On Monday vegan activists blockaded a major thoroughfare in Melbourne as well as several other sites, including Melbourne Aquarium and an abattoir in Queensland, as well as a march in Sydney to protest against carnivorous behaviour.
And oh, the outpouring of anger at these people! So thoughtless! Such zealots! What were they hoping to achieve!
Well, we can answer the last bit, at least: given that the point of the protests was to get people talking about veganism, the protests absolutely worked.
Why is my timeline filled with triggered white men who feel the need to gloat about their meat consumption after a vegan protest? Are you that fragile? #veganprotest
— David Ashkanasy (@ashkas) April 8, 2019
Yes, the conversations are largely about how inconvenient the protests were (which is 100 per cent the point of protesting: a protest that no-one notices is of dubious utility) and about how it’s making people eat more meat just to totally stick it to them dumb vegos and their anti-meat agenda.
That said: the conversations are still going.
And when was the last time you heard people talking about veganism at all in the mainstream media? If this was the aim of the protests then… well, they pretty much nailed it.
In fact, it’s a victory all round. Vegans got a higher profile for their cause, vegan-haters get to feel smug about how badly their foes were self-owned, talkback hosts get to tsk tsk about how they were delayed in getting to work, and a group of protestors got three adorable lambs out of the deal!
In other words, everybody has won! Thanks, civil disobedience!
Protesters in Queensland agreed to leave an abattoir in exchange for three lambs. https://t.co/r0WRyjHfMi
— Josh Taylor (@joshgnosis) April 8, 2019