How to deal with the "almost vegetarians"

[Julian]

I recently had a meeting with some old friends that I haven't seen in 15 years.
One of them had become "almost vegetarian".
He was vegetarian, except for some sea animals... we've been talking about the Octopus Paul that predicted the Football world cup results, so I know he doesn't eat octopus... nor he eats fishes.
But he eats shrimps, oysters and molluscs.

Some 15 or 20 years ago I would have gone "fuck you, you aren't vegetarian enough!". I'm not like that nowadays, nor I think that's the way to persuade someone. But I couldn't think of much arguments about why not to eat oysters that may convince someone like him (his argument was that he didn't think that there was a contradiction between caring about AR and eating oysters).

Another different former friend (who's no longer my friend because I got sick of her racism about blacks, arabs and asians) used to be a vegetarian who LOVED meat, but didn't eat meat because AR were very important for her. But she would OFTEN eat hot-dogs, under the excuse that such thing was just the "trash" of the meat industry and not the cause of its existence... so she accepted that it wasn't cool to do it, but also thought that she wasn't causing harm since, according to her, no animal is killed to make hot-dogs, that it's the remaining "trash" of the animals that become the saussages.
Her case is even more strange than the first one, because AR were VERY important for her (her main activity is to save money as to be able to build an Animal Shelter, scpecially for abandoned dogs and cats).

How do you deal with the "almost vegetarians"?

[annb]

I will answer indirectly.

My goal is to save as many animals as possible.

To do this I need to be efficient in my use of time.

People who currently eat animals range from the very stubborn about everything to the very open to vegetarianism. I don't waste time on the first group regardless of how close to vegetarianism they might be.

The majority of people who currently eat animals just haven't thought much about food animals the way they think of their own companion animals. I use my time to discuss animals rights with these people as history has proven to me that they are most likely to change.

The trap I occasionally fall into is that I am inclined to talk with the people closest to me, regardless of how unlikely they are to change. As the years pass I fall into this trap less frequently.