Animal Liberation Now Reflection

In the last quarter of my undergrad at Cal Poly (Spring 2020), I took a social ethics elective, during which we read the opening chapter to Peter Singer’s 1975 book, Animal Liberation. This book is widely credited for starting the Animal Liberation movement, including the founding of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Up to that point, I was a voracious meat eater who thought vegans were obnoxious, and I never stopped to consider what justified my consumption of animal products. However, when asked to write about this issue for the class, I found that I could not argue in an intellectually honest way that eating meat from factory farmed animals was morally permissible nor consistent with my values. Thus began my journey to ameliorate my cognitive dissonance by taking gradual steps over time towards reducing my animal-derived food consumption. 

Fast-forward three years to today, I am fully vegetarian and mostly vegan (I do not purchase non-vegan products, but will occasionally eat non-meat animal products when offered). I spend a lot of time thinking through ethical issues involving animal welfare, although most of this thinking never leaves my head since sharing these ideas out-loud tends to not make me super popular. So, I was excited to head to SF last month to see Peter Singer in conversation, promoting his new version of the book, Animal Liberation Now. I got a free copy of the book and will attempt to summarize and reflect on it below, though please note that I am leaving out much of the nuance of his arguments. As will become apparent, I still find his case for going vegan quite compelling.

Singer argues that speciesism, which is the assumption that humans are superior to nonhumans, is simply another form of prejudice like that of sexism and racism. While everyone recognizes that members of different sexes and races can have different characteristics, most people (these days) acknowledge that these differences do not imply that certain people should be treated with less consideration merely because they are a part of one characteristic group and not another. Similarly, he believes that the fact that nonhuman animals have different characteristics than humans does not necessarily imply that their interests should be discounted. 

In order to justify speciesism, he claims that one must identify a morally relevant characteristic, attribute, or capability that all humans have, but no nonhumans have. This is surprisingly difficult to do. For example, you may think that humans’ unique abilities to talk and solve complex problems are what make us superior. However, by this logic, it would be permissible to treat humans who do not possess these capabilities (due to various disabilities) just as we currently treat animals. Unless you are willing to condone performing experiments on people with disabilities and forcing them to live in cages, then this argument suggests you should condemn such acts when performed on animals.

What is a “morally relevant” characteristic then? And on what basis should we decide which beings’ interests matter and which do not? The answer to these questions comes from the father of Utilitarian philosophy, Jeremy Bentham: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, can they suffer?” Bentham, Singer, and I agree here that what ultimately matters is whether the being is sentient, meaning they can have positive or negative experiences. Singer outlines the overwhelming and growing body of evidence that suggests that animals (including fish) can indeed feel pain and have complex desires, with the possible exceptions of oysters and certain insects. In case you are wondering, while some plants show signs of responding to their environments, there is no similar research suggesting the plants are sentient, as they do not have analogous nervous systems.

I’ll add another point that I think strengthens his argument for rejecting speciesism. No one chooses to be born, let alone be born as the sex, race, and species that they are. It is pure luck that you were granted the experience of a human and not that of an animal on a factory farm. If the mere flip of nature’s coin determined your fate, then you cannot argue that you earned your position of power, nor that the animal deserves their life sentence. From this perspective, I think it is difficult to justify our exploitation of animals, just as is difficult to justify slavery or denying women’s suffrage.

Thus far I have explained some of Singer and my arguments for why animals are deserving of equal consideration, but not why these matter for our dietary choices. The largest chapter in the book describes the lives of animals on factory farms. In the US alone, 9.7 billion birds and land animals are killed each year (34M cows, 128M pigs, 2M sheep, 23M ducks, 216M turkeys, 9.3B chickens), while the number has risen to 83B for the entire planet. A staggering 124B farmed fish and 500B to 1 trillion wild caught fish are killed globally each year. These numbers are truly impossible for our brains to comprehend, but that does not mean they should be ignored. Every single one of these beings can suffer, and I see no compelling reason why this suffering should not matter.

Reading about the horrific conditions of animals on factory farms is not fun, but it’s better than choosing to be ignorant of the facts. I’ll provide a few details here, but I encourage you to do your own research. Chickens, who are by far the most prevalent animal, are typically shoved into cages where they cannot spread their wings or windowless sheds with thousands of birds where they have less than a piece of paper’s worth of personal space per bird. They are bred to be perpetually hungry so they can grow abnormally fast. Most end up with leg problems, not to mention diseases from the dense ammonia in the air from their poop not being cleared out. Female pigs and dairy cows are kept in stalls where they do not have room to turn around and are made to endure a series of forced pregnancies (in humans we call this rape) where their babies are immediately removed from their presence upon birth. Farmed fish are also kept in crowded cages, then starved for many days before dying via suffocation. Beef cattle arguably have the least bad lives since they can spend some of it outdoors, but unfortunately, they are the worst for the environment and the least efficient in terms of converting plants into meat protein (for every gram of protein we get from beef, 40 grams were required to feed the animal).

I have left out countless details, but hopefully this makes clear why one might reconsider giving their money to an industry that puts profits and efficiency before the wellbeing of its animals. Economic logic and studies of this topic show that reducing our purchases of animal products will indeed lead to commensurate decreases of the supply and its living inputs. The “Big Ag” industry treats animals as machines to be optimized and puts great effort into distancing us from the source of its products. Fortunately, some progress has been made by animal welfare activists to improve the conditions of these animals, primarily in Europe, but in the US the industry has very weak regulatory oversight. Based on what I have read elsewhere, I thought Singer’s summary of factory farming was on the conservative side, leaving out some of the most gruesome practices.

The other area of animal exploitation that Singer writes about involves experiments done on animals for biomedical, psychological, and cosmetic research. This is a topic I had not thought about as deeply, but his arguments convinced me that these practices were also broadly unjustified. One of the surprising things I learned was that most of this research using animal models does not translate well to human applications. In the area of psychological research, where animals are deliberately abused to give them conditions like PTSD, anxiety, and depression, Singer points out a paradox: “Either the minds of animals are not like ours, in which case the experiments are unlikely to benefit us and there is less justification for funding and carrying them out; or else the animals do have minds like ours, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us.” This is mostly true for biomedical research as well, which leads me to wonder how the National Institutes of Health make funding decisions with our tax dollars. It also relates to my general rule of thumb for thinking about animal welfare: if you wouldn’t do it to another human being because it causes them harm, then you probably shouldn’t do it to an animal.

In the remaining chapters of the book, Singer describes the history of speciesism, lists some accomplishments that the animal liberation movement has achieved thus far, and responds to critiques of his argument. He puts significant blame on Judeo-Christian thought, which dogmatically declared that God has granted mankind dominion over animals. Nowadays, Europe seems to be heading in the right direction with regard to improving the conditions of animals, but the economic development and population growth in China and India are leading to growing demands for animal products. In a future post I will write more about Singer’s and my responses to critiques of the moral case for veganism. 

I have deep admiration for Peter Singer, as few people have influenced my world view as much as he has. I would recommend any conscientious person to read this important book, although I will admit that I found the case made by Ed Winters in This Is Vegan Propaganda perhaps more compelling. This topic has become very close to my heart over the past few years, so I invite any readers to reach out if they’d like to discuss further.