Peter Singer
Best known for his work in bioethics and his role as one of the intellectual founders of the modern animal rights movement, Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Emeritus, at Princeton University (United States) and visiting professor at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore. His many books include The Ethics of What We Eat, and The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty.
Interview by Anuliina Savolainen
UNESCO
As a postgraduate philosophy student in the mid-1970s, you started writing about animal rights and ethical eating and have never stopped since. Can you pinpoint one decisive moment that triggered this?
There was a very key moment that led to my new interest in the ethics of what we eat and that was having lunch with a Canadian graduate student called Richard Keshen. We were in a class together which had nothing to do with eating or animals - it was about freedom and responsibility. When we entered the dining hall at Balliol College at Oxford University (United Kingdom), there was a choice of either a vegetarian salad plate or spaghetti with a brown sauce over it, and Richard asked if the sauce had meat in it. When he was told it contained meat, he took the salad. This was in the 1970s, you didn't meet many vegetarians back then. He was the first person to get me to think about what I was eating and how the animals were treated.
I had assumed that the animals had reasonably good lives outside grazing in the fields, but Richard told me that many of them were indoors all their lives, in extremely crowded conditions, and that there was no concern for their welfare. The producers would do whatever would enable them to produce the animal product more cheaply, which meant that the lives of these animals were miserable. And that made me think about what would justify us treating animals in this way when we don't need to eat meat to survive.
In your book Animal Liberation, first published in 1975 and still available in an updated version called Animal Liberation Now, you argue that we have the moral obligation to consider the interest of animals, and therefore minimize the suffering of farmed animals. Why is that?
I don't treat killing lightly, but I think nevertheless that it's not really a question of whether it is wrong to kill an animal. But it's very hard in any way to defend inflicting a lot of suffering on animals just because we enjoy the taste of their flesh more than we enjoy the taste of some equally nutritious food available to us that didn't cause suffering. Animals are other sentient beings; we share the planet with them, and we bring them into existence, in enormous numbers now. And the question is, what sort of lives do we give them?
If we let cows graze in the fields, or chickens peck around outdoors, maybe that would be tolerable. But when you put them inside, in vast, crowded sheds, that in itself causes them stress. For instance, chickens normally live in small social groups where they can recognize every other bird. They know their place in the group, so aggression is rare. But if you put 20,000 birds in a shed, more aggression is likely to occur. They are also bred to put on weight extremely quickly, while their still immature bones are not able to bear that weight, which causes them pain. Producers make more money when their chickens grow faster. This well-documented evidence shows that we're not really concerned with their welfare. That whole attitude that animals are just commodities seems completely wrong to me.
Is your action driven by emotion or intellectual reasoning?
I think for me it's more an intellectual drive. When I first learned about the conditions in which we raise animals for food, I was already specializing in ethics, and so I started reading what some philosophers had said. But in this area, their reasoning was weak. It became obvious to me that this was just one of those moral blind spots. We know that the slave traders and the slave owners had a terrible moral blind spot about racism. Men in patriarchal societies had a blind spot about sexism. But many people still don't recognize this blind spot. I call it speciesism. We still accept the idea that our species somehow has the right to exploit members of other species in whatever way suits us. I think that in 50, 100 or 200 years, people will look back at our time and say, well, in some respects they were trying to live decent, ethical lives, but when it came to animals, what they did is just appalling.
Speciesism consists of accepting the idea that our species somehow has the right to exploit members of other species
Is the world today more receptive to the cause of farmed animal welfare?
I think it is. There is now a large animal rights movement and the conditions of animals have improved in many countries, especially in the European Union, but also in some of the states of the United States, that have passed better legislation, and some other countries are slowly moving towards better situations. But there are still countries where there aren't really any laws protecting the welfare of animals in factory farms.
Vegetarianism and veganism are gaining ground especially in affluent countries. However, meat consumption is on the rise globally. What would be the ethical solution here?
Meat consumption is on the rise globally partly because many countries are more prosperous today than fifty years ago. More people can afford meat. Of course, it's a good thing to lift people out of poverty and give them more choices, but it's unfortunate that this results in the purchase of products that involve such a lot of animal suffering.
We could easily decrease our greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the number of farmed animals
Having more vegan options is an important improvement also for the planet because raising so many animals significantly contributes to climate change. We could easily decrease our greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the number of farmed animals. This would also allow us to reduce major public health risks caused by viruses that develop in factory-grown animals, such as the swine flu pandemic, or bird flu that has already spread to other animals and, in some cases, humans.
We have obesity in some parts of the world and hunger in others. Isn't this a huge moral failure?
Absolutely. The fact that there is still hunger on this planet is itself a moral failure because we have the resources to produce enough food for everybody. And in fact, one of the reasons why people are hungry is that vast amounts of grain and protein-rich soybeans are cultivated to feed animals. If we were to eat the grains and the soy directly, we would need less cropland to feed ourselves. The price of those crops could come down, and we could have surpluses to distribute where necessary - and thus have a more equitable distribution of food on the planet as well.
Could in-vitro produced meat be part of the solution?
Because it has proven so hard to get people to stop eating animal meat, solutions like cultured meat could be a way forward. But this option is still rare and rather expensive. So we're unfortunately still a long way from that kind of technology helping us to solve the food problems.
