Animal Liberation Turns 40: Exclusive Interview With Peter Singer

In 1975, Peter Singer’s seminal work, Animal Liberation, sparked a radical change in attitudes about animals. Since its inception, it has been widely credited as the catalyst for the modern animal rights movement, and has led countless people to consider a vegan diet.

I didn’t know what to expect. On the one hand, our exploitation of animals is so deeply entrenched in our way of living, and is supported by such powerful industries and political lobby groups, that it seemed almost impossible that my book would have any impact. Yet at the same time, the arguments I was putting forward seemed so obviously correct that I hoped that once people read them, they would go vegetarian and tell all their friends to do the same. So I oscillated between thinking that the book might disappear without a trace, and hoping that it would change the world.

It’s changed in many ways, and mostly for the better. In 1975, no one took the idea of animal liberation, or animal rights, seriously. Few people knew about factory farming, and there were very few vegetarians. The term “vegan was completely unknown. There were no large organizations campaigning against factory farming (and hardly any small ones either). Nor did any states or countries have laws prohibiting the cruelest forms of confinement for farmed animals, of the kind that exist now in Europe, and in California.

So all this is good. The bad aspect is that the number of animals abused on factory farms has grown considerably, largely because increasing prosperity in Asian nations has led to a jump in the demand for meat. This is a tragedy for animals, for the climate, and for the health of Asian people. I very much hope it can be reversed.

My ultimate goal, an end to speciesism, has not changed, but I have become more of an incrementalist. After more than 40 years of struggle I can see that reaching the ultimate goal is going to take a long time. The animals cannot wait. We have to do what we can to improve their situation, even if that means a compromise that leaves us, for a time, with conditions that are still far from what I would like to see.

I expect to see the abolition of the standard battery cage for laying hens, and of gestation crates for sows, as well as individual crates for veal calves. These things have already happened across the entire European Union, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve them in the United States, Canada, Australia, and many other countries as well. These changes will bring a better life to hundreds of millions of animals, but of course they do not go nearly far enough. So I expect that in the U.S. the movement away from animal products will continue, and we will see more and more vegetarians and vegans. I hope that this way of thinking will spread to Asia as well.

Philosophically, they are both about reducing the suffering of groups we tend to ignore for morally indefensible reasons, for example, because they are not humans, or because they are far away, and of a different race or ethnicity.

In practical terms, the livestock industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transport sector: all cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes. Climate change is going to hit the poor hardest, because they depend on rain to grow their crops, and if the rains fail, they have no good options. They will become climate refugees.

We should also realize that most of the animal products we eat in the affluent world come from animals fed on grain or soybeans. We are feeding hundreds of millions of tons of these crops to animals, and getting back, in return, less than one-third of the food value of the crops we feed to them. That puts up the price of grain and soybeans on the world market, and makes it harder for the poor to buy them.

I said earlier that when Animal Liberation was first published, few people knew about factory farming. Undercover videos have made a huge difference in this respect. Now most people have seen them, or at least clips from them, on the evening television news, or online. So the curtain has been lifted, and no matter what ag-gag laws are passed, it will never drop again.

Keep up the great work you are doing at MFA. The struggle against slavery took a lot more than 40 years, and the struggle for animal liberation is trying to change practices that are even more deep-rooted and widespread. So don’t expect instant success, but keep moving forward, spreading the message to more and more people, and leading them to become vegetarian or vegan, for animals, for the climate, for the global poor, and for their own better health.