I doubt anyone liked us. I doubt anyone was persuaded. I doubt anyone learned anything. But I think it was one of our most successful disruptions to date, and here's why: we set a new norm for everyone in the room that “meat” is not stigma-free, and that when you promote violence, you risk a nonviolent, disruptive response.

Our goal - and ultimately, one of the entire movement’s goals - is to create stable and powerful social norms against violence towards animals. Clearly, such stability requires that people largely accept these norms. With enough conviction and nonviolent courage, we can actually begin to enforce these norms before they are accepted, laying the groundwork for their adoption.

When it comes to eating animals, our society is in an extremely unstable place. Right and left, we see people trying to avoid thinking about the violence we inflict on our fellow animals. At the Wall Street Journal talk, the event description read "Putting the environmental and health considerations aside, we'll focus on the culinary and cultural aspects of eating meat." The moderator began by saying that in all the discussions of the environmental and health costs of meat, "what's hiding in plain sight is our love of meat." What is also hiding in plain sight is something they could not bear to mention, even briefly -- the mass killing of animals for food.

The life of an animal that must inevitably be taken (at a critically young age, as one of the panelists himself noted) is so disturbing and yet so built-in to the very idea of meat that it could scarcely be mentioned. If we admitted the sentience of other animals, then an hour-long discussion about carving up their bodies becomes twisted and sadistic indeed.

When we stood up and began sharing the stories of individual animals -- pulling on the powerful psychological phenomenon of the identifiable victim -- we inserted into that room a subject everyone wanted to hide. We upended a discussion that was premised on the denial of personhood to our fellow animals. We disrupted the charade of talking about destroying animals' lives with a thinly-calloused indifference to the animals themselves.

The result was that the audience faced a choice: continue discussing meat, with the pall of now-visible violence cast over the whole discussion, or end the discussion entirely and flee from the truth. The audience and panelists literally fled. With that, we established for them the beginning of a new norm: discuss “meat” if you want, but you will not discuss it without recognizing the animals whose lives -- and bodies -- it rips apart. This is what it looks like to stigmatize eating animals.