Tips for Getting to the Discussion

You aren’t going to influence anyone if you aren’t engaged with them. It’s important to get positive conversations about animals started, so here are a few tips on getting discussions going. We have dozens of ideas in the “Great Ways to Promote Veganism” section of this site. These are a few of my favorites:

Connect With Nonvegans

If you only hang out with animal rights activists, you’ll have fewer opportunities to spread the word about cruelty-free eating. It’s great to have non-animal interests. You could join a book club; work out in the gym in your animal rights T-shirt; join a running, biking, or hiking club; or do whatever activity is important to you. Get involved in different organizations, and become the animals’ voice in these communities. It’s amazing how many animal rights activists are members of a religious community, a book group, or a basketball team and then tell us that no one in their group thinks the way they do about animals. It often turns out that the activist is just not speaking up, and that they have no idea how others feel about the issue! Great ways to help animals and to start the conversation are to wear an animal rights T-shirt or button, to have a bumper sticker on your car, and to carry PETA’s vegetarian starter kits with you everywhere so that you always have something to hand to people if you end up in a discussion. Wearing a button or a T-shirt is a little thing, but it’s extremely effective.

Your workplace can also be a great place to talk with people about animal issues—just put an animal rights postcard or sticker on your wall or in your cubicle, and questions will follow! Plus, make sure you politely work with company officials to get more vegan foods offered in the vending machine and company cafeteria.

Don’t Neglect the Small Stuff

Although already discussed, probably the best way to do the most good for almost no expenditure of your time is to prioritize the little things like wearing T-shirts, putting bumper stickers on your car, and carrying literature with you to distribute. The importance of displaying buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers can’t be overstated: People will see those things, especially if your button invites them to talk to you. For instance, I have six “Ask Me Why I’m Vegan” T-shirts and a box of the buttons. I wear them everywhere, and people really do ask, spurring conversation after conversation on planes, in the metro, and everywhere else. And even for people who don’t ask, they have to think about whether they want to ask, which is also good because they will think about why they’re not vegan and why you might be vegan. Each time someone who would not otherwise have thought about this issue thinks about it, that’s a little victory for animals.

Pass Out Leaflets

It takes a bit more effort, but spending time passing out leaflets is both fun and an amazing way to advocate for animals. Just think about it: The average person in the U.S. eats dozens of chickens, pigs, turkeys, fish, and other animals in a year. Even if only one person becomes a vegetarian after an evening of your leafleting, that is an enormous victory for animals—hundreds of animals saved from horrific suffering in just an hour or two! I can tell you from our surveys that every time you go out to leaflet, you affect more than just one person. Also, many of those who don’t immediately become vegan or vegetarian will likely be more receptive to the idea the next time around.

Many activists make sure to always have a stack of PETA’s vegetarian starter kits in their backpack or purse wherever they go. They leave them in doctors’ offices, on trains and airplanes, coffee shops, and everyplace else they go. And, of course, they have them ready for when someone sees their bumper sticker or button and asks them why they’re vegan.

For an even bigger impact, take a break from watching TV on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon, and pass out a stack of leaflets for an hour. (I’d recommend our new vegetarian celebrity leaflet.) Find a place with lots of foot traffic, and you’ll reach hundreds of people in a short amount of time. I live in Washington, D.C., so it’s particularly easy because there are constantly people flowing in and out of the Metro. Just a few of us can give away 300 or 400 leaflets in an hour. When we go to the bottom of the escalator, we see maybe a dozen thrown away—but the rest are being read, and many will be passed on or left on trains for others to read. Some people will stop to talk with you, so try to have a friend along so that one of you can keep leafleting while the other one talks.

Of course, you don’t need to live in a big city to find great leafleting opportunities. Next time there’s a county fair, a minor league baseball game, a concert, or a Fourth of July town picnic in your area, grab a stack of leaflets and stand by the entrance for an hour—you’ll make a huge difference. Going outside to leaflet during your lunch hour, after work, or on a weekend is a great way to get fresh air and is a more enjoyable break than staring at a computer screen.

Leafleting 24/7: Adopt a Vegetarian Starter Kit Stand

PETA's vegetarian starter kit stand project is a great way to distribute massive amounts of pro-farmed-animal literature. If you or your organization can pay for the cost of a stand (between $40 and $90), we will provide you with unlimited vegetarian starter kits—which make up the bulk of the cost of the project—as well as colorful stickers to attach to the sides of the stands. This is the most effective way that we know to distribute animal rights literature—it's like having someone hand out leaflets 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and only to people who have an interest in going vegetarian! Indoor stands are perfect for health-food stores, bookstores, yoga studios, gyms, student unions at colleges, or anywhere else that attracts a lot of people—just ask the person in charge if he or she would be willing to have a stand on the property. Outdoor stands can be placed on sidewalks in areas with lots of foot traffic. (The indoor stands cost roughly $40 to purchase and ship, while the outdoor stands cost about $90.) Once you set up the stands, all that you need to do is check on them a couple of times each week and refill them as necessary. Through these stands and the efforts of activists who maintain them, we have been able to distribute more than half a million vegetarian starter kits to individuals all over the U.S. and Canada in the couple of years since we started this project! Please e-mail us with your name and city to get involved in this terrific—and time-efficient—project.

If money is tight, a terrific alternative to buying a stand is asking local businesses if they are willing to have a small stack of vegetarian starter kits on their counters or in preexisting literature racks. If they agree, just check in every couple of weeks to see if they need a refill.

Make It Visual

You can set your laptop computer or a generator with a TV/VCR on top of a card table and show PETA’s “Meet Your Meat” on public property. This is fantastically effective, especially now that “Meet Your Meat” is narrated. Honestly, it is just stunning to see the number of people who will just stand in front of the TV and watch the entire thing, sometimes more than once! They hear Alec Baldwin’s voice, and they get drawn in, often asking questions afterward. Grab a friend and head out to a public square, a sidewalk where concertgoers are lining up, or anywhere there are a lot of people. You’ll be amazed at how many people you can reach in just an hour or two! Make sure you have literature to hand out.

Teach a Cooking Class

Giving people information is great, but if you have the proficiency, there’s something even better—teaching them how to be vegan. PETA staff member Alka Chandna has been doing this for years and reports that you can generally get a health-food store or local co-op to give you some of its space, help you advertise, and donate the ingredients because you’re offering this free service to the people who shop there, who will then turn around and buy more of the store’s products. One of the key problems for people adopting a vegan diet is that they just don’t know what they’re going to eat. So teaching them how to create delicious vegan dishes and telling them why the diet is so much better for them and animals is an extremely effective kind of activism.

Use Cable Access

A great way to advocate for farmed animals that’s really catching on is to show animal rights videos on cable (community) access TV stations. If you or your close relatives (such as your parents or children) live in a town that has a cable-access TV station, it doesn’t cost anything to air pro-animal videos such as “Meet Your Meat” and “Chew On This.” Cable-access stations belong to the community and are there for community members like you to show what you want. PETA has two outstanding new compilations made specifically for cable access, and we’d be delighted to send you copies. Activists in cities all over the country are already showing these videos to hundreds of thousands of people each week. If you’re interested in getting this terrific project up and running in your community, please read more and then e-mail us at VegInfo@peta.org—we will send you everything you need. Showing videos on cable-access TV is one of the most effective ways we know of that you can make a huge difference for farmed animals without using up all of your activist time.

Arrange Talks

Arranging talks is another effective way to advocate for animal rights and vegetarianism. Read more about how to sponsor a speaker or how to give a talk yourself. You can put posters about the talks everywhere, and all who see the posters—even if they don’t come to the talks—can be positively influenced. Be sure to take the same care with the words on your poster that an ad agency would for its most important client. You can entitle a talk, “Vegetarian—the Only Diet for a Small Planet” or “Animal Rights: Social Justice for the New Millennium” or something else that will reach people with your basic message, even if they only see the headline. But do be sure to offer an explanation of the talk (about four sentences) and a phone number or e-mail address for people who want more information. Also, put a Web site address on the sign, whether it’s your group’s site, GoVeg.com, or any other pro-vegetarian Web page. Remember that the quality of your signs is arguably as important as the quality of the talk—whenever people read your sign (even if they don’t go to the lecture), they will be absorbing a pro-animal message.

Creative Gift Requests

We all have people in our lives who absolutely refuse to watch or read what we offer. The next time one of these people asks what you want for your birthday or Christmas, tell them that the only thing you want is for them to watch “Meet Your Meat” or to read PETA’s vegetarian starter kit or whatever else you decide and then to discuss their impressions with you. Then have the discussion in an open, loving, and nonjudgmental way as previously discussed. We have only recently started suggesting this at PETA, and we’ve been amazed by the number of people who have finally reached loved ones in this way.

Take a Public-Speaking Course

If you are afraid to speak to the public, or even if you’re not, Toastmasters offers classes in public speaking that have proved very helpful to many animal advocates I know. The classes can help you hone your vegan advocacy skills in the presence of nonvegans. Your classmates will listen to your message and help you make your arguments more effective. There are Toastmasters clubs in pretty much every city. I can’t recommend Toastmasters highly enough for improving your skills as an advocate and reaching more people at the same time. Local community colleges also offer public-speaking courses. Plus there are tons of great books available at any bookstore or library about how to be a more effective communicator. Read more.