(Meta: It’s cool that you changed the post in response to feedback!)
I wouldn’t recommend trying to hard to shift the views of that single coworker, unless the two of you are close enough friends that you can keep pushing every so often without annoying her too much.
On your question (a), I think the answer is “yes”, in the sense that some people will naturally see much greater morally relevant differences between humans and animals than other people. If you take your co-worker at her word, she may literally “not see it that way”.
To be frank, I have a very difficult time empathizing with farmed animals, and accept arguments about suffering based on biological evidence (and trust in the rest of the community) rather than innate feelings. If I weren’t surrounded by people and research pushing me to care, I don’t know how I’d feel now. If pushed, I can articulate reasons why I struggle to empathize despite my rational knowledge, but the reasons will sound silly, and I have to dig to get past my natural apathy and actually find the reasons. Your friend may never have done that kind of digging.
On (b), I very much doubt there are generalizable answers. For every major film about animal welfare, there exist people whose views were transformed by the film and people who watched it and didn’t change their views at all. The same is true for every relevant book, every veg*n argument, and so on. People are different along so many different axes that you rarely find a “general” path to persuasion, especially on a cause that entails such a different way of thinking about the world (and acting in the world).
This doesn’t mean you have to give up on persuasion, though. My response to developing this view was to take causes I cared about (e.g. the general case for effective altruism) and develop a collection of distinct arguments/frames, so that I could try to shape my persuasion to match any person I spoke with. The same approach might work well for animal advocacy; there are arguments you could use to appeal specifically to libertarians, socialists, pet owners, environmentalists, Christians, and any number of other groups.
(Meta: It’s cool that you changed the post in response to feedback!)
I wouldn’t recommend trying to hard to shift the views of that single coworker, unless the two of you are close enough friends that you can keep pushing every so often without annoying her too much.
On your question (a), I think the answer is “yes”, in the sense that some people will naturally see much greater morally relevant differences between humans and animals than other people. If you take your co-worker at her word, she may literally “not see it that way”.
To be frank, I have a very difficult time empathizing with farmed animals, and accept arguments about suffering based on biological evidence (and trust in the rest of the community) rather than innate feelings. If I weren’t surrounded by people and research pushing me to care, I don’t know how I’d feel now. If pushed, I can articulate reasons why I struggle to empathize despite my rational knowledge, but the reasons will sound silly, and I have to dig to get past my natural apathy and actually find the reasons. Your friend may never have done that kind of digging.
On (b), I very much doubt there are generalizable answers. For every major film about animal welfare, there exist people whose views were transformed by the film and people who watched it and didn’t change their views at all. The same is true for every relevant book, every veg*n argument, and so on. People are different along so many different axes that you rarely find a “general” path to persuasion, especially on a cause that entails such a different way of thinking about the world (and acting in the world).
This doesn’t mean you have to give up on persuasion, though. My response to developing this view was to take causes I cared about (e.g. the general case for effective altruism) and develop a collection of distinct arguments/frames, so that I could try to shape my persuasion to match any person I spoke with. The same approach might work well for animal advocacy; there are arguments you could use to appeal specifically to libertarians, socialists, pet owners, environmentalists, Christians, and any number of other groups.