I recently found myself in an uncomfortable situation when attending a social event with coworkers. As many of us know all too well, these types of events often involve animal products, which can make things difficult for vegans like myself. As anticipated, one of my colleagues inquired about my plate, which they noticed lacked the carcasses of once feeling individuals. I simply replied that I prefer not to dine on the bodies of fellow animals. The topic was inescapable.

At first, my colleagues appeared to understand and even complimented me on making a conscious decision to prioritise my health. But when I clarified that my abstinence from eating other animals wasn't about health but rather a moral choice, their attitude performed a gymnastic flip from approval and admiration to condemnation and mockery—even accusations of blasphemy!

So, in a desperate bid to find common ground, I quoted a religious passage that, with a pinch of mental gymnastics and a heaping spoonful of ingenuity, could be interpreted as being anti-animal abuse via consumption given available alternatives. Alas, my efforts backfired, and my peers became incensed, calling me out for distorting religious teachings. In their lights I was now not only a contemptible vegan but a heretic as well.

The whole experience left me feeling confused and frustrated. Why is it seen as acceptable and normal to cause harm to 80 billion farmed animals every year and trillions of marine animals, yet someone who chooses to abstain from contributing to that needless pain and suffering—arguably the sheer scale of which dwarfs any contemporary suffering, let alone historical one—is considered radical or offensive and their mockery is fair game? It is rarely met with applaud for refusing to participate in systematic cruelty for the sake of convenience, culinary tradition and taste preference. It is also rarely a neutral reaction, rarely a simple nod or an ‘I see’. Rather, too often it is met with contempt and defensiveness. Why? No one ever shrieks, rolls their eyes or throws a defensive fit about those pesky anti-slavery advocates. Are we the baddies?

The Social Construction of ‘Vegans’

After reflecting on the odd response from my peers to my stance, I have realised that 'Vegans' as a coherent group with a recognisable identity have been fashioned externally by popular and media discourses backed by a trillion dollar “animal agriculture” industry, rather than internally by its members—by those people who believe that animal exploitation and slaughter should be halted and consequently advocate for this change in practice.

Only by constructing this well-defined, bounded collective entity can the "Us vs. Them" game be played, where disparate individuals are lumped together as 'outsiders' and painted with the brush of negative stereotypes. An adversarial dynamic between us, “meat-eaters”, and them, “vegans”, is thus made intelligible. Imagine if, instead of labeling individuals as 'vegans', we referred to them as 'anti-animal abuse activists'. Such a title is undeniably rooted in the fundamental belief of opposing animal cruelty, much like we refer to those opposing child abuse without assigning them a distinctive group label or identity. It skips being pigeonholed into the stereotype-laden group identity associated with 'veganism'.

The result of this label “vegan” as it currently stands is that when people associate others who reject eating other animals with these specific set of traits based on media portrayals, the focus shifts away from the underlying ethics behind such choices and turns instead to a fixed image of a certain type of person, a certain cultural archetype, a “vegan”, which is at worst a negative one, or at best a simple “lifestyle” choice.

Therefore, when someone consistently chooses not to consume animal products, they're automatically associated with the stereotypes related to the "group" (vegans), rather than the "belief" (opposition to animal exploitation). Even if they attempt to clarify their ethical stand, it's subconsciously tied to the societal narrative surrounding “veganism” - a narrative heavily influenced by media and popular representation which veers back to the idea of vegans-as-a-group, rather than the ethos behind the belief.

It is sadly no longer possible to think of veganism as a belief or stance against the horrible treatment of animals which purchasing animal products necessitates. The belief is now equated with an imagined group and its imagined negative characteristics. The profoundly successful achievement created by that discourse is a frame of reference which effectively shoots the messengers and muddles up the message; a game which perhaps I have unfortunately played into by writing up this post. They’ve won - eating other animals today is as widespread as it has ever been in human history, and only getting more so with the rise of animal consumption in places like China. And one need only look at the successful anti-PETA propaganda to clearly appreciate this achievement (see footnote for more).1

Also unfortunate is that individuals holding that belief are now willy nilly constituted by that dominant discourse. They have no choice but to resort to an imagined group that is represented by an externally hostile discourse when they adopt the appellation ‘vegan’. You are that cultural archetypes, that imagined “annoying vegan” and “soyboy” as a matter of fact.

A Discourse of Mockery and Hostility

My anecdote is of course not uncommon. Memes all over the internet depict vegans in a mocking light, portraying them as misanthropic and cultish. There’s an entire subreddit with 22 thousand users dedicated to just doing that. Here are several examples from a literally two minutes search on reddit:

It is generally socially acceptable to ridicule vegans, not least in the workplace. That is, if one is lucky enough to get a job in the first place as being vegan is more likely to exclude you from job applications due to negative stereotypes. This stigma is part and parcel with being a vegan and the fear of stigma, unsurprisingly, makes people hesitant to make the change.

In Canada, for example, the general population hate vegans more than atheists and immigrants (the two notoriously most hated groups!). Vegans are however rated better if they were motivated by health reasons rather than ethical concerns. More (Belgium), more (US) and more (Australia) studies are coming out replicating these results in various other countries. The indignation is so normalised and ubiquitous that a plant-based shop in London sells vegan chocolates that are wrapped in anti-vegan tweets. And recently, a chef who openly discriminates against vegans has received much praise from online users:

This hostility seems to be especially common in Britain. Over half of the UK vegan population reported facing antagonism and hostility from family and friends over their veganism. I am reminded here of the time when Gordon Ramsey said that he’s allergic to vegetarians and would pay his kids to never be ones. The UK media also regularly present a derogatory and stereotypical portrayal of vegans. Take this drivelling stupidity of an article published this week on Spiked, entitled ‘The quiet revolt against veganism’, which showed up in my google news algorithm:

One also need only listen to Piers Morgan, the most well known British broadcaster, for a little while and the topic of veganism will be ultimately brought up in some derogatory fashion. This extends to pop media as well, from the likes of Joe Rogan, Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson to progressives like HasanAbi and others from the left who view vegans as cultural imperialists.

One study conducted in 2011 examining the British media’s reporting on veganism found that out of 397 articles only 20% were neutral, 5% were positive and the rest of the 75% were negative. The perpetuated discourses in order of frequency were found to be:

1. Ridiculing veganism.

2. Caricaturing veganism as asceticism.

3. Describing veganism as difficult or impossible to sustain.

4. Portraying veganism as a fad or fashion trend.

5. Describing vegans as overly sensitive.

6. Characterising vegans as hostile. (p.139)

Subsequent research in 2022 has confirmed this by subjecting an even larger data set of media corpus in the UK to discourse analysis and concluded that

Vegans tend to be evaluated negatively in this context, portrayed as violent, hypocritical, pushy and irresponsible when it comes to their (and their children’s) health. [… the discourses] present veganism as a choice and represent vegans in terms of their consumption practices, as increasing in numbers, as violent and ‘militaristic’, as unreasonable and easily offended, and as hypocritical in terms of how consistently they follow a vegan philosophy. Such representations, some of which echo those identified in previous studies, are thus likely to constitute dominant discourses around veganism in British society, to the extent that they cut across newspaper formats in their take-up.

I wanted to see this for myself, so I searched Youtube with the term ‘vegan’ and plenty of media clips popped up. I have found that on the rare occasion where a ‘vegan’ guest is selected to be interviewed (probably through extensive screening), they almost invariably speak and behave in artificially stereotypical ways.

Out of the four years I have been communicating with other vegans, I have yet to meet any that embody those stereotypes. Barring a few occasions, vegan activists that are representative of the movement are systematically rejected from appearing on media platforms.

Here’s one recent example where the ‘vegan’ guest acts like an obnoxious child on the Piers Morgan show, with the video receiving over 1.7 million views in two months (ending with an epic pwn by Mr Piers; the totally novel and hilarious joke of eating animal flesh in front of the vegan!):

The Orwellian euphemisms of the animal exploitation industry.

In Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, Big Brother envisions the systematic replacement of standard English, or Oldspeak, with Newspeak, a language designed to control thoughts. This process involves eliminating certain words and introducing new ones, as well as constantly conditioning the public to reinterpret old words. The indoctrination begins with Big Brother's three slogans: "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength." Orwell notes that "Political language […] is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

The meat industry's obfuscation is a present day exemplification of this. Phrases like "beak conditioning" are employed to describe the act of cutting a chicken's beak, making it sound less distressing. Moreover, the individuals tasked with ending the lives of chickens that escape the "automatic killer" machine are labeled "knife operators," implying a harmless occupation. Curiously, the term "insanguinated" projects an aura of refinement, though it actually represents the gruesome process of bleeding to death. The concept of "humane slaughter" is presented, while in actuality, chickens perish through freezing or boiling, pigs are gassed alive, and the horrifying practice of skinning animals alive persists.

The meat industry has a knack for masking the true nature of their practices, substituting words like "slaughterhouse" with "meat plant" and using terms such as "pork," "bacon," "beef," "mutton," "venison," and "veal" to create a mental distance between consumers and the animals they consume. Euphemisms like "cage-free," "broilers," "bycatch," "artificial insemination," "free-range," "processing," "depopulation," and "livestock" are employed to further obscure the harsh realities of the industry.

A defender of Orwellian euphemisms might argue that their usage isn't so bad, implying an unstated the proposition that nonhuman animals are commodities for human exploitation. However, such a proposition is too controversial to remain unspoken and is certainly too contentious to be presented as definitions rather than arguments.

Rhetorical Analysis: Who Exactly are ‘Militant’ Vegans?

In a world of skewed media representation, vegans frequently find themselves backed into a corner, confronted by adversarial interviewers and prejudiced depictions. Picture, if you will, an unsuspecting vegan guest on a popular television show, such as This Morning, under the contentious banner, 'Are Militant Vegans Going Too Far?'.

This loaded inquiry, far from being neutral or disinterested, is designed to cast vegans as an exotic and radical "other," effectively distancing them from the mainstream audience, all the while subtly reinforcing the notion that animal consumption is, indeed, the natural order of things.

It first creates an outgroup to the audience that are not simply disparate individuals who take a stance against the needless mass abuse and slaughter of nonhuman animals, but are recognisable to the audience as an “other” to which the audience can roll their eyes and identify as ‘those’ vegans that are not ‘us’. It does not specify any ingroup because the ingroup is ‘everyone else’; eating animals is a given, the natural thing to do.

In this skewed narrative, veganism is depicted as a fringe, extremist movement locked in combat with a curiously faceless adversary, cloaked in euphemisms and rendered virtually invisible [the ideology it opposes, when spelled out is that ‘it is morally acceptable to pay others to gas alive, butcher and artificially inseminate nonhuman animals for human taste pleasure even when there are alternatives’]. By such artifice, the anti-vegan position is tacitly endorsed, its proponents shielded from scrutiny, while the unwavering spotlight illuminates only the conduct of animal rights activists, conveniently bypassing the actions of animal abusers and their patrons. Will we ever witness a media outlet daring to pose the question, 'Is the Violence of Eating Other Animals Going Too Far?' It seems highly unlikely.

The term "militant" itself is evaluatively laden and loaded with negative connotations, often employed by mass media to describe terrorist organisations (e.g., see analysis in 1, 2, 3). However, Brookes and Chalupnik (2022) observe that "militant" ranked as the highest ranking a the most potent modifier collocate of vegans in the media corpus they analysed.

And the phrase ‘too far’ is moreover meant to transmit the idea that there has been an uptick in violent incidents, and the only point of possible contestation, the only rational point that is open for public debate, is whether the legions of violent vegans have finally gone too far and a tipping point has now been reached, such that any talk about veganism among the British public becomes circumscribed within those very narrow parameters.

In the midst of this media-fueled maelstrom, one would be hard-pressed to find actual instances of self-identified vegans employing violence against humans as part of their activism. The propositional content of the term ‘militant’ is thus left under-specified and implicitly conflated with ‘anyone who dares to adopt an ethical stance against animal abuse and dares to remind others of its prevalence’. Yet, it is precisely this moral panic that generates clicks and captures attention. As illustrated in the media headlines, vegans are frequently exploited for that purpose despite the oxymoronic nature of the headlines, which, when disambiguated, absurdly read as ‘people who are passionate about anti-animal violence cause people who are violent to animals to be violent to animals’.

In short, headlines such as ‘Are Militant Vegans Going Too Far’ rhetorically rely on public anti-vegan sympathies without making the propositional content of the question explicit: who are the militant vegans? Are they pressure campaigns? Street activists? Sustained protesters? Individuals illegally sneaking into farms and filming the horror show?

Such headlines rest on the unspoken assumption that any activism against the widespread violence inflicted upon nonhuman animals is inherently unacceptable, as any form of dissent will inevitably be labeled as "militant" and "going too far." This powerful rhetorical strategy not only perpetuates negative stereotypes but also serves to dissuade even the most conscientious vegans from broaching the subject of animal abuse with friends or colleagues, lest they too be branded as "militant."

THE MOST COMMON METHOD TO KILL FARMED PIGS TODAY IS TO GAS THEM ALIVE. Amidst the gut-wrenching screams that reverberate through the room, amidst the false promise of a painless end in the gas-filled chamber where newborn pigs are held captive, a bone-chilling dread permeates the adjacent quarters, filling the air with an intangible horror that has the others pressing their ears flat and letting their docked tails fall limp, as if they too are burdened by the shared, inevitable end...

Despite their heightened senses, despite their acute awareness of the world around them, the macabre enigma that is the seemingly ordinary room eludes them - a room that promises life and delivers only silence, a room where an unimaginable horror unfolds: a place one enters but never leaves, where life is violently torn away, where the soul lingers for a fleeting moment, contorting and writhing, before being abruptly sucked into oblivion, leaving behind an emptiness that echoes with the remnants of existence, a room that is less a room and more a gateway to an existential void, an abyss of silent screams and stolen lives.

Trends on YouTube Search Queries about Vegansim:

We can do our own little ‘research’ using Google Trends by identifying the most popular search queries on the platform YouTube that contain the term ‘vegan’ in them. Scoring is on the relative scale where a value of 100 is the most commonly searched query and 50 is a query searched half as often and so on.

First, the results for terms that are most frequently searched with the term ‘vegan’:

This is the results for terms that are most frequently searched with the terms ‘why vegans’:

And this is the results for terms that are most frequently searched with the terms ‘are vegans’:

Possible Sources of Mockery and Hostility Towards Vegans

Based on my own interpersonal interactions with non-vegans, I contemplate three other possible reasons behind the stigmatisation of vegans that goes beyond the hypothesis of ‘media enculturation’. Specifically, on why the simple utterance of ‘I’d rather not eat other animals’ in a relevant conversational context might conjure a hostile or mocking response despite that not being the communicative intent of the speaker.

1. Vegans pose a challenge to the moral order and the moral identities within it.

Firstly, opting not to consume nonhuman animals for principled reasons inherently challenges the social and moral order that supports and normalised such practices. This dynamic is prevalent in any activism undertaken by an ideological minority within a population. For example, the 19th and early 20th-century "abolitionist" movement in the United States faced accusations of being hostile, radical, militant, and extreme. Unlike the "reformist" camp, which merely advocated for more humane treatment, abolitionists sought the complete dismantling of the slave system—an "abnormal" position perceived as inconceivable, utterly utopian, and economically unfeasible. Similarly, if I were to adopt the moniker "feminist" in Saudi Arabia due to my commitment to justice for women, I would likely encounter the same scorn and derision I experience elsewhere when identifying as an ethically motivated vegan—both positions deviate from the prevailing moral order, thereby unsettling the status quo.

The moral order built on eating other animals just so happens to be more secure. Challenging it is perceived as raising a middle finger to my interlocutors’ moral upbringing, to what they have been taught as being natural, common sensical, acceptable, good and even to what they take to form part of what is meant by rationality, by sanity, as much as 2 + 2 = 4, since it has always, everywhere been the case and no one has ever began to challenge the morality of eating other animals just as much as no one questions why humans are allowed to breathe air.

The taken-for-granted belief that underpins the behavior of eating other animals also constitutes a significant aspect of people's self-image. For instance, they may identify themselves through their favorite animal-derived foods. Consequently, a simple declaration like "I am vegan" becomes a threat to the established moral order and the deeply ingrained habits (eating three times a day, every day) that this order supports—especially considering the social nature of these habits. This utterance simultaneously evokes a multitude of thoughts, implicitly challenging the normative and evaluative principles that underlie the consumption of animals. Consequently, it disrupts the intersection of animal eaters' gender (particularly masculinity), moral, and cultural identities.

2. Vegans conjure feelings of guilt and responsibility.

I surmise that the second reason, related to the first, stems from vegans taking a normative stance—'I don't eat animals for ethical reasons'—which compels their interlocutors to reevaluate their unexamined beliefs underpinning the practice of eating animals. Most people claim to love nonhuman animals, yet they consume a culturally acceptable subset of them. When reminded of this, feelings of guilt and potential accountability arise. To alleviate this discomfort, the abstract guilt is redirected towards a concrete subject: vegans.

Few people—aside from enthusiastic philosophers and inquisitive children—relish having their beliefs and assumptions scrutinized, especially when such examination might implicate them in unsavory conclusions or when these assumptions form part of their identity.

This redirection of blame is a common response in various situations. It's far easier to avert our gaze, engaging in self-abnegation by attributing responsibility to other entities: divine commandments, tradition, culture, the government, society, colleagues, or teachers. This continuous deflection avoids admitting our own agency. We provide excuses, insisting that external factors are to blame rather than ourselves. This effectively shifts responsibility from the actor, distancing them from acts they know are wrong and should not be committed, to some unconscious force: "It's part of my culture; I can't help it; I'm determined; I must obey."

It really does make us uncomfortable—utterly daunts us—to suspect that our beliefs rest on insecure and complicated assumptions that may or may not lead to unpalatable logical conclusions. We would rather go on living happily ignorant and we cannot exactly and always fault ourselves for that, people have their own everyday worries; but it is the job of the sympathy translators to extend our sympathies to those alien to us whom 'we' have have failed to notice—we members of the tribe to other tribes, we men to women, we straights to sexual minorities, we members of the nation to immigrants, we Homo Sapiens to non-human animals and (hopefully) so on.

3. Nonvegans perceive vegans as judgmental do-gooders.

The third is I suspect related to the phenomenon of 'do-gooder derogation'. This is an attitude which generates a perception that I was morally sermonising them for their actions and judging them as morally inferior individuals, making them feel resentful of me personally. There's been good research on this topic, and one abstract of a research article by Julia A. Minson Benoît Monin reads: 

Two studies document do-gooder derogation (the putting down of morally motivated others), by studying the reactions of meat eaters to vegetarians. In Study 1, 47% of participants freely associated negative terms with vegetarians and the valence of the words was negatively related to how much participants expected vegetarians to see themselves as morally superior to nonvegetarians. In Study 2, we manipulated the salience of anticipated moral reproach by varying whether participants reported these expectations before or after rating vegetarians. As predicted, participants rated vegetarians less positively after imagining their moral judgment of meat eaters. These studies empirically document the backlash reported by moral minorities and trace it back to resentment by the mainstream against feeling morally judged. 

The phrase 'I'm vegan' is interpreted as 'you are not vegan', and therefore, 'you are not the good kind of person, the kind of person who is against abusing animals'. The signifier 'vegan' in itself has come to accrue considerable connotations, such that the signified is more than just 'a person who does not eat meat'.

It’s Not About Vegans

Undoubtedly, there will be individuals who embrace the anti-animal abuse belief while also displaying negative traits such as being cultish, unfriendly, misanthropic, aggressive, or even militant. People can be fallible in some aspects yet steadfast in others. Moreover, I am not suggesting that "vegans" are an oppressed group. In fact, it's peculiar to classify vegans as a group or identity in the conventional sense, since the belief in not breeding, artificially inseminating, torturing, and slaughtering animals doesn't constitute an identity. Those who share this belief do not form a group in the same way that people who oppose child abuse don't form a group or derive an identity from that belief.

It's crucial to remember that, just as the true victims of slavery were the slaves rather than the abolitionists, individuals adhering to the anti-animal abuse belief may face discrimination, ridicule, and hostility, but they are not the ultimate targets of the broader discourse. The real victims are the billions of animals we consume. I hope that people can eventually move past their preconceptions about this imagined group, shaped by media and popular discourse, and begin to evaluate the belief itself based on its own merits.

In conclusion, after composing this post, I stumbled upon a four-minute video by Edward Winters, which eloquently encapsulates the media's role in shaping our perceptions of veganism—perceptions we now accept without question. The video presents striking examples that further elucidate the argument I've been making: