An Open Letter to Compassionate, Left-leaning, AI-hating, Animal-loving Meat Eaters · brennan.day
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'Meadow with Animals' by Jan van Ravenswaay, ca. 1820–1837. | The Rijksmuseum (edited by the Author)
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...