Short Thoughts
In our advocacy, we should try as much as possible to focus on impact over activity. Activity means doing things and being busy and crossing items off of a to-do list. Impact means animals saved, and animals helped. Activity means "look at how many things I got done."
Short Thoughts
If you want to make something happen, you often have to do it despite some internal and external resistance. Want to go vegan? Well, you're going to have to do a bit of research, change up your food purchases, maybe modify the recipes you make, learn how to
Short Thoughts
Connect For Animals is focused on ending factory farming globally. Why might our personal diet matter as part of that? First, there's supply and demand to consider. If I refuse to buy something (like products made from killing animals), there's less incentive for a company to
Short Thoughts
Animal advocates are some of the most inspiring people I know. These are people who see something terribly wrong with the world—an unfathomable amount of suffering and a massive injustice—and even though nearly everyone in society is working to ignore it, they have chosen to rise up against
Short Thoughts
Being able to make accurate predictions and forecasts would be helpful for animal advocates. Are we close to a takeoff point for plant-based meats, where the majority of the market will switch in the next few years? Or, is the plant-based sector on a stagnant (or declining) trajectory, if we
Short Thoughts
There are countless influences acting on us at all times. There are social influences, like friends who invite us to dinner ("want to come?"), or family members who tell us about a new whatchamacallit that they saw online ("you should get one!"). There are corporate influences,
Short Thoughts
We might sometimes think of animal advocacy as binary—all or nothing, full-time activist or do-nothing bystander. But this is a misperception; getting involved in advocating for animals is not binary at all, and we probably do ourselves a disservice when we think of it as such, leading ourselves (and
Short Thoughts
Throughout my time in animal advocacy, I've often found myself existing simultaneously in opposing "camps" of the movement—an experience that I usually find enlightening. For example, there was a period of time when I was pretty deeply involved with two organizations at the same time:
Short Thoughts
When we get too busy or stressed, the things that we drop first are usually the things that have longer-term benefits: review and reflection; sleep and exercise; reading and thinking; exploration of new topics, new ideas. Dropping these things may help us crank through some more urgent short-term tasks—which
Short Thoughts
Sometimes there can be conflict between the idealists and the realists: those who dream about what the world could be, versus those who try to see the world for how it is. The idealists see problems or opportunities, and they imagine what a better world could look like. "Look
Short Thoughts
Great things take time to build. There's a quote that encapsulates this: "Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years."(Commonly attributed to Bill Gates; also said by others.) There are a few ways you
Short Thoughts
Where, ultimately, are we headed in this movement? If we think really big and long-term, things can get pretty weird. All of the life on Earth will die in a billion years, more or less: our sun will slowly expand, boiling off the oceans and eventually consuming our planet. Humans