Do you get annoyed by vegetarians as a meat eater, and why?

Do meat eaters often find vegetarians annoying? Many of the reactions we read to articles we write about veganism would suggest so. An interesting fact, which has even been the subject of university research…

When you look at problems such as the CO2 emissions caused by meat consumption and what the future of the planet currently seems to look like, you might think that meat eaters would actually appreciate the fact that many other people choose not to eat meat, and would feel warmly towards vegetarians. But this psychologist encountered something quite different in her research.

Perception

Florien Cramwinckel tells AD that she presented the same question to the group of meat eaters in two different ways. She asked the meat eaters what they generally thought of vegetarians, and no negative answer came out of that. But when she asked the same question after first asking, ‘How do you think a vegetarian feels about you?’, the meat eaters suddenly became very negative. So when people first thought about how someone else might see them, their image of that person became worse.

Guilt trip

This could be because, at that moment, meat eaters think that vegetarians will consider them wrong and bad, which of course does not exactly improve the way they view others either. The vegetarians who refused a slice of sausage because they considered it ‘wrong’ were also perceived as annoying by the meat eaters. And the meat eaters, in turn, may have felt like ‘bad people’ as a result.

As far as is clear, flexitarians did not take part in this study, which was conducted some time ago. A shame, because they might have been able to act as a dove of peace between these two groups…

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Source: AD