I know I’m an opponent to veganism all that so I shouldn’t be giving animal rights advocates any ammo, but I just had an idea for an animal rights campaign that would be pretty effective.

You know the “Why Love One But Eat The Other?” campaign? The concept behind it is that if you love your dog or cat, it makes no sense to eat equally worthwhile animals like pigs and chickens.

Not picking favorites among animals is a pretty common animal rights argument now. It’s basically the foundation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals — if you love your dog George, you better be consistent and love all God’s subhuman creatures. We do love our dogs, and if you play that dog love right, you can make a lot of people question their meat eating. Dogs are the gateway animal. They aren’t exactly herbivores themselves, but man’s best friend is no enemy to human vegetarianism.

Near-universal sympathy for dogs is why “Why Love One But Eat The Other?” is a strong campaign. But it could be stronger.

As it is now, the posters show a dog or cat next to a pig, cow or baby chick. Underneath are images of cows/pigs/chickens suffering in factory farms. Presumably our warm feelings for the dog rub off a little on the farm animals, and then we feel bad to see the cows and chickens in factory farms. That might work. But wouldn’t it be more powerful to take the next step and show dogs and cats in factory farms?

I know there is a sort of factory farming with dogs and cats, the puppy and kitty mills. But the end result of that is not death for human consumption. If you really want to make the comparison between farm animals and house pets, why not create a visualization of what it would be like if dogs and cats were factory farmed for us to eat?

It could be a series of photos (I can vividly imagine the shot of tons of dogs packed together, looking at the camera with mournful eyes), but a video would be best. First you show the conditions of typical farm animals on factory farms. Super confined, sick and dirty animals, chickens having their beaks cut off, pigs being castrated with no anesthesia and having their tails docked, baby male chickens dropped down a chute into spinning blades that turn them into a bloody mush. And then scenes of them all going to slaughter. You know, the usual.

But then you say… “Now imagine if we did this to dogs and cats!” And you show the same scenes, but with dogs and cats taking the place of the farm animals (all done with special effects, of course). Dogs and cats all packed together, dirty and sick. Dogs and cats having their tails cut off. Dogs and cats castrated with no anesthesia. Puppies and kittens sent down conveyer belts into blades that turn them into a red mush. Dogs and cats in slaughterhouses, dragged through electrified water, getting bolt guns to the head, hanging upside down then having their necks slit.

And for an artsy touch, you have a strobe effect near the end of the video, flashing between the slaughtering of pigs and the slaughtering of dogs and cats, truly forcing us to associate the two.

Then for the sucker punch, end with a shot of people eating animal flesh. We can’t identify what the meat is - is it pork or dog? And does that distinction even matter now?

I’m telling you, it would work.

So why am I suggesting an ad campaign that is likely to lead more people into veganism, a trend I’m fighting against? Simple. The more vegans there are, the more ex-vegans there eventually will be. And that means more readers.