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Making a character a vegan or an animal rights activist has been a very typical TV way of conveying that they're an annoying, priggish fanatical progressive. I'm not a vegan or any sorts of an animal-rights type myself, but I've noted this for some time now. Lindsay in Arrested Development comes to mind. Or having veganism being used to convey being a killjoy in general; Angela in Office (US) was no progressive, but still had somewhat incongruous veganism tacked on her to accentuate her being a stuck-up bore.
Of course, you also get progressive characters who are alternatively written as noble and annoying; some of Lisa Simpson's more annoying moments involve her veganism, and I hold that Hermione Granger's SPEW (which, today, seems to mostly be interpreted as some sort of a dis of antiracist activism, and thus brought up as evidence of Rowling's racism) is intended to rather be a parody of animal rights activism ("what if the animals actually WANT to be oppressed, huh?")
I've seen people on this forum and elsewhere bring to attention that Hollywood and TV shows often portray fundamentalist Christians as fanatics and bigots, but the equivalent treatment of animal rights activists (see eg. Straw Vegetarian page on TVTropes) gets less attention. I would guess most would just go "Well, but the vegans actually ARE that annoying!", though that view is probably also mediated by seeing examples of annoying vegans and animal rights activists being mocked on various types of media.
I think there's merit to the straw vegetarian/vegan trope. I don't think I've ever met a vegan in person who tried to convert or harangue me. However, I have seen them on social media.
I guess that the mediating effect of being in person causes people to tone down their beliefs for the sake of social harmony. One assumes that the growth of the web and social media is what's driving the great awakening, rather than any deeper ideological shift. Freddie deBoer did an interesting post about a book from the 90s that mocked PC types from that era. Their beliefs weren't that different from those of modern progressives.
This sounds like an argument for why the straw vegetarians are less than warranted.
I honestly think straw vegetarians are much more a product of the cognitive dissonance of meat-eaters who realize deep down the incredible cruelty of the meat industry and on some level register vegetarians as a walking mirror of their own hypocrisy.
(I say this as a somewhat self-hating meat eater)
I think small family farms are an entire world of difference from industrial meat processing. I feel people who actually kill/process the animals the eat basically have no moral burden. They are willing and able to do the task themselves. I've killed animals before and have found myself able to have done so without self-disgust, so that somewhat mitigates the qualms I have about my meat-eating. As for the rest of it I try to only eat meat once or twice per week.
I've kicked around in my head the hypothetical of requiring people over the age of 14 or 16 to get a "meat-eater's license", i.e. having to kill/dress a larger mammal by themselves in order to qualify to eat meat. I wonder what percentage of the larger population would disqualify themselves from eating meat if they were forced to jump through that hoop. I do feel that if you cannot steel yourself to take the life of an intelligent, social animal like a pig or a deer or a cow, then you should not eat meat.
I don't identify as an effective altruist (but I generally shirk from labels, and I dislike that label for much the same reason I dislike "rationalist").
By your reasoning, is it hypocritical to be disguisted by watching or participating in gay sex, but support gay rights?
I don't follow this logic at all. Why would I be obliged to enjoy gay sex if I supported gay rights? It's not a question of taste: I don't think pineapple on pizza is unethical because I don't like it. I wouldn't seek to criminalize things that are simply not my preference. The hypocrisy would be to deny others the right to marry the people (i.e., consenting adults) they love, when I already enjoy that ability.
The crux is that you get meat by killing a sentient, emotionally complex, intelligent animal. I think that if you can't bring yourself to do that (and have to rely on the emotional distance of someone else doing the dirty work), then yeah, I don't reckon you should eat meat, because industrial meat processing takes that one bloody act and multiplies it billions of times yearly. We all have our hypocrisies and have to pick where to draw the extent of which we tolerate them, so I think if you can't stomach the very simple act the meat industry is built upon, you shouldn't seek to benefit from its utterly horrific economies of scale.
That's the same scenario I described for gay sex, except without the boo light "dirty work". You can't bring yourself to watch (or participate in) gay sex. But if someone else does it in private, the emotional distance allows you to tolerate it. Is your tolerance hypocritical?
Or do you think that no significant number of people have visceral, negative, emotional reactions to gay sex?
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