Early Peter Singer: Preface to Animal Liberation (1975)

We now have almost 50 years later Peter Singer, in the form of Animal Liberation Now. But maybe there is something to be said for a short glance at the original. The version I am using is a reprint of the original preface, pages 1-10 in Why Vegan?, Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2020.

• “This book is about the tyranny of human over non-human animals [p. 1].”

• “The struggle against this tyranny is a struggle as important as any of the moral and social issues that have been fought over in recent years [p. 1].”

• The moral issue at stake has nothing to do with being an animal lover; the argument concerns “reason, not emotion [p. 5].” Portraying activists as “animal lovers” is a method of excluding animal welfare from serious moral or political consideration.

• The crux of the matter: the rational and moral imperative to provide “equal consideration of interests [p. 3]” to animals and to humans...

• ...and that means all animals: “When the United States Defense Department finds that its use of beagles to test lethal gases has evoked a howl of protest and offers to use rats instead, I am not appeased [p. 4].”

• “I ask you to recognize that your attitudes to members of other species are a form of prejudice no less objectionable than prejudice about a person’s race or sex [pp. 6-7].”

• The animals themselves cannot organize, cannot voice a protest.

• Many people (including meat eaters) are beneficiaries of the current system, so they are hard to persuade.

• Another prejudice is the unexamined view that concerns with animal suffering are trivial in a world where many humans suffer.

• The unfortunate near necessity of using the term animal to refer to only refer to non-human animals, which seems to support a notion of difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. (Singer was writing before the coining of the useful word "anymal!")

• The wastefulness of animal agriculture, feeding billions of farm animals who then we eat, instead of cutting out the middle anymal. (This resource-intensive approach to feeding humans is one of the main reasons that plant-based meat (and dairy and egg) alternatives will eventually out-compete the morally-unacceptable industrial farms.)