Back-of-the-Envelope Activist Math

There are about 118,000 vegetarians and vegans in the Seattle metro area. Of those, approximately 50 participate in any kind of regular activism (at least once every two months): Justice For Animals gets ~5-10 people; the Animal Rights Initiative gets around a dozen; the Northwest Animal Rights Network has ~20-30; and The Humane League has half-dozen.^[1] Another 50 to 100 people participate irregularly, perhaps once or twice a year. Taking the more generous number of 150 volunteers, the participation rate shakes out to 0.1% of vegans and vegetarians (and 0.004% of the general population).^[2] These are people who've already made the considerable personal and social shift to go vegan, and they’re deciding not to spend a few hours a month on activism that could reach many more animals than their diets.

It’s not just that people don’t want to participate in activism in general. There are a number of movements that have much larger participation rates. BLM protests and climate protests top the charts at a participation rate of 6% of the American population attending at least one protest or rally. The Women’s March had 1.0 to 1.6% of the population participate. If we look at the umbrella of activism in general, a Pew study finds 11% of the population reporting that they’ve attended a protest or demonstration in the past year. Gen Z is particularly active, with one study showing that 32% regularly engage with activism or social justice work.

All of this begs the question: where are all the animal activists? Even just looking at vegetarians and vegans, we have an abysmal participation rate in activism. And it’s hardly like omnivores are apathetic towards animals with 80-90% of people voicing support for stronger protections for farmed and wild animals. Clearly, a good chunk of the population will participate in activism and cares about animals. If we can take a hard look at what we’re doing and figure out why so many people are turned off by animal activism, we have the potential to grow the animal activism movement ten-fold.

Animal Activism Sucks

No one wants to participate in animal activism because animal activism sucks. If I wanted to design the least rewarding experience possible, animal activism wouldn’t be far off from the result. We spend months or years doing activities that tend to be boring and/or demanding (such as sending emails or standing outside buildings protesting), during which we might be heckled, disparaged, or harassed. A lot of the things that I’m doing for animal activism are so annoying that I actively avoid them at my paid job. 

Beyond the intrinsic frustrations, there’s a lack of extrinsic rewards. Other activists are fighting for better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities. When they win, their lives improve. When we win, we see no immediate changes or benefits to our lives. And if we tell other people about what we do, the responses can range from admiration to ambivalence to disdain. So the effects in terms of our quality of life or social standing usually hover somewhere around nonexistent. 

There are a few benefits we do get: a sense of living up to our own moral standards, recognition from other animal activists, and community with people who share our values. Being a vegan or animal activist in mainstream culture can be deeply isolating. When we participate in animal activism, we go from being ostracized or alienated for some of our deep values to being celebrated. It can be a powerful draw for people who are committed to the ideology. 

Unfortunately, these benefits can evaporate for people who aren’t fully bought into the belief system (ex. omnivores). In the worst case, they face scorn or disdain from folks in our movement. On average, they will often experience mild alienation: veganism and vegetarianism are frequent topics of conversation, which may be inaccessible and uninteresting. So anyone on the fence loses out on the camaraderie or status, some of the scant rewards for being a part of these groups.

Even if someone wants to participate in the face of all of these difficulties, participation can be difficult to sustain over a long period of time. Animal activist leaders (like me) spend most of our time asking for more from our community members - one more protest, one more email, one more donation. In contrast, I’ve seen other movements host more celebratory events, like one of the Seattle city council campaigns that did happy hours after canvassing and a party at the end of the campaign, win or lose. To put it another way, if you were in a relationship with someone who kept asking you to do things for them, regardless of where you were in your life, that would be an unhealthy relationship and you would (hopefully) leave. Yet that’s what we do with our volunteers. 

The result of these adverse conditions is that most of the people who stick around are those with a strong enough moral conviction that it’s worth paying all the costs that animal activism incurs. In turn, this conviction often creates a harsh stance towards anyone who doesn’t meet our standards. Some activist vegans will even call non-activist vegans or vegan activists who favor softer tactics “cupcake vegans” as a pejorative term to try to provoke them into more hardline activism. Although this level of derision is uncommon in most of the in person circles I’ve seen, there’s still an underlying energy of intensity to the activism that can be offputting for anyone who doesn’t match it. 

So we mostly end up with small communities^[3], which are as much of a turn-off as the work itself. Why would anyone participate in a group that only has a handful of members? It’s like seeing a bunch of empty tables at a restaurant - you’ll question what the restaurant is doing wrong. And you don’t get any of the benefits of having a larger community, like potential friends and communal support during difficult times. Even modestly larger movements get these benefits for free: the Seattle DSA chapter has dozens of people at its meetings, which makes it easy to imagine making a new friend there. The animal movement’s small size turns into a vicious cycle: fewer members make it harder to recruit. 

So, animal activism is somewhere between boring and miserable at the moment, carries few long term rewards outside of camaraderie with a small circle of moral zealots, and acts as a consistent drain on your personal resources. This makes for a movement where there’s little reason to participate if you don’t already think that animal suffering is one of the most important things in the world. 

Missing Ingredients: Fun, Meaning, and Connection

Here’s a radical idea: What if we made our activism fun? In many ways, our work is life and death, and fun can seem out of place. Yet being able to incorporate elements of levity and joy into our work could go a long way towards both sustaining veteran activists and drawing in new activists^[4]. It’s a little like covering broccoli with cheese to get kids to eat their veggies. We could host any number of events (a happy hour, a movie night, a board game night, etc.) and just have people send an activism email when they come through the door. It would be a low stakes way for someone to try out the community and do a little good. Or, we could adjust our activism to be more intrinsically motivating. Have a bingo board for who can get certain responses from their social media posts. Do a dance contest at a protest in full chicken costumes. Look for ways of bringing challenge or whimsy to our activist tasks. 

For all the good it can do, fun has some significant limitations. Fun is fickle. You can’t force fun. You can provide structure for fun to appear, but it’s quite difficult to mandate, as anyone who’s been to a mandatory “fun” corporate event knows. We have the added challenge of trying to get fun to coexist with an activity that has a high degree of inherent boredom or stress. Part of the reason why our actions (like calling customer service) are effective is because they’re a little miserable, which makes them an expensive signal to send to a corporation. We may never get rid of these difficulties; the broccoli will always be hiding under the cheese. Many people will simply opt for pure cheese, i.e. entertaining events that demand nothing from them. Thankfully, fun is not the only need people have.

Meaning is another deep human need, one that we have in abundance. What could be more meaningful than sparing millions of innocent beings from suffering? The problem is that we often fail to capitalize on the raw meaning inherent in our activism and turn it into something tangible. Sure, THL will send out a celebration email when we win a campaign and the regional coordinators will tell us we did a good job, but that is a brief ray of sunshine in a long and stormy slog. The activists who manage to stick with it are those who already feel the meaning so deep in their bones that they don’t need any external validation to prop it up, which is not many people at all.

What we need is symbolism and ritual to make the importance of our actions more tangible. Meaning requires giving people a story in which to place themselves and a sense that they can steer that story. We want to matter. So, send volunteers badges for each corporation we topple or a small wooden egg for every million hens we help. Read passages from stirring literature at the beginnings and ends of events. There are countless religious and cultural practices we can draw inspiration from to craft meaningful rituals.

Perhaps more fundamental than fun or meaning, we can provide connection. We already do this to some extent; we all bring some level of shared ideals to our activism and that connects us. We can take this one step further by providing more opportunities to connect and be social. An easy way to start is by hosting more quality events and providing platforms to connect outside of events (like chat apps). There is certainly a learning curve to learning to host well, but no more than any other skill. With more frequent social events, we provide a space for existing members to build stronger connections.

Another way to strengthen connection is growing the size of the community. Bigger communities offer pools of potential friends, dating partners, mentors, and mentees. It’s one reason why so many people flock to religion. Yet finding more people to connect with is a catch-22: We need a bigger community to draw people in, but we need to draw people in to have a bigger community. Once you’ve met the dozen THL activists in the area, that’s it. Providing more people to connect with is more difficult than simply hosting more events. Growing the community ends up as more of a goal than a strategy; someday, we want to be able to ignite social fusion, getting to a community large enough that it attracts people for a self-sustaining reaction.

Fun, meaning, and connection are great places to start, but the most important part is that individual activists and especially movement leaders start asking how we can support and give back to each other. The movement can’t keep asking for so much without giving more in return. Even though we’ve managed to accomplish tremendous victories with a handful of activists, we’ve also managed to burn out scores of activists and keep running into a ceiling of how many people we can get involved. If we really want to become a force to be reckoned with, we need to care for each others’ needs as much as we care for the fight for animal liberation. 

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Special thanks to beta readers: Kim Evans, Aditya Nair, Maddi Laffitte, and Sam Bernecker

1. ^{^}

    These numbers are based on a combination of personal experience and photos published by these groups on social media

2. ^{^}

    I have less familiarity with other cities, but my impression from talking with organizers is that they are encountering similar problems. A THL organizer from the Columbus area once mentioned combining their group with all the other animal activism groups in the city because there weren’t more than a dozen people who wanted to engage. 

3. ^{^}

    Sometimes, in large enough cities like New York, we’ll see proper communities coalesce that can bring in people who might not usually get involved; but that’s more a product of the sheer number of people around than anything the local organizers are doing. 

^{^}

Even with the depressing reality of factory farming, there’s plenty for us to find joy in: our shared camaraderie, the profound wonder in life, the wins we’ve had along the way. 

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