I was very active in the animal advocacy movement for about 20 years, including when the Liberation Pledge was announced. My reaction to it was basically the same reaction I had to nearly everything DxE did. It's way too early for this to work. Specifically, while I think there's a good idea, it will only succeed with a much larger critical mass of people involved from the start.
All the best estimates I've seen suggest that around 1% of the US is vegan. I think it's reasonable to assume that most animal advocates are vegan, but that most vegans are not animal advocates.
What might be a good estimate for the number of advocates? The Animal Rights Conference used to attract a few thousand people. Let's say 2,500. The size of the movement as a whole is probably some multiple of this. I'd guess 10-100x. So we're talking about 25,000 to 250,000 people. The US has about 333 million people right now, so this is ... (does math) ... about 0.075% of the population at best.
I'm not sure what the critical mass is for having enough advocates to make this stuff work, but looking at the civil rights movement might provide some insight. In 1963, 200,000 people attended the March on Washington. The US population was only about 189 million then, so this was 0.1% of the population at one rally which required people to take time off work and travel to attend! I can't find any estimates on the size of the movement as a whole, but I think a cautious low estimate might be that there were 10x as many people who were quite invested (1% of the population), and 100x (10%) who were at least casual supporters, willing to write letters to congresspeople and tell them they'd vote based on their civil rights record.
My feeling (obviously there's no way to prove this) is that this is the right order of magnitude for the Liberation Pledge and other stuff DxE has done. And moreover, trying to do these things too early is a huge waste of energy, likely to lead to extreme activist burnout, all while probably making the population at large less sympathetic to the cause.
There's also a real question as to whether we can ever get to the advocate numbers we'd need. That vegan number (1% of population) has been stalled for a long time. I swear I read an interesting article about this by Che Green (formerly of Faunalytics), but now I can't find it. From memory, the article argued that vegan outreach should focus on recruiting new advocates, not just new vegans, and that those advocates should focus on more winnable efforts like corporate and political efforts, rather than trying to grow the vegan population as a path to success. I found it fairly convincing.
I was very active in the animal advocacy movement for about 20 years, including when the Liberation Pledge was announced. My reaction to it was basically the same reaction I had to nearly everything DxE did. It's way too early for this to work. Specifically, while I think there's a good idea, it will only succeed with a much larger critical mass of people involved from the start.
All the best estimates I've seen suggest that around 1% of the US is vegan. I think it's reasonable to assume that most animal advocates are vegan, but that most vegans are not animal advocates.
What might be a good estimate for the number of advocates? The Animal Rights Conference used to attract a few thousand people. Let's say 2,500. The size of the movement as a whole is probably some multiple of this. I'd guess 10-100x. So we're talking about 25,000 to 250,000 people. The US has about 333 million people right now, so this is ... (does math) ... about 0.075% of the population at best.
I'm not sure what the critical mass is for having enough advocates to make this stuff work, but looking at the civil rights movement might provide some insight. In 1963, 200,000 people attended the March on Washington. The US population was only about 189 million then, so this was 0.1% of the population at one rally which required people to take time off work and travel to attend! I can't find any estimates on the size of the movement as a whole, but I think a cautious low estimate might be that there were 10x as many people who were quite invested (1% of the population), and 100x (10%) who were at least casual supporters, willing to write letters to congresspeople and tell them they'd vote based on their civil rights record.
My feeling (obviously there's no way to prove this) is that this is the right order of magnitude for the Liberation Pledge and other stuff DxE has done. And moreover, trying to do these things too early is a huge waste of energy, likely to lead to extreme activist burnout, all while probably making the population at large less sympathetic to the cause.
There's also a real question as to whether we can ever get to the advocate numbers we'd need. That vegan number (1% of population) has been stalled for a long time. I swear I read an interesting article about this by Che Green (formerly of Faunalytics), but now I can't find it. From memory, the article argued that vegan outreach should focus on recruiting new advocates, not just new vegans, and that those advocates should focus on more winnable efforts like corporate and political efforts, rather than trying to grow the vegan population as a path to success. I found it fairly convincing.