Are You An Evil Person For Eating Meat? - Peter Singer

My argument is not based on the idea that we should love animals or have warm feelings to them. It's based on the idea that this is a major ethical issue, a major ethical wrong that we are doing to those who are not members of our species. (wind blows)

It's nearly 50 years since you first published Animal Liberation. Why re-release the book now?

Well, partly because it is, uh, nearly 50 years. And although I did revise it in 1990, that's still 33 years. And the book isn't just, you know, timeless philosophy. It, it has some of what I hope is timeless philosophy in it, but it, it's applied to the real world. And the real world includes, um, industrial animal production, uh, which is a vast industry that is terrible for animals, the planet, climate, uh, health, everything. Um, but it's changed, of course, that industry has changed over the last, uh, 50 or 33 years. Um, I also talk about the use of animals in laboratories, um, and I described experiments that were done the last time I revised the book, so experiments from the 1980s, not very relevant if you want to know what's going on with animals in labs today. So those are two main reasons. Um, lots of people ask me about, "Well, you know, has... have we made progress for animals over the time since you wrote Animal Liberation?" Um, I wanted to answer that question. Uh, and I did want to talk about climate change and its relevance to our choice of what we eat, because that obviously wasn't in the 1975 edition. I had no knowledge of climate change, and it was barely in the 1990 edition either.

What ways do you think we've made progress with regards to animal welfare, and in which ways have we gone backward?

We've made progress in restrictions on some of the worst forms of close confinement of animals in industrial animal production that I focused on in the earlier, uh, book. Um, so for example, laying hens, egg-laying hens were in very small wire cages, uh, where they couldn't even stretch their wings. Even if there'd only been one hen per cage, they couldn't have stretched their wings fully, um, but there might be four or five hens in those cages. They have been prohibited in some places. So they've been prohibited in the European Union. The United Kingdom has maintained those prohibitions after leaving the, uh, European Union. Uh, some states of the United States where citizens can bring initiatives to the ballot and have a vote on them, uh, California is the largest of those states, uh, have, uh, also restricted those cages, and as well, individual stalls for, uh, veal calves and sows, uh, where again, they, they couldn't turn around. The stalls were so tight they could hardly walk a step. Um, so there are some places where those things have been banned. Um, another big form of progress is that there are many more vegetarians and vegans. There were virtually no vegans when, in 1975, when the book was published. Uh, there are now, uh, I think, supposed to be 1.3 million vegans in the United Kingdom, and varying figures for the United States that, uh, some, some surveys go much higher than that in the US. So, you know, uh, there's greater awareness of animals and the idea that animals might have rights is no longer a matter for ridicule, as it was when the book first came out. So there's lots of, um, ways in which we've gone ahead. The big way in which we've gone backwards is that there are more animals in industrial animal production now than ever before. Uh, and that's, uh, at least partly because of the rise of China, uh, the fact that China has become a lot more prosperous, which is great. We don't want people to be in extreme poverty. But, um, so hundreds of millions of Chinese now use their extra income that they have to buy more meat. Um, and China has been building these enormous factory farms, like 26-story buildings just full of thousands and thousands of pigs, obviously never getting to go outside, just living their entire lives, uh, on the concrete floors of these buildings. Uh, and because of that, uh, and, you know, expansion of other... chicken production, uh, uh, fish factory farming, aquaculture as it's, uh, called, too nice a word for what it really is. Um, you know, so there are far more animals suffering now from human abuse than there were in 1975.