms and slaughterhouses for example, they don’t see it in the same way.

Most people think eating and using animals is necessary, so they’re more okay with hurting and killing animals in that context. But they’re generally not okay with hurting and killing animals in other contexts.

It’s important to acknowledge this reality. We have to work with what is the case, rather than what we think ought be the case.

And this is where “the predictable vegan” problem comes in.

Why it feels logical but fails emotionally

From what I can see, it appears as though many animal advocates are working with how they think things ought be as opposed to working with how they are.

The “you’re not vegan though so you don’t mean that” criticism is probably the most common critique vegans make when someone who isn’t vegan speaks up about animal abuse, and I think it highlights that well.

When you consider what I just explained about perspective and context, I don’t think people only become annoyed by this sort of thing, I think it can actually have the opposite of the intended impact. It can drive people towards a more anti-vegan position.

This isn’t to say the core point being made isn’t valid. It is valid in a very simplistic, top level way:

“If you’re against animal abuse but you pay for animal abuse how can you say you’re against animal abuse?”

But there’s nuance here. Black and white critiques like this aren’t usually sufficient for the complexities of human psychology and society.

1,000 songs in your pocket activism

I saw this great post about the Apple iPod that explains the problem in a different way.

“5gb storage” or “1,000 songs in your pocket”.

You can probably guess which was more effective at getting people to buy an iPod. It was the “1,000 songs in your pocket” messaging.

People can imagine listening to all their songs, but most people can’t imagine the benefit of 5gb of storage. They might even find the “5gb storage” ad annoying if they’re not technically minded, because they don’t know what that means in practical terms.

5Gb storage is selling a feature. It states a fact about the product.

1,000 songs in your pocket is selling a benefit. It lets you imagine how it would be to use it.

Applying this learning to our number one predictable critique, can it be more effective? Our “5gb storage” version is:

“You said this but you’re a hypocrite/inconsistent because you aren’t vegan”

Factual, but taking a complex nuanced issue and making it black and white. Making it harsh, cold, unwelcoming.

How about this:

“Thank you for speaking up. I really care about this issue. I also care about the cows, pigs, chickens and other animals we breed and kill for our plates. We really need to come together and fight for all of these innocent animals”

Do you see how the second version is more like the “1,000 songs in your pocket” message? It’s more inviting, and it builds on the issue the person already cares about rather than shutting it down or accusing them of anything.

I’ve been testing comments like this, and I have to say the response has been much more productive. There will always be trolls and people who get upset, but I’ve received far more nuanced and productive responses than my previous “predictable vegan” responses.

The “1,000 songs” method can be tweaked to your liking to be even more effective, without ever undermining the core message.

I’m not against the idea of highlighting hypocrisy or inconsistency to make a point, I’m just not convinced that doing this alone will get the outcome we’re hoping for. I think if we do this with a bit more tact, a bit more strategy, we have more chance to have a bigger impact and avoid falling into the “predictable vegan” trap.

When to really call out hypocrisy

But what about when someone is being an on the nose hypocrite? A recent example of this was with famous streamer Hasan Piker. He allegedly used a shock collar on his dog. Two other famous streamers, Destiny and Asmongold, both came out aggressively shaming him for it.

For those unfamiliar, these are influencers with millions of followers, so their contradictions have real impact on how their audiences view animal advocacy.

But here’s the thing, both have said horrific things about dogs in past debates with vegans. Things like how they don’t care if people eat dogs, and that they “feel nothing about animal suffering”, including dogs

Destiny actually said that animals, including dogs, are the same as inanimate objects to him.

You can see more on that in my video below.

So I think there are times where people should be called out.

Saying that, in my video I did still acknowledge and appreciate them calling Hasan out, despite what they said about dogs in the past.

So in short:

In general (with a few exceptions) when someone speaks up about socially unacceptable/illegal animal abuse, I’m not convinced that being hostile towards them for not being consistent across socially acceptable/legal animal abuse is the most effective advocacy. I think we should work with them to both amplify their message and attempt to expand it in productive ways.

And remember, if we want people to have the sort of poignant, transformative awakening that we described at the start, it has to come from within. I think it’s our job to point them in the right direction, not demand how they should or shouldn’t feel at this exact moment.

This is my take on being a “predictable vegan” and avoiding some of these common and predictable critiques. What do you think? Have you fallen into the predictable vegan trap? What's worked for you when trying to expand someone's circle of compassion?

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Vegans.

Globally, we’re one of the smallest minorities.

A tiny group of individuals with simple goals mostly driven by respect and compassion for animals… Okay and maybe a few narcissists who want to feel superior to everyone else (they do exist).

Unfortunately, vegans have a pretty small influence on society. We mostly focus on farmed animals, and these causes receive less than 1% of the global charitable donations.

Most of us vegans are trying to achieve our goals through collaborative means. We use discussion and debate to bring the truth to light. No riots, no assaults or murders, no burning down buildings. Just a lot of talking, and the occasional moral condemnation.

We try to connect with the goodness in people.

On paper, you’d expect vegans to be a blip on the radar for most people. Just a group trying to help animals in some of the friendliest ways possible.

But herein lies the problem.

What vegans say is so violent, so aggressive, so damn triggering, that many people go into fits of rage when they hear it.

I’ve seen a strange phenomenon that takes place when people argue with vegans - it appears many people lose their ability to think critically. Or at least, they lose a certain percentage of it.

Otherwise intelligent, empathetic people make some of the most deranged, backwards and callous takes. Something just switches in their mind. It’s like the full moon just appeared and they’ve morphed into a boring werewolf that drones on about plants having feelings or protein.

And the fragility of the vegan critic is not to be understated.

You’ll struggle to find as much victim mentality and DARVO as when someone is proven wrong or called out for their poor anti-vegan takes.

Exhibit A

Introducing the Instagram creator, “Blooms&Greens by Chloe”. Chloe isn’t usually a vegan critic. Her videos mostly focus on growing vegetables and flowers. I think she’s actually quite popular with vegans, which makes this quite strange.

She recently posted a video suggesting vegans are stupid while tapping her own head and saying we “must have something missing up there”, because a vegan criticised the exploitation of sheep.

I made this five word, three second response to her offensive video.

I assume she got a notification from Meta that informed her about my video, because she immediately got it removed from Facebook and Instagram for “copyright infringement”.

I successfully contested this and got it reinstated under Fair Use policies.

The next morning I woke up, and my video had been taken down again. My account was issued with a warning too, because this time she had falsely reported my video as “threatening or inciting violence”.

I appealed, and after a human review, my video was reinstated again.

She followed a path I’ve seen many vegan critics take:

• Attack vegans

• Attempt to censor and stifle backlash

I wish I could say this happens rarely, but we have another example of vegan critic fragility that just appeared in the UK news cycle.

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Exhibit B

Introducing William Sitwell.

William Sitwell used to be a writer for Waitrose, the fancy UK supermarket. He was forced to resign after emails were leaked exposing him making strangely detailed jokes about killing vegans.

Seems like a lovely guy right?

Did William “take the L” as the kids say, or did his bad behaviour continue? We recently got an answer.

First, he popped up at the start of January with a piece for The Telegraph about how Veganuary is going to destroy his restaurant. Long story short, he’s complaining about dry January and Veganuary because non-alcoholic drinks and vegetables are cheaper and this hurts his business.

My heart aches for this poor soul.

Just a few weeks later and he’s back with another column for The Telegraph titled, “Farewell vegans, you will not be missed”.

In this one he’s:

• Complaining about when his emails got leaked

• Blaming the vegan who leaked his jokes about killing vegans for leaking his jokes about killing vegans instead of, you know, taking responsibility for making jokes about killing vegans

• Complaining about vegan chefs trying new recipes and making a name for themselves

• Celebrating the “downfall of veganism” because some companies removed their vegan options (despite recently complaining about how Veganuary is ruining his business)

• And boasting about his cousin who was eating plant-based but now isn’t eating plant-based

Again, to use some of the kid’s lingo - have you ever seen a more obvious crashout?

Why they do this?

My take is that they think being in the majority gives them a certain privilege. The privilege to dunk on vegans, and get away with it.

They get a false sense of security and entitlement from being in such a large group (people who aren’t vegan). They think it gives them a level of anonymity, that they’re just one of the many people who aren’t vegan, criticising vegans. They think they don’t deserve any repercussions.

But when a vegan responds with facts and logic that undermines them, proves them wrong, or simply exposes their nastiness, the fantasy is broken. They panic. And for many people, panic in the face of confrontation turns into playing the victim. That’s where our good old friend DARVO comes in.

What to do about it?

Well I can tell you what not to do.

These fragile vegan critics want one thing from the vegans, and unfortunately many of us are too willing to give it to them: They want you to lose your mind.

They want you to scream, call them an animal abuser, shout insults at them. They want you crazy, because you being crazy gives them more credibility. It “proves them right”.

There’s not a lot we can do about their fake victimhood, DARVO and tantrums, but there is a lot we can do about our own behaviour. Stay level-headed. Calmly unravel their nonsense. Explain concepts plainly instead of using highly specific terms that can alienate people.

You could use an LLM like ChatGPT to help “translate” the “inter-vegan” language to something more general. When we’re dealing with the public, it’s important to try and use language they generally use. Otherwise, we risk giving the critic credibility simply because they sound more convincing.

These tips probably won’t make a difference to the fragile critic. Either way, they’re likely to have a meltdown. But it can help us reach those watching from the sidelines.

We want people to see all this and say, “hey, I thought this person’s critique of vegans was good at first but the vegans are making better points.”

We don’t want them saying, “Ha, look at all the triggered vegans. This guy got them good.”

How we’re viewed in society can have a direct impact on animals. If people don’t listen to us or take us seriously, they won’t change. If they don’t change, nothing changes for animals.

The fragility of vegan critics isn’t going anywhere. Enjoy it when you can (it can be funny, like with our crashout king William Sitwell). Respond accordingly when necessary. Expose any petty, cowardly behaviour to the masses in as convincing a way as possible. And whatever happens, keep moving forward.

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It was about a woman in London, UK, who was arrested and fined for, wait for it… feeding bread to the pigeons. No less than five police officers attended the scene.

Maybe they were just really excited at the prospect of a free sandwich, because five officers to arrest a woman for feeding the birds seems excessive to say the least.

Is the UK really policing compassion for animals, or is something else going on?

The amount of times I’ve seen a headline or Instagram story oversimplifying an issue which turns out to be way more complex and nuanced, I had to ask.

She was probably doing something anti-social. Shouting, drunk, on drugs. Surely the media has just spun this into “arrested for feeding the birds” to bring in more of those highly sought-after clicks and ad revenue.

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Now then, what’s going on here?

So I had a look. Here’s a statement from the Police department that arrested this woman:

“At around 2.30pm on Wednesday 7 January, officers were approached by local council enforcement officers dealing with an anti-social behaviour incident on Wealdstone High Street, Harrow.

A woman, in her forties, was repeatedly asked to provide her name and address so that a fixed penalty notice could be issued. After speaking with officers for around 20 minutes, she repeatedly refused to provide her personal details.

She was arrested on suspicion of breaching Section 50 of the Police Reform Act, which requires people to provide their name and address when requested to do so by the police.

Her details were later obtained, and she was de-arrested and dealt with by council officers.”

More on that in a moment.

Here’s a statement from the local council that confirms this was all over feeding the birds:

“There was a breach of the Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) relating to bird feeding.

The individual refused to provide their details, which is an offence, and also refused to stop feeding pigeons when asked to do so.

Our PSPO is in place to help keep our streets clean and safe for everyone, and anyone found breaching these faces a £100 fixed penalty notice.”

There it is.

Confronted by the council, refusing to give her details and accept the fine, then arrested… for feeding pigeons.

It’s even worse when you realise why there are so many pigeons in our streets in the first place. Pigeons were domesticated and used for communications, then abandoned as soon as we developed better technology. They were part of our homes, families, society. Now, they’re cast out to fend for themselves.

More of us should be like this woman.

Stop that woman!

In London, where recorded crime has increased by 31% in the past decade, with violent crime up by 40%, why are five police officers rushing to the scene to deal with a 40 year old woman refusing to give her details for a fine for feeding pigeons?

From what I understand (I’m not a legal scholar) it doesn’t even look like the Police were within their rights to arrest her.

They said she was arrested “on suspicion of breaching Section 50 of the Police Reform Act”. Now again, I’m not a legal scholar, but here’s what that act says. Do you think they had the right to arrest her?

Under Section 50 of the Police Reform Act 2002:

• A uniformed constable has the power to require a person’s name and address if the officer has reason to believe that the person has been acting, or is acting, in an anti-social manner.

• If the person fails to give their name and address when required, or gives a false or inaccurate name or address, that person commits a criminal offence.

• The statutory definition of “anti-social behaviour” comes from related law and generally covers behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm, or distress.

Was this 40 year old woman feeding bread to the pigeons causing “harassment, alarm or distress” to the public? Unless she was launching slices of bread at people’s heads, probably not.

Was her refusing the order to stop feeding the pigeons, and refusing to give her details for the fine, causing “harassment, alarm or distress” to the public? Maybe it hurt the ego of the council worker trying to issue the fine, but again, probably not a public issue.

If a non-violent, benign act of defiance of feeding birds and refusing to give your details is enough reason for arrest, you are not living in a fair and just country. There are many words I could use to describe a country that sends state officers to demand identification and arrest you for the cardinal sin of feeding the birds, but I’ll let you insert those words in yourself.

Some would argue this is a real, widespread problem. They say UK policing is more emphasised on the daily activities of regular people than on actual crimes. Others say that’s just propaganda.

Is compassion criminalised?

Some things do seem to be apparent though. So if you live in the UK, or you’re planning a visit, here’s what you need to know:

• Shoplifting is practically legal, enjoy.

• If you get beaten up or robbed, you have a one in a million chance of getting justice for it (or getting your things back).

• But please for the love of god, don’t feed the pigeons. They take that very seriously over there.

Sarcasm aside, I don’t think compassion for animals should be criminalised. Our legal system should know the difference between littering and helping abandoned animals that are forced to survive on scraps, struggling to get through another cold winter.

The UK Police should stop punishing do-gooders and refocus themselves on the many, many do-badders destroying their society with violence, drugs, and other serious criminal offences.

And whenever they get the chance, they should feed the pigeons.

(But not bread, something healthier like a seed mix).

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This campaign, named “Forget Veganuary”, is the work of the organisation, FarmKind. FarmKind is basically an aggregator for animal charities. They work with what they believe to be the most effective animal charities based on detailed evaluations. To simplify the process of getting your money to these effective charities, you just donate to FarmKind, and they take care of it for you.

FarmKind focuses on “offsetting”, helping animals without changing your consumption. Their idea is to engage people who otherwise would do nothing to help animals by giving them another option that only requires a donation, rather than changing their lifestyle habits.

But I think they went too far with this campaign. Instead of simply offering an alternative, they actively spoke out against diet change.

In my view, not only has FarmKind used anti-vegan/Veganuary rhetoric to secure media opportunities, but their campaign website includes many disparaging takes on diet change.

There is even a game on the website which is designed to be very difficult, attempting to show how “difficult” Veganuary is.

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On top of this, some have noticed that it appears FarmKind isn’t only advocating for animal product consumption, but is promoting overconsumption. They are hosting competitive eating competitions with competitive eaters that will involve eating nothing but animal products for an entire day, then “offsetting” the harm by donating to FarmKind.

These competitive eaters are proudly listed on the campaign website as “experts”, and a recent video from one of them shows him standing in a goat farm boasting about how he’s going to eat one of them. “A whole goat”, he says.

Another concerning fact that I found out through researching various animal advocacy forums is that although Veganuary were notified with some vague details of this campaign, they weren’t invited for input. Quote from someone speaking on behalf of Veganuary:

“I'd like to clarify that Veganuary was not involved in developing the “Forget Veganuary” campaign and had no role in shaping or approving its messaging or execution.

While they were given advance notice that FarmKind was planning a campaign promoting offsetting as an alternative to trying vegan in January and were kept informed about media timing, they did not have sight of the website content until after it was launched, nor of the final PR framing.

They share some of the concerns raised in these discussions about the potential risks associated with this approach.”

As you can imagine, I had a lot of thoughts about all this. So I invited FarmKind’s co-founder, Thom Norman, onto my YouTube channel to discuss this controversial strategy.

I highly recommend watching the video, there’s a lot of nuance and context that is better understood through hearing it explained verbally.

Listening to Thom’s responses across the discussion, my understanding of his position is roughly as follows:

• FarmKind does not see this campaign as encouraging people to eat more meat or animal products, and Thom pushed back on the idea that this is what they are advocating

• Thom argued that even if some people did consume more animal products, there are practical limits to how much more people could realistically consume

• FarmKind’s strategy is to work with where society currently is, and Thom expressed scepticism that large-scale diet change is something society is ready for at this stage, even though some FarmKind-recommended charities do diet-change work

• Thom framed the campaign as an attempt to redirect or intercept anti-Veganuary sentiment that appears every January, and to use that attention to raise money for farmed animal charities

• Thom did not see significant risk in the campaign’s messaging toward veganism or Veganuary

• Thom acknowledged several criticisms of the campaign and said he was open to the possibility that they may have misjudged aspects of it

I disagreed with Thom on much of this, and made that clear in the discussion.

I do believe this campaign promotes the consumption and overconsumption of animal products. For example, if an environmental organisation hired professional travellers as experts, sent them flying around the world, and told me to not worry about flying as we can just offset it, I would fly more. I think that’s quite a simple thing to predict, and it’s likely the message this campaign is promoting, even if unintended.

I also believe the campaign has sacrificed Veganuary/veganism at the alter of donations. I don’t think the risks are small, I think they’re serious. I understand FarmKind is hopeful they’ll get onto Piers Morgan’s show with this campaign. I get daily comments on my social media from people quoting Piers Morgan’s anti-vegan arguments almost word for word. Some of these quotes are from clips that are now 4-5 years old.

Anti-vegan clips are sticky, and they’ll be especially sticky when “ex-vegans who have previously worked for international pro-vegan organisations go on anti-vegan TV shows to speak against veganism/their former pro-vegan employers and promote a pro-meat eating campaign”, which is how I think the framing is to the public. Again, regardless of the intention.

I don’t oppose FarmKind’s idea for “offsetting” as a way to generate donations for effective animal charities. I acknowledge the reality that there are sections of the population that I as a vegan advocate can’t tap into, that maybe they can tap into. FarmKind is just another tool in the toolbox.

I also believe Thom is well-intentioned. We have a mutual friend who volunteers with him at a local animal sanctuary, and I can see he does really care about animals. This was never in question.

But I can’t get on board with this campaign. I think they have underestimated the risks and the damage they could cause not only to the public’s perception of veganism, vegans and Veganuary, but also to the animal advocacy movement itself.

There is already animosity and a lack of understanding between certain divisions of the animal advocacy movement. You can see this especially with vegan advocates’ attitudes towards welfare reform advocates.

I believe this campaign has deepened that divide. It’s given vegan advocates more reason to dismiss welfare reform advocates, and incited more infighting and division. I am not alone in this view. I’ve seen advocates from both camps making the same observation.

If we’re going to play “good cop bad cop” with the public to achieve our goals, everyone needs to be in on it. We need to work together, unified. Decide what narratives we’re comfortable with, how far we’re willing to go, and what risks we’re willing to take - together.

We shouldn’t be rushing off, going it solo, and telling the other side to just suck it up for the sake of our preferred strategy to help animals.

I hope this campaign serves as an important lesson for future campaigns and for our movement on the whole. Our work for animals benefits when we find ways to work together.

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Most people’s New Year’s resolutions focus on self-improvement, which is a good thing. I’m a big fan of sayings like, “to save the world, you need to save yourself first”.

Health and fitness goals, career progression - all worthy of a New Year’s resolution, but are they really big enough? If you’re suffering from health issues, or find yourself in poverty, then of course goals like this become incredibly important. But for the rest of us, they can feel… surface level.

I mean if you really want to do something that makes a difference, not only for self-improvement, but also making the world a better place, do you think you could do better than a fling with healthy eating or getting abs?

Let me pitch you my idea for a New Year’s resolution that anyone can do, one that requires a real commitment, but has an incredibly rewarding payoff. Not only a personal payoff, but a much wider impact on the world.

Every person reading this post consumes products every day. Whether that’s food, drinks, clothes, household items, medicine.

By this point most of us are aware that there are better and worse ways to consume.

We see the options at the store for things like Fairtrade fruits and vegetables, signalling that they came from fair labour and not exploitation. We see products going plastic-free to reduce plastic waste, or using biodegradable materials in an attempt to eliminate waste.

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There are endless options like this, and it can be overwhelming. I’m not here to suggest some complicated New Year’s resolution that means learning about all these options. My pitch is very simple.

There is one issue that has impact on a scale that’s almost impossible to quantify.

The numbers connected to this one issue are so large, our brains can’t even comprehend it.

I am of course talking about animals. Specifically, the animals in our systems of consumption. Food, beverages, clothing, toiletries, pharmaceuticals.

Fairtrade, plastic-free and other items promoting similar interventions are great, don’t get me wrong. But compared with the scale of the impact of animal use in our consumption system, we may as well be comparing a grain of sand to every beach on Earth.

For these things consumed daily from the supermarket, we don’t just breed, use and kill millions of animals, nor billions, but trillions.

Trillions.

Most of them in factory farms.

And if you include the animals affected by the external, incidental and indirect impact of these animal-dependent systems, that already high number grows even more.

The animals in this system aren’t mindless machines or vegetables in fields. Research has demonstrated time and time again that they’re sentient, conscious, capable of a wide range of emotions including joy, happiness, fear and even depression and anxiety.

Name one other thing that affects that many thinking, feeling, emotional lives, that most of us are either directly or indirectly responsible for? It should be our number one focus, but many of us will never become aware of just how bad it is. And this isn’t by accident.

With such large scale operations comes large scale money. Trillions of dollars actually. When you’re working with that much money, shaping norms is much less of a challenge. Deceptive advertising, propaganda aimed to confuse, political lobbying - keeping people distracted and in the dark. They’ve got the most talented teams and powerful connections to make it so.

But now you know, so what does a New Year’s resolution to do something about this look like? The most simple answer is easier said than done, but if you have the willpower and the passion to learn, it will become like riding a bike in no time.

And that is: stop consuming animal products. I said it seems easier said than done, because I know anyone who currently lives a standard lifestyle will see this and think, “I have no idea how I could do that”. I get it, it’s an entirely new way of living. It can take time, and many people choose to do it gradually so it’s a less scary change.

That’s why programs like Veganuary exist, where you can get free support for a January challenge to eat animal-free for the month.

Or some people think they’ll be unhealthy, or won’t get enough protein, or that actually buying high-welfare animal products is just fine. Remember those trillions of dollars I spoke about earlier? These ideas come from their aggressive propaganda campaigns. All major research indicates that so long as you learn how to get your nutrition properly from non-animal sources, you can be as healthy or healthier than you are now.

Protein isn’t an issue either, just last year two plant-based athletes beat animal-based athletes in international strength competitions. Tom Butts won World’s Strongest Man in his weight category for the 3rd year running, and Angeline Berva won the European Strongman Games, even setting a new world record.

And high-welfare animal products? Useful if we are forced to consume animals for our lifestyles, but most of us are in the position to choose not to breed animals into captivity, use and kill them, which is the ultimate “high-welfare” choice.

My hope is that someone reads this and begins their journey into changing the world for what is by far the most forgotten and overlooked individuals in our society - the animals in our systems of consumption.

Whether you choose to join Veganuary, immediately go animal-free today, or begin reducing your consumption of animal products - make 2026 the year you started making a difference. When you committed to not only do something good for yourself, but for the many someones who really need you to change.

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