Activist vs. Advcocate

Through my years in animal advocacy, having worked in many different positions and capacities, one thing has struck me about the work that I do; the reaction that I get from others when they find out what I do for a living. It is almost always one of two reactions; they either get really excited and emphatically proclaim, “I am a member of (insert extremist animal group here) and just believe in what they do so much!”, or, I get the uncomfortable stare as the person waits for me to throw red paint on their leather shoes.

I will get to the first reaction in a later post, but the reaction that affects me more is the uncomfortable stare. It signals a serious epidemic that has been created in our society; a listening that the general pubic has for animal advocates….that we are all a bunch of staunch, militant, paint-throwing, lunatics that will scream at you on the street for eating a hamburger. Unfortunately, it is this perception that actually hurts our work more than helps it. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are some large organizations out there that do manage to make some major changes due to their outrageous, in-your-face, tactics. But historically, those tactics have mainly served to make changes within large entities and organizations that cannot afford bad publicity. Large restaurant chains that don’t want their chicken products being compared to the holocaust, or the embarrassment of the undercover investigative footage that may come out in the public eye, depicting the chronic, substandard, treatment of the animals within those plants. Those are large corporations that may require larger tactics to catch their attention.

The obstacle that we run into however, is bringing advocacy to a smaller, grassroots, level. These in-your-face tactics simply do not work on the general masses as a means to bring awareness to the issue. Instead, we alienate them, and make them feel defensive. We make them feel uncomfortable, not in the way that they are uncomfortable facing the issue, but in the way that they are uncomfortable facing us! No one wants to feel as if they are being judged for their actions, let alone actions that they more than likely did not know were causing harm to other living creatures.

For the purposes of this blog, the words “activist” and “advocate” have two very different meanings. They are being used in the following definitions: 

Advocate: A person who recommends or propounds an idea.

Activist: A person who takes direct and militant action to achieve a political or social goal.

The purpose of this blog is to make a clear-cut delineation of these two types of proponents of animal rights and examine the introduction of “advocacy over activism” as the new grassroots movement in animal-rights reform.