I'm going to start off by saying I'm aware this will probably be one of my most divisive, controversial posts. I originally was writing it for the Calgary Vegan Society, but they decided it had too much geopolitics and graphic imagery, so take that as a content warning.

I am writing this open letter to a specific kind of person, not everyone. I'm writing this to those who consider themselves compassionate, left-leaning, and have a strong distaste for genAI. So if you're reading this, I'm going to start by assuming you're tired of all of the ChatGPTs and seeing the ✨ emoji in every app you use, or being forced to use genAI at work yourself by people who think LLMs and chatbots somehow magically print money.

If you're reading this, I'm going to assume you're aware of the environmental detriments of AI and the data centres needed to power the massive computational needs of LLMs. I'm sure you already know about the once clean water made polluted and undrinkable by the endeavours of shareholders banking on this bubble only getting bigger and bigger.

Maybe you've also been keeping up with the news and witnessing the undemocratic, staggering number of deportations happening in the United States under Donald Trump's second term. And maybe you've been keeping up with the unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Congo or Sudan or what remains of the Gaza Strip after countless attacks on Palestinian civilians.

All of this is to say I assume you're a compassionate, politically-active person who cares about the harms occurring around the world, and you're trying to figure out how to cope. You're trying to figure out how you, as a single person, could contribute to stopping some of this harm. How you could contribute to bettering the world when there's so much terror and suffering happening.

🐘 Address Me

This next part is a lot less of a popular take, so I want to be careful in how I handle it. I'm writing particularly for those who do eat meat. I mean, there's no point in writing to those who are already vegan—preaching to the choir just makes us all feel better and nothing changes.

What I want to do is meet you where you are. I want to try to help you understand the steps you can take that aren't impossible, and why they're important to take.

Please understand, I am not trying to make you change your entire life overnight. This is not about purity testing or litmus testing politics. This is not about being holier-than-thou. Rather, we must not ignore certain harm and suffering in favour of others.

Let's start with me, I mean, who am I to try to tell you how to live your life, right? If you don't know me already, my name is Brennan and I'm an Indigenous blogger trying to write for a more human, more civil web. I've written a 2,000 word essay nearly every day for the past half year, and the one question I've been circling the most in my work is this: How do we minimize harm?

I'm also the first to tell you I myself am a terrible vegan. I've been trying to be fully plant-based for my entire adulthood, and I fail often. And that's okay! Because this is about reducing the harm we cause, not fully eliminating it. The hard, bitter truth is that we can't ever fully eliminate the harm we cause. Once we start there, though, we can begin growth and healing (I swear!).

Cognitive Dissonance and Mental Gymnastics

If reading this so far makes you feel a little defensive or queasy, it's a sign of a functioning moral compass bumping against a deeply ingrained habit. I've found that meat eating is one of the most common occurrences of cognitive dissonance I come across. Researchers call this the meat paradox. The lived mismatch between loving animals and eating them. Psychologists have documented how we guard against contradiction. We tell ourselves the animal was raised well and the death was quick and painless. We lean on what researchers call the 4Ns: eating meat is natural, necessary, normal, nice. We change the language so the animal disappears. "Beef" instead of cow, "pork" instead of pig, "poultry" instead of bird.

We also often downgrade the intelligence and emotional lives of the animals we intend to eat. Research shows we motivatedly deny animals' minds and their capacity for suffering, for fear, for grief. For acknowledging those capacities would make the dissonance impossible.

People who would call animal services over a neighbour neglecting their dog but sit down to a pork rib dinner. People who sign a petition against dolphin captivity but then eat shrimp from a cocktail glass. These are people operating under the cultural agreement reinforced by every restaurant menu and grocery store aisle and meal eaten at grandma's table.

Let's go back to my first example of the harms done by AI: Any environmental argument you can make against use of generative artificial intelligence you can make more so against the eating of meat, or any other form of animal exploitation. Both are systems of extraction that treat living worlds as resources, but the scale of animal agriculture dwarfs even the data centres. The environmental harms include livestock production accounting for 14-18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and cattle responsible for about two-thirds of that total. Nearly 80% of agricultural land is devoted to livestock, and meat production is responsible for 75% of tropical deforestation.

Animal Lovers

Do you have a cat or dog? Would you call yourself an animal lover? Did you fall in love with the tiny pygmy hippopotamus Moo Deng or feel heartbreak for the Japanese monkey Punch?

I'm sure the answer to at least one of those questions is yes. And so I simply want to extend these feelings of compassion and warmth you have to other animals: Cows have best friends and enjoy music. Pigs outperform dogs on cognitive tests. Chickens enjoy cuddles.

I've actually walked through a factory hog farm, myself. The smell hits you before the door is even open. Ammonia from the waste, concentrated to the point of making my eyes water. The pigs, these emotionally intelligent animals, they're in gestation crates barely wider than their bodies. Again, these are animals that can solve problems, recognize individual people, and can feel boredom and distress and great pain. In their crates, the pigs cannot turn around. The pink little guys stand on concrete and cannot turn around for months. And this room is full of other pigs who also cannot turn around. The screaming does not stop.

Broiler chickens, no different from the free-roaming chickens that love cuddles, are bred to grow so fast that their legs fracture under their own weight before they reach slaughter age (six weeks). Most never see sunlight. The floor is covered in months of litter, and the ammonia is extreme enough that it causes chemical burns on the breast and legs of these birds who can barely stand. There are 9 billion in the United States alone, per year.

The dairy cow searches for her calf for days after it's taken. These cows are artificially inseminated without anaesthetic. The calf is taken within hours—sometimes minutes—of entering the world, slick and still trembling. She will call for that calf for days. The calf remains in emotional distress for days after separation. The cow's vocalizations carry her own distress outward. Low, bellowing, and unrelenting for days after the pen empties.

If the calf is male, he goes to a veal operation, where he's isolated and kept deliberately anemic for the pale meat the market wants, or he's just killed on the farm within days of birth. If female, she becomes her mother: Inseminated, pregnant, her calf taken, milked, inseminated again. The cycle is everlasting. There is a word in the industry for a cow at the end of her dairy usefulness. Spent. The milk in your fridge can only exist with a supply chain built on that grief.

Approximately 80 billion land animals are killed for food globally each year. Industrial animal agriculture accounts for approximately 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than all transportation combined.

Where Does All This Leave Us?

What I've written here is heavy and difficult. I'm not asking for abstinence, just that you don't look away. I'm asking you to hold in your mind, while you make choices at the grocery store, that the animal was real. The grief and screaming in the hog barn and dairy yard was real.

Start with beef. Of all the meats, beef carries the largest environmental footprint. The most land, most emissions, and the most water. Reducing or eliminating it before anything else is the single highest-impact dietary change you can make. One meatless day a week is already a 15% reduction in consumption. Start there.

Try oat milk in your coffee. Buy the soy yogurt, see what you think. Learn one lentil dish like dal makhani, or a simple red lentil soup. Keep it in rotation. Find joy in the peanut noodles and seasoned roasted chickpeas. A bowl of congee with fried shallots and chili oil.

And when you're at the office party and eat the chicken skewer because you were hungry and didn't feel like having the conversation? That doesn't mean you start over. You just continue. Tomorrow exists. The next meatless meal exists. We just keep trying to do better.

You already decide what you put in your body: choices shaped by cost, convenience, culture, and by what you grew up eating. I'm asking for one more consideration to join the constellation: Did something suffer for this? And if the answer is yes, then is there a way to let it suffer less?