As you may know I am fairly new to the idea of animal rights and the abolitionist approach. However, I believe that I am very commited to sticking with it and trying to convince as many people as I can to go vegan and thereby help making this world a better place for all of us.

I often talk to a friend of mine about animal rights and veganism. Sometimes it’s me who brings up the subject, sometimes it’s her. We always have lively discussion, me trying to lay out the facts and her trying to defend the status quo. This has been going on for months now and yesterday it got kind of out of hand. We had lunch in the cafeteria and she was talking to her friend about how they find it perverted that people here choose to not eat certain foods while other poeple are starving to death, how we should all be grateful for what we have. I stayed quiet knowing that I shouldn’t start talking because it’s such an incredibly dumb argument that when I explain it to them, they would probably feel insulted. So the discussion went on about organic vegetables and so forth. At one point I had to intervene and try to point out that by eating meat and cheap foods we are actually destroying our earth and using up all the resources we still have. I don’t know what happened then but as I mentioned before it ended in kind of a fight between us. She was staying ignorant to the point where it wasn’t funny anymore, so I eventually just shut up and walked away. Later on she came up to me and told me that I shouldn’t take too seriously what she was saying and that it’s just a point of view.

I accepted her apology but now I don’t know what do to from here on. What do you do when a good friend of yours is so ignorant about animal rights that you can’t have a normal conversation with her. I know it’s not a point of view whether it’s right or wrong to posess animals but I also don’t want to lose a friend whom I’ve known from before my introduction to animal rights. Should I simply not talk about it anymore in her presence? Then again, I wasn’t the one starting the discussion.

What do you do in such situations?

Tobi