Emily de Wet
Skidmore College
On April 28th, a video of pop star Billie Eilish went viral and unleashed a firestorm of controversy online. In the video, Eilish was asked by Elle Magazine what hill she would die on and she responded with “eating meat is inherently wrong… you can eat meat, go for it, you can love animals, but you can’t do both.”
The response online has been intense. While vegan content creators and farm animal sanctuaries have praised her use of her platform for animal activism, much of the response has been backlash, and not from far-right pro-meat spaces but largely from “the Left” (Torella 2026). The backlash ranges with many calling Eilish condescending, and some commenters claiming that veganism is elitist. Some has also come from Indigenous content creators, writing “indigenous people still exist and to this day we still respect the animals that provide us food, leather, clothes, tools, and shelter” or other people invoking Indigenous ways of hunting. These comments overlap with claims that “white vegans” and veganism are racist. This position has spurred a response from Indigenous, BIack, and Latinx vegans, critiquing their erasure and highlighting the many ways to live a vegan lifestyle and deep histories of doing so. While this is a subset of the conversation, much of the wider commentary is around the sheer scale of industrialized farming in the U.S. Kenny Torella (2026) argues that the backlash from “the Left” reveals a bigger problem about the Left’s inability to take seriously animal exploitation and animal suffering in the U.S. food system. Indeed, “everyone cares about oppression until you bring up animals” has become a common claim from many vegan activists online.
Rather than wading into the debate, I propose that a multispecies anthropology perspective reveals that the issue is a question of differing forms of relations. I explore instead how different ways of eating animals are embedded with differing ways of relating to our nonhuman worlds.
While varied across time and contexts, a multitude of work from Indigenous scholars and activists demonstrates complex relations with animals that they live alongside, hunt, and eat. Paul Nadasdy (2007) and Charlotte Coté (2010), writing about Kluane First Nation hunters and Makah and Nuu-Chah-Nulth whale hunting, demonstrate the ways that these respective groups understand hunting to be a deeply social act between hunter and hunted, requiring gratitude, cunning, ceremonial preparation, respect, and care on the part of the hunter, leading to a successful hunt only if conducted properly. This scholarship and that of many others, demonstrates a relationship of care that undergirds Indigenous ways of hunting and eating animals. To hunt in this worldview is to see an animal as a clever, intelligent, sentient being and to respond accordingly. There is no guarantee that an animal will allow itself to be caught, there is a dynamic relationship that unfolds through which both life and death are possibilities. When the violence of taking life does occur, it happens as part of a wider web of relations in which humans and nonhuman animals are all actors. Within Indigenous ideologies, cosmologies, and ontologies, animals can be kin, adversaries, food, and friend.
This is radically different from Eilish’s claims where such ways of relating to animals are not possible.
One of the key arguments from Eilish and others is that if people knew what was happening to the animals before they become meat or as they provide milk or eggs, they wouldn’t continue to consume them. In an online post days after the viral video, Eilish refused to apologize and directs her critics to “watch a documentary or two and some footage of what is done to the animals u claim to love…” Further, an account on Instagram in support of Eilish wrote that if grocery stores had TVs above the meat sections, people would have to confront the reality of the violence in the animal farming industry in the U.S. They ask how someone who claims to love animals could subject them to this kind of violence.
The industrialized farming system creates certain kinds of relations between humans and the animals they eat and eat from. This is an explicitly exploitative relation in which animals and their bodies are genetically altered, mutilated, bred, and slaughtered for the purpose of human consumption. 99 % of U.S. farmed animals live in factory farms in these conditions. This industry successfully functions because these harmful conditions are hidden from us (see Pachirat 2011, Gillespie 2020, Blanchette 2020). Further, attempts to reveal these conditions have been criminalized through legislation known as ag-gag laws. Most animal-loving, meat-eating consumers may know the realities of industrialized farming, but refuse to confront it, a process that feminist geographer Kathryn Gillespie has dubbed “doublethink.”[1] Consumers buy chicken as plucked, dismembered, plastic-wrapped products with almost no reminder that their food was once a living animal. Animals are renamed as bacon or pork (not pig), beef (not cow). The industrialized farming system creates a distinctly disconnected relationship between humans and their food in which there is no need to recognize the intelligence, emotion, individuality of the consumed animals. In fact, as Eilish and activists point to, this is the whole point – the industry could not exist at this scale if consumers did have to confront this reality.
The perspective from Indigenous activists and scholars, on the other hand, demonstrates a different kind of relating to the animals they consume. Under differing conditions, we see a possibility for a different kind of relating, a different kind of loving animals.
When Eilish and others argue that it is impossible to love animals and also eat them, this debate opens a powerful space to confront the harms of industrial animal agriculture, but it also opens an important conversation about the ways that structural systems create different ways of relating to animals. Eilish is directing us to think about the relations created under capitalism and industrial agriculture, not those of Indigenous hunting practices. Rather than placing these positions at odds with each other, let us rather see them in conversation to reflect on the possibilities for relating to animals. Let us expand our understanding of what it means to love a nonhuman being; anthropology and Indigenous perspectives provide the means to understand that love and violence can be intimately connected (see Govindrajan 2018 and Davé 2023). To remove these possibilities for relating to animals is indeed a Eurocentric perspective, rooted in the racism that gives rise to one way of being in a multispecies world.
At the same time, if we see nonhuman animals as sentient, emotional actors in the world, we might indeed have to confront the conditions that so many live and die within. Crucially, this does not mean that there is only one way to love (or eat) in a multispecies world. A relational perspective moves us beyond the siphoning off of justice for humans or for animals, it removes the power of critiquing animal rights activism for its racism, it could hold “the Left” accountable in its anti-oppression stance. Rather than asking if one can love animals and also eat them, let us rather ask, what ways of relating to the animals we eat are possible under the conditions in which we do so.
References
Blanchette, A. (2020). Porkopolis: American animality, standardized life, and the factory farm. Duke University Press.
Coté, C. (2015). Spirits of our whaling ancestors: Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth traditions. University of Washington Press.
Davé, N. N. (2023). Indifference: On the praxis of interspecies being. Duke University Press.
Exposito, S. (2026, April 28). Billie Eilish talks astrology, dragons, and her next album. ELLE. https://www.elle.com/culture/music/a71142286/billie-eilish-ask-me-anything-video/
Gillespie, K. (2020). The cow with ear tag #1389. University of Chicago.
Govindrajan, R. (2019). Animal intimacies: Interspecies relatedness in India’s central Himalayas. University of Chicago Press.
Pachirat, T. (2011). Every twelve seconds: Industrialized slaughter and the politics of sight. Yale University Press.
Nadasdy, P. (2007). The gift in the animal: The ontology of hunting and human–animal sociality. American ethnologist, 34(1), 25-43.
Torella, K. (2026, May 6) The Backlash to Billie Eilish’s vegan comments explains a lot about the American Left (and everyone else). Vox. https://www.elle.com/culture/music/a71142286/billie-eilish-ask-me-anything-video/
[1] A concept from geographer and multispecies scholar Kathryn Gillespie to capture how people actually do know the costs of meat and dairy consumption. They don’t want to think about it, but that their active disengagement (people saying that they “don’t want to know”) actually demonstrates awareness. The fact that they refuse to hear means that they know and don’t want to engage.
FoodAnthropology 