Singer - Animal Liberation

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT
FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

Animal Liberation

The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement

Peter Singer

To Richard and Mary, and Ros and Stan, andespecially toRenata

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.

Contents

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 wasnt 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 isnt, 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 peoples 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.

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 Unionall twenty-eight member nationsto 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 cranka thought reflected in the self-mocking name of what was then Londons 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 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 emissionsmore than that of the entire transport sectorhas led many environmentalists to become vegetarian, vegan, or flexitarian (eating meat only on special occasions). The demand for plant-based products that imitate meator 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 beingis 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 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 worlds 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 Center in southern Nebraska.

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 when those experiments were going on, major newspapers did not report anything about them, let alone send reporters to investigate and put the story on the front page. What we did to animals, it seemed, didnt really matter. Now it does. Thats an important step forward, and a sign that over the next forty years we may see even bigger changes in the ways we treat animals.