No Stupid Questions

To grossly oversimplify things, there are two kinds of vegans...

Type 1 are "healthy living" and "sustainability" vegans. These type are generally benign, polite, helpful, positive, and keep to themselves unless asked. They also tend to not be super militant about their veganism... like the occassional egg from someone's beloved home-raised chickens is fine.

Type 2 are ideological vegans. These types believe that "exploiting" "living creatures" in any way is fundamentally immoral, and because it's a morality issue (e.g. basically religion) the vast majority are very preachy, demanding, and in-your-face about it. They don't consider type 1 to be "real vegans".

Type 2, being the loudest and most abrasive, giving veganism a bad name and ruining it for everyone.

I think people hate vegans more than veganism. The most annoying x% makes the other (100-x)% look bad

Choose your own x I don't want dunks from either side lol

Because many people see it as political, or at least moral. And that means they want to "pick a side"

I do not like being told by someone that i need to become vegan because they have become vegan.

no one hates veganism, we just hate the vegans

Imagine that you go to an outdoor barbecue on a bright Summer day.

And some guy who is an extreme Muslim is going around telling some women that they're not dressed in a modest enough way and that everybody should follow the Teachings of the Prophet and how life is a lot better when people follow the Teachings of the Prophet.

It's not Islam that's the problem, it's certain kinds of people, their proselytising and, worse, their trying to force or even impose their own moral values on others.

Same with Veganism and some kinds of Vegans: because it's a moral choice some of those who practice it have the very same behavioural disfunctions as religious nutters and because they're the most visible representatives of it they just cause many to draw negative conclusions about the entire thing.

I think a lot of people also have a hard time seeing it as a priority for themselves compared to their personal problems and other ongoings. It's subjective, sure. But it also takes a ton of personal responsibility and self control/denial to change habits.

Bottom line, there is a lot of things out there to care about right now, and being vegan is a big change for a lot of people. That, mixed with the extreme (understandable) feelings about mistreatment of animals by vegans, often leads to a feeling of repulsion from investing personal bandwidth into changing the behavior.

That's my opinion based on growing up with religiously vegan parents.

Half my social circle has gone vegan at this point and I think a lot of the anti-vegan sentiments is people don't like modifying their behaviour to give up their own comfort even when they know something is distressing to someone else. Since a lot of vegans see a very real cruelty that they are generally powerless to stop and other people do not understand their reactions to seeing other people participate in cruelty is often to feel very sad. Since so much of human culture surrounds shared meals having a vegan takes a lot of options off the table entirely and alters other people's options even when they don't intend to.

Like it's not a matter of "well we'll go to your vegetarian restaurant this time and next time we go to a place I'm excited to go" for those of us who care about our friends being upset we basically rarely pick our first choices and more often sacrifice things we are excited for in the name of someone else's comfort. It can be a love language to find restaurants and eat the things on the menu that don't exactly thrill you but other times you just want to have that selfish Birthday dinner where you don't feel compelled to pick a restaurant for someone else.

I think a lot of people reject veganism more forcefully because they don't want to have to participate in that sort of friction. All it takes is one ethical vegan to completly change a friend groups food culture. Even when they bring their own food and try not to make a big deal and mask it not bothering them when they see meat being consumed people are generally compelled to care for people they know and ignoring someone's distress isn't showing care. When people ratchet up the social cost of veganism they are more often than not trying to engineer a social sphere where they do not feel callous, don't have to give up what they like and don't have to do any additional research work or social calculations .

It takes a "special" kind of person to take something so ingrained in culture and still say "I'm not gonna do that," usually a slightly crazy and/or neurodivergent person. I think this is partly why there are so many "insane" vegans, because it's self selecting for people who are outside the norm.

I don't even mention to most people I'm vegan, usually just an excuse like "meat makes me feel sick" because the average person will think I'm going to give them a 20 minute lecture.

To anyone who is the vegan who will give the 20 minute lecture, please consider if your goal is actually animal welfare, you can hardly ever debate someone out of something they like. Instead, just show people easy dishes you made that they actually enjoy (pasta with spaghetti sauce, French fries, vegetable stir fry, roasted veggies with olive oil) and you'll often find they start cooking more vegan food (or at least less meat), and also talk more positively about veganism

It’s because people feel threatened. Vegans indirectly say „you meat eaters are the baddies” no one wants to be the baddies. But… instead of putting effort to change to vegan, the easier and lazier thing to do is to paint them as mad, bad, cult, in the mind.

And also some of the vegans really ride a high horse and behave all pure and that stuff is making it easier. Some vegans really do it to get moral high and have superiority syndrome.

I am not a vegan but I managed to curb these coded in ape brain mechanisms somewhat.