And I feel powerless to stop them. Does anyone else feel like this?
I think the strong emotional appeal is what makes it off putting because people feel pushed into an opinion based on feelings. It’s a bit like the equivalent of anti abortion nuts screaming THINK OF THE CHILDREN and holding up signs of bloody fetuses.
I can’t agree with this.
People pretty much only make decisions based on emotions. This is even pretty well established as the case in modern jurisprudence; judges work backwards based on their emotional presuppositions.
People don’t like these sorts of comments, because they don’t want to be confronted with the impacts of their practices, and experience the uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance.
While I might use other language for carnists, they would not be happy with vegan arguments and discourse unless it is completely supportive of their position or otherwise silent. I don’t see anything wrong with OP posting this sort of language in a vegan forum to vent.
To be honest I shared this with vegans who I thought might relate, it wasn’t something I typically say to non-vegans, because in my experience, they make fun of vegans before they would allow themselves to truly engage with the idea of animal suffering/exploitation/killing etc by humans. So I would probably modify my language to be more facts-based and make them aware of the problems with animal farming/exploitation. If I see a living, conscious animal, that’s immediately a “friend” to me and I respect them, so all animals are friends. I hope this inspires more kindness to them. But for others, the idea of that might seem worthy of ridicule.
I understand the resistance to “appealing to emotion”, but I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing as a whole; if we’re sure that being vegan is the right thing to do, then appealing to people’s emotional side with how they view animals could be a useful tactic. Perhaps it would need to be less vague however, such as “animals are sentient, complex beings” rather than friends.
I would argue saying “think of the children” while holding up an image of an aborted fetus might be a bit of a misrepresentation of reality rather than just an appeal to emotion, at the risk of offending someone. Undeveloped, unconscious fetuses aren’t equivalent to “children” or fully formed, conscious humans in the sense we typically understand it (e.g. a sentient human woman who would truly suffer from an enforced pregnancy), but it might lead people who don’t know to believe they are. I don’t think anyone really thinks I’m personally friends with every farmed animal who gets abused and slaughtered as a result of people’s animal product purchases, so I don’t think it’s misrepresentative to call them friends as a general term of endearment for all sentient life.
But I take your point, I really do.
I have been thinking about this a bit more as well, because you are of course right on principle, people should feel empathy for the other creatures that share our world, and I also believe that most people are capable of empathy in general.
So it must be something else that makes it weird, and the only thing I can come up with is the anthropomorphization of the animals. People might agree on principle that we shouldn’t harm other beings, but might feel uncomfortable with the notion of treating them as fully equal to humans, even if it’s just on a subconscious level.
