Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement

484 Pages·2009·2.09 MB·English

by  Peter Singer

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Animal Liberation
The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement
Peter Singer
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To Richard and Mary, and Ros and Stan, and—especially
to—Renata
This revised edition is also for all of you who have changed
your lives in order to bring Animal Liberation closer. You
have made it possible to believe that the power of ethical
reasoning can prevail over the self-interest of our species.
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Contents
Preface to the Fortieth Anniversary Edition
Preface to the 2009 Edition
Preface to the 1975 Edition
1 All Animals Are Equal …
or why the ethical principle on which human equality rests
requires us to extend equal consideration to animals too
2 Tools for Research …
your taxes at work
3 Down on the Factory Farm …
or what happened to your dinner when it was still an animal
4 Becoming a Vegetarian …
or how to produce less suffering and more food at a reduced
cost to the environment
5 Man’s Dominion …
a short history of speciesism
6 Speciesism Today …
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defenses, rationalizations, and objections to Animal
Liberation and the progress made in overcoming them
Further Reading
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
A Biography of Peter Singer
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Preface to the Fortieth Anniversary Edition
People often ask me what I was expecting to happen when
Animal Liberation appeared forty years ago. One thing I
wasn’t expecting was that the book would be continuously in
print for the next forty years! Nor, of course, was I expecting
it to appear as an ebook, because it was typed on a manual
typewriter long before there was an Internet or anyone had a
personal computer.
That isn’t, however, what people really want to know. They
want to know what impact I expected the book to have. On
that, my expectations fluctuated between two extremes. In my
more optimistic moments, the arguments against our
oppression of animals seemed so clear and irrefutable that
surely, I thought, a popular movement would arise to inform
people how we are treating animals (for then most people
knew nothing about factory farming or the kind of
experiments done on animals). This better-informed public
would boycott animal products, so that factory farming, or
perhaps the entire meat industry, would shrink and eventually
disappear, along with the kind of research on animals that I
describe in chapter two.
In my more pessimistic (or realistic) moments, I understood
the enormity of the task facing the movement that I
envisaged. How can one change habits as widespread and as
deeply ingrained as eating meat? It would first be necessary to
transform people’s attitudes toward animals, and these
attitudes would be especially difficult to change because as
chapters five and six demonstrate, people are very good at
finding rationalizations for doing what they want to do.
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Against the background of those more realistic assumptions,
we can be pleased that despite the obstacles, we have made
significant progress. We can rightly deplore the fact that
today, forty years on, animals are still being mistreated on a
vast scale, but we should not despair of making a positive
difference in the lives of animals. In many parts of the world,
including Europe and the United States, there has been a huge
shift in attitudes toward animals. The powerful animal
advocacy movement I hoped would emerge does exist, and
thanks to undercover videos and the Internet, the information
it provides cannot be denied or suppressed. The animal
movement has challenged the huge agribusiness industry with
remarkable success, forcing producers of meat and eggs
across the entire European Union—all twenty-eight member
nations—to give hens and pigs and veal calves more space
and conditions better suited to their needs. Similar changes
have now become law in California as well, following an
overwhelming victory for animal advocates in a referendum
in 2008. Admittedly, these changes are still far from giving
factory-farmed animals acceptable lives, but they are a
significant improvement on what was standard practice before
the reforms came into effect.
Perhaps even more satisfying is the popularity of becoming
vegetarian or vegan, and the still-larger number who have cut
down their meat consumption, for both ethical and health
reasons. In the 1970s, to be a vegetarian was to be a crank—a
thought reflected in the self-mocking name of what was then
London’s best vegetarian restaurant, Cranks. If you used the
term vegan, you invariably got a blank look and had to
explain what it meant. Since then, the number of vegetarians
and vegans in the United Kingdom and the United States has
risen steadily and continues to do so. Even in countries like
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Germany and Austria, where virtually every main course was
based on meat or eggs, vegan foods are appearing on menus
and in supermarkets.
In the United States, something remarkable happened in 2008.
For the whole of the twentieth century, the US had the
reputation of being “a nation of meat eaters.” Consumption of
meat kept going up and up, with just one or two small blips
for events like the Great Depression of the 1930s. Beef
consumption peaked in the mid-1970s, but a sharp increase in
chicken consumption more than made up for that drop. Then
in 2008, total meat consumption, including that of poultry,
fell, and it has fallen again every year since. No one quite
knows why, but probably more people having at least one
meat-free day a week has made a bigger difference than the
increasing number of vegetarians and vegans.
Greater awareness of the huge contribution that the livestock
industry makes to greenhouse-gas emissions—more than that
of the entire transport sector—has led many environmentalists
to become vegetarian, vegan, or “flexitarian” (eating meat
only on special occasions). The demand for plant-based
products that imitate meat—or that, in the case of attempts to
cultivate bovine cells in vitro, really are meat, although they
have never been part of a living, sentient being—is
increasing. Whatever the reason, it is a hopeful sign that we
are not inevitably heading for a future in which more and
more animals suffer, more and more grain and soybeans are
wasted, and more and more greenhouse gases from livestock
production accelerate the rate at which our planet is warming.
Despite all this, it is probably still true that there are more
animals suffering at the hands of humans now than ever
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before. That is because there are more affluent people in the
world than ever before, and satisfying their demand for meat
has meant a vast expansion of factory farming, especially in
China. But to see this as an indication that animal advocates
have made no progress would be like saying that because
there are more slaves in the world now than there were in
1800, the antislavery movement has achieved nothing. With
the world’s population now more than seven times what it
was in 1800, numbers do not tell the whole story.
There will always be periods in which the animal movement
seems to be struggling to hold its own, or even going
backward. But there can be no doubt that attitudes about
animals are completely different from what they were forty
years ago. Just as I was drafting this introduction, the front
page of the New York Times carried a long article headlined
“U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for
Profit.” The article reported the results of a long investigation
by a Times journalist into the U.S. Meat Animal Research
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Center in southern Nebraska. At the time of writing this
preface, a bipartisan group of congressional representatives
had said that they would move legislation to bring
government institutions like the Meat Animal Research
Center under the Animal Welfare Act, which already
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regulates experiments by nongovernment institutions.
The experiments described in the Times article obviously
caused great suffering to many animals, but many of the
experiments I describe in chapter two caused even more
suffering, were also taxpayer funded, and could not plausibly
be claimed to have had a more important scientific
justification or to be likely to lead to a greater benefit than
those carried out at the Meat Animal Research Center. Yet
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