What do you do when you’ve got a good job with a high income and it’s making you physically ill?

That’s the conundrum Leanne McConnachie faced a few years ago.

A couple of times during her 15-year career in information technology, she nearly quit. But just as she was ready to take the leap, McConnachie would get another job offer from a different IT company with a higher salary and she’d take it.

Finally, she was at a workshop where participants were asked about their goals and job choices and McConnachie’s story spilled out. She wasn’t happy, wasn’t healthy and what she’d always wanted to do was work with animals, but her high-school science marks had precluded her from getting into veterinary school.

Instead, she’d earned an undergraduate degree in economics with a minor in marketing, went to to work first at Telus and then to a string of smaller IT companies. Her last job was at an encryption software firm, which sent her to a conference. There, during a workshop about setting life goals, she’d starting talking about the mistreatment of farmed animals. One of the other participants — a stranger — said to her: “Well Leanne, how many more animals have to die while you make more money?”

“It just hit me,” she says. “And I went, ‘Wow ... He’s right. I’ve got to get going on this.’”

McConnachie started researching what was available and found the UBC master’s program in animal welfare.

She excitedly told her husband that she was going to quit her job and go back to school. An MBA? He asked.

No. But all the animal welfare grads get jobs, she said, reluctantly adding that the wages for those jobs are a small fraction of the six-figure salary she’d been earning.

The money she’d saved paid her university costs. After graduation in 2007, McConnachie was hired by the Vancouver Humane Society as director of farm animal programs where she’s running a campaign aimed at British Columbia’s egg producers. The goal is to follow Europe’s lead and end the practice of keeping egg-laying hens in cages.

The work is more demanding, controversial and intellectually engaging than what she did before. And, she’s doing it for a quarter of her last salary.

“That was probably the hardest part when you live in a society which judges and values you on how much you’re making ... I’m lucky I have a spouse who supported me when I went back to school and all those sorts of things, although I had made some good money prior to that.

“But it was quite an adjustment and I struggled with it for quite some time.”

Although some friends and family members questioned her decision to leave the IT industry, more of them had difficulty with her other job-related change.

McConnachie quit eating meat. She still eats fish, but mainly so friends and family won’t quit asking her to join them for dinner.

When she worked in the IT industry, stress and anxiety had resulted in McConnachie having adrenal gland problems, which made her constantly tired. Now, in her mid-30s, she gets up every morning eager to get to work. She no longer resents checking emails on holidays.