Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals by Peter Singer. 

3/5 rating. 258 pages.

Book #48 of 2020. Read July 28, 2020.

This is a classic about humanity’s need to take seriously the sentience and suffering of nonhuman animals. Peter does a great job of offering a very-well reasoned justification for our adoption of animal rights, including the elimination of animals as a means to humanity’s ends in areas such as medical research, testing, and for food.

Peter begins by talking about the ways that we clarify differences between humans. As he says:

“The principle of the equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans; it is a prescription of how we should treat humans.”

Here, Peter takes this fact and asks why this would be any different for how we treat other sentient beings. As Jeremy Bentham once said,

“The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

If something can both suffer, and feel pleasure, isn’t it within our purview to ensure that we are not causing unnecessary pain and suffering!?! For centuries, preachers have said that animals are within our dominion, but luckily, we have advanced far enough as a society to not be held hostage by this human-centric thinking.

As Peter ultimately argues:

“What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.”

Overall, Peter does a great job of staying away from any extreme positions. He incrementally explains his reasoning and ensures to lean towards the low-side of any wrongdoing perpetrated against animals for a fair critique.

This is one of the founding books for the current animal rights fight. It’s worth a read for historical context and to spur you into vegetarianism or beyond without being at all hyperbolic, it just is not the most engaging book.

Quotes:

“The appropriate response to those who claim to have found evidence of genetically based differences in ability between the races or sexes is not to stick to the belief that the genetic explanation must be wrong, whatever evidence to the contrary may turn up: instead we should make it quite clear that the claim to equality does not depend on intelligence, moral capacity, physical strength, or similar matters of fact. Equality is a moral idea, not an assertion of fact.”

“If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.”

“All that we need to say is that experiments serving no direct and urgent purpose should stop immediately, and in the remaining areas of research, methods involving animals should be replaced as soon as possible by alternative methods not involving animals.”

“What we should learn from thalidomide, then, is not that animal testing is necessary, but that it is unreliable; not that we need to imprison more animals, but that we need to find alternative methods of testing, and until then we should make do without new nonessential drugs.”

“There are laws that prevent ordinary people from beating their dogs to death, but a scientist can do the same thing with impunity, and with no one to check whether his doing so is likely to lead to benefits that would not occur from an ordinary beating.”

“Our sphere of moral concern is far wider than that of the Nazis; but so long as there are sentient beings outside it, it is not wide enough.”

“People may hope that the meat they buy came from an animal that died without pain, but they do not really want to know about it. Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed have no right to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy. If it is distasteful for humans to think about, what can it be like for the animals to experience it?”

“But it was a frightening experience, seeing their fear, seeing so many of them go by it had to remind me of things no one wants to be reminded of anymore, all mobs, all death marches, all mass murders and extinctions….” – Richard Rhodes on watching pigs be killed at a slaughterhouse

“Surely it is only because fish do not yelp or whimper in a way that we can hear that otherwise decent people can think it a pleasant way of spending an afternoon to sit by the water dangling a hook while previously caught fish die slowly beside them.”

“We have seen that the egg industry is one of the most ruthlessly intensive forms of modern factory farming, exploiting hens relentlessly to produce the most eggs at the least cost.”

“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble and, I believe, true, to consider him created from animals.” – Charles Darwin

“[O]ne of the advantages of being a ‘reasonable creature’ is that one can find a reason for whatever one wants to do.”

“We are more likely to persuade others to share our attitude if we temper our ideals with common sense than if we strive for the kind of purity that is more appropriate to a religious dietary law than to an ethical and political movement.”

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