Manny Rutinel discusses how animal activists can encourage others to be involved in the animal movement at the 2024 Animal Legal Defense Fund Student Convention.

Transcription:

So I guess my question is just how do you go about inspiring, if not like blatantly persuading non advocates that animal welfare is a worthwhile cause? Broke.

Brooke, thanks so much for that question. I think like Cheryl was saying, I think folks across the board want to be kind and to take care of even animals. I think one thing that the animal movement has done that. Has caused us to basically shoot ourselves in the foot is that we've set up a lot of purity tests that I think have been very exclusionary to people. And so the biggest 1 is like, are you vegan? Right? It's this question that there's this like saying in the animal movement, which is like you can't love animals and eat them and that's just not true. In some sense, because people have a multitude of different interests and beliefs and they are complex and they hold them all. At once and we are social animals and breakfast, lunch and dinner, we are faced with another social animal that's putting all sorts of pressure on us, a culture that's putting all sorts of pressure on us. And ultimately, very, very few people are vegan, but that doesn't mean that they don't think that it's important to care about cruelty at the same time. And So what I think to this question about how do you make people care about animal welfare?The answer is I think they already do. The question is. What's a call to action that allows them to feel like they're part of a movement? And I think one thing that we can encourage folks to do is to. Consider our movement a very big tent and allow them to contribute to the movement without these purity tests that go against our social nature. And so some examples are donating. I would much rather people donate $300 a year to an organization like Animal Outlook than for them to go vegan and never talk about it or never talk about the importance of the animal factories and things like that. I think that's much more impactful, actually. So that's one, they can go to protests, they can go to meetups, they can write to their local legislators and tell them that this is an important issue. I think there's a lot of calls to action that allow people to enter the movement, express that identity around caring for animal welfare that don't have to do with this purity test around, let's say in this case, veganism.