Everyone has met a vegan who has been rude
to them or who has been outrageous or just
angry or yelling at them.
This milk was stolen from mothers.
Mothers whose freedoms were taken from them!
So it's not surprising that someone like Anthony
Bourdain will call vegans Hezbollah—
Vee-jans or ve-jans or whatever they call
themselves, they’re the Hezbollah of, uh,
they share a lot similarities with dangerous
fundamentalist groups.
because we just have this reputation.
Rightly so, because of how many of us act,
of just being absolute fanatics.
Basically no one eats meat because they want
animals to suffer.
No one goes to the grocery store and says,
"Yeah, I love what Tyson does to this chicken.
That's what I'm going to support."
Chickens were punched, kicked, swung, and
thrown by their fragile wings.
People eat meat because everyone around them
eats meat.
It's what they're used to, it's what's familiar,
it's what's easy and cheap.
KFC we’re making value simple.
For a limited time get a 10-piece bucket for
only $12.99!
What some friends and I decided is we should
take a different approach.
Rather than just pushing veganism,
we should take the opportunity that people
have to take one step that will have a profound
impact on the number of animals suffering.
And that is to have them not eat chickens
anymore.
No matter what they eat instead, if they cut
out eating chickens they will remove the vast
majority of their support for factory farms.
The average American diet causes about 25
land animals to be factory farmed and slaughtered
every year.
If people just stopped eating chickens, they
will spare 23 of those animals.
This is because it takes over 200 chickens
to provide the same number of meals as one
steer or over 40 chickens to provide the same
number of meals as one pig.
There have been a number of studies, the most
recent by Faunalytics, that shows over 80%
of people who go vegetarian go back to eating
animals, and almost half of the people surveyed
on this say that they go back because they
can't stand the pressure to maintain a pure
diet.
So when we're pushing people to eat the way
we eat—
I was thinking of going vegan.
I’m a level 5 vegan, I won’t eat anything
that casts a shadow.
Wow.
we are driving people away.
We are driving people back to eating meat.
Around 2% of people are true vegetarians and
about a .5% of the people in the United States
are vegan.
Now this is after decades of advocacy.
Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation came
out in the 1970s.
PETA came around in 1980.
So groups and advocates have been at this
for decades and yet the percentage of people
in the United States who are vegetarian has
basically not changed at all.
So it really is time for us to reconsider
our message, reconsider our advocacy, and
do something that has a chance of being different.
That has a chance of breaking through to the
general public.
Because we know, just by looking at the graphs,
just by looking at the numbers, that we have
been failures at this so far.
