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A Special Opportunity
Double Your Donation Today!
Dear Friend,
As mentioned before, for Spring
2006, Adopt
a College activists have set
a new semester record of over 187,000
booklets, surpassing the previous
distribution record of 175,000.
For the 2005-2006 school year, AAC
activists have handed 360,000+ booklets
directly to students.
Overall, Vegan Outreach
is on track to distribute a million
booklets during 2006!
 One
member recently had the chance to
leaflet with Jon Camp (at right)
and was so impressed by
the students’ reaction to Vegan
Outreach’s work that he decided
to help expand the program by offering
a $20,000 matching donation!
Whatever you can afford to contribute,
your tax-deductible donation will
be doubled.
We need
your contribution today to meet
this challenge!
Since the first mailing for this
matching donation, we have received
just over $10,000, leaving us more
than half-way to being able to put
the matching donation to work for
the animals.
So please -- take
a moment to send in a special contribution
and help Vegan Outreach receive
$20,000 towards speaking for the
animals! You can donate
securely on-line here,
or send a check or money order to:
Vegan Outreach
P.O. Box 38492
Pittsburgh, PA 15238-8492
Thanks so much!
Jack Norris, RD (tabling at right)
Vegan Outreach President
PS Below, you'll find an essay
about the importance of vegetarian
outreach, and the role each of us
can play. I hope you'll find it
interesting and inspiring.
The Difficulty and Importance
of Vegetarian Advocacy
If we can't see it, does it
exist?
Years ago, Paul McCartney pointed
out that, "if slaughterhouses
had glass walls, we'd all be vegetarians."
This concisely captures the main
difficulty of vegetarian advocacy
-- that people don’t have to see
the animals they eat being imprisoned
in factory farms and butchered in
industrial slaughterhouses. One
can order a chicken sandwich, and
that is all that is involved --
just a sandwich. Even after reading
detailed, illustrated information
about factory farms, the cruelties
of meat don't stick with every individual,
especially when the rest of society
conceals the realities behind meat.
 Similarly,
if factory farms and slaughterhouses
were as visible as the meat they
produce, all thoughtful, compassionate
individuals would be vegetarian
advocates. Without the elaborate
concealment, it would be clear that
the vast majority of animals exploited
in this country suffer and die to
be eaten.
Human nature leads us to focus
on the familiar and immediate, such
as the campaigns to help dogs and
cats displaced by Katrina. In fact,
people concerned with animals have
spent hundreds of millions of dollars
on high-profile cases, while focusing
much less money on the roughly 99%
of domesticated animals who are
slaughtered to be eaten.
We each want to feel we have accomplished
something tangible, that we have
achieved a quantifiable victory.
Promoting vegetarianism doesn't
always provide this kind of reward.
You meet few of the people you have
influenced to stop eating animals,
and you can’t see the animals who,
in the alternative universe where
you hadn't pursued veg outreach,
would have suffered horribly in
factory farms.
Yet, the number of animals helped
by exposing factory farms and promoting
vegetarianism are impressive. For
example, over 650,000 students have
been handed Vegan Outreach booklets
through our Adopt
a College program. We calculate
that this has prevented the suffering
of more than 28.5 million birds
and mammals. And this counts only
our college outreach program --
it doesn't include all the animals
spared by the other 3.8 million
booklets distributed!
Of course, we could
also list some of the signs that
we -- a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens -- are, indeed,
changing the world: e.g., the 2005
ARAMARK poll that showed that 24%
of surveyed college students consider
having vegan options important;
the ever-increasing availability
of vegetarian and vegan options;
the stories reported every day by
Vegan Outreach leafleters. However,
these are mostly indirect indications
of success; for many people, these
aren't enough to support person-to-person
outreach.
In short, we know how terribly
animals are suffering today, and
the animals saved by vegetarian
outreach are so abstract as not
to exist, let alone to feel like
a "victory." Because there
are so few of us who look beyond
the familiar and immediate, recognize
the magnitude of the suffering caused
by eating meat, and understand the
opportunity veg outreach presents,
we have a special obligation to
do the hard, intangible, and often
unrewarding work of tearing down
the walls that hide the atrocities
of factory farms and industrial
slaughterhouses. We need to work,
every day, to abolish, totally and
forever, the horrors of modern animal
agriculture.
In the end, we must remember that
throughout history, there has always
been a "right" and a "wrong"
side to ethical issues -- a right
side to slavery, women’s suffrage,
civil rights. And there have always
been “reasonable” people, advising
caution and realism: "You can't
really expect to end slavery/get
women the vote/pass a civil rights
law. Let’s be realistic in what
we seek."
With hindsight, though, we don't
respect those who simply accepted
the seeming limitations of the status
quo. Rather, we admire those who
stood up for what is right and,
in so doing, changed history.
We can be those people. If not
us, who? If not now, when?
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Vegan Outreach is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the suffering of farmed animals by promoting informed, ethical eating.
All donations are tax-deductible.
Vegan Outreach
POB 30865, Tucson, AZ 85751-0865 |
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