Google Search Search www.satyamag.com Read each article! Satya has ceased publication. This website is maintained for informational purposes only. All contents are copyrighted. Click here to learn about reprinting text or images that appear on this site. October 2006 Singer Says The Satya Interview with Peter Singer As a university student in the early 1970s, Peter Singer sat across from a friend who ordered a vegetarian meal. While eating meat, Singer asked his classmate why he didn’t eat meat. His ethical reasons for vegetarianism prompted Singer to plumb some of the deepest moral issues of the time. He found factory farming indefensible and applied a utilitarian philosophical framework to a culture based on animal exploitation. Thus a book called Animal Liberation was born, published in 1975, which inspired an international movement. Three decades later, Peter Singer holds professorships at both Princeton University and the University of Melbourne, and Peter Singer and Maude at Farm Sanctuary. has published dozens of books addressing a wide range of Photo by Derek Goodwin ethical issues. In 2005, Singer was listed as one of the world’s 100 “most influential people” by Time magazine. At 60, Singer’s standing as a major figure in the animal rights movement was reinforced with the publication of The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Rodale) this spring. Singer paired up again with co-author Jim Mason to revisit some of what they explored in Animal Factories. To examine the many ethical issues related to food, the authors followed around three families: a Wal-Mart shopping family who eats fast food, an environmentally-conscientious family, and a vegan family. Singer’s philosophy has also stirred controversy and offense on a number of fronts, including with disability rights activists, for his contention that infanticide can be justified in certain circumstances where a newborn is severely disabled; anti-abortion activists, for his stance that human fetuses do not qualify for personhood; feminists, for his rejection of an ethic of caring as a necessary component of a moral framework; and animal rights activists, for his utilitarian relegation of some animals as “replaceable.” Over tofu BLTs at Chelsea’s all-vegan restaurant Blossom, Catherine Clyne asked Peter Singer about his new book and how his strategy for animal liberation has changed over time, and about some of his controversial views on animal welfare reform. What do you want the general public to get from reading your book, The Way We Eat? The overarching thing I would like is to get them to think of food as an ethical question, which most of them don’t. Once they do that, the single most important thing I’d like them to do is to realize that buying factory farmed products is something we can’t defend on a lot of different grounds. And at a minimum, to make that step away from buying anything from factory farms. What do you want animal activists to get from the book? Well, some of them might think a bit more about some of the other aspects of what they’re eating. That is, they might think about buying fair trade products and more organic produce, for example. Beyond that, I would like them to think about what’s the most appropriate way to really reduce the suffering of animals. The book is suggesting that we might be more effective by being somewhat more tolerant of people who consume animal products, if they’re thoughtful about where they came from and try to ensure that the animals have had a decent life. And that we not be too fanatical about insisting on a purely vegan life. What’s the response been so far? From the general public, it’s been really very good. The reviews have been strong and positive, and a number of people have spoken to me or emailed—people who are not part of the animal movement—to say they read the book and became vegetarian, or will say I’m never going to eat chicken again. (Several people found the chapter on chickens particularly off-putting.) So that’s really encouraging. From the activist movement, it’s generally been very good too. I’ve been pleased that people who are vegan themselves, and are involved in some of the major animal rights organizations, have been strongly in support of it. I’ve had a few gripes from the kind of people I would expect to have gripes from. I mean, there are people who I think are a little too ready to criticize others who are basically on the same side of the fence, but are not as pure as they are, and they’ve fixed on the fact that this book doesn’t simply say you ought to go vegan and nothing else. How do you respond to such criticism? If you read the book, it does make clear that going vegan is a good solution to a lot of the ethical problems. It doesn’t hide that; and it defends the fact that you can bring up your children as healthy vegans and so on. In my view I guess the line that says just tell people to go vegan and that’s it, really hasn’t faced up to reality. I’ve been in the movement for more than 30 years and the number of vegans is still a tiny minority, we haven’t got into the mainstream. Today, factory farming is the mainstream. So if we could change the mainstream from eating factory farmed products to eating only free-range, pasture raised animal products, that would be a huge and positive change. People would end up eating a lot less meat and fewer animal products anyway, and the animals they do eat would have had better lives. How has your strategy changed since you wrote Animal Liberation? I suppose when I wrote Animal Liberation I didn’t really quite know what to expect. But I did think the argument was very clear and compelling and that any reasonable person who read it would say, ‘well, that’s right, so therefore I shouldn’t be eating animals and I should change my whole lifestyle.’ And if enough people did that, and told others about it, then these animal industries would collapse fairly quickly. Now, I wasn’t totally naïve even then. I guess I realized that these were big, powerful interests and maybe people are just too selfish to accept a rational argument when it goes against their eating habits. So I wasn’t really sure that would happen, but I did think there was a really powerful argument that should appeal to people. I still think that’s true, but given that we haven’t got anywhere near where I hoped we would be, 30 years down the track, I think we do have to look for other things. Over the years since Animal Liberation, I’ve become more of an incrementalist. That is, I’m prepared to say that we’ve got to make progress where we can, we’ve got to reduce animal suffering where we can, and even if we’re just doing it by taking small steps, which fall well short of our ultimate goal, that’s a good thing to do. I would be concerned if I thought that in some way this was going to prevent us from achieving further goals, but I can’t see that it is. I know some people claim it will make people comfortable with eating meat, but I don’t think we’re going to get the mainstream of the population to just become vegan. It’s not as if there are more vegans in countries like in the U.S., where animals are more abused than in Britain or Sweden or somewhere else where they have better protection; in fact, there are fewer vegans here than in Britain. I think they actually reinforce themselves: the greater consciousness of animal issues, improvements in the way animals are kept, feeds back to greater consciousness and more people thinking that even though there have been improvements, this is really still not good enough. Whereas, if you don’t have the debate about the improvements, people don’t know about the conditions in which animals are kept and they don’t really change. You are kind of considered the “godfather” of the animal rights movement for writing such a watershed book. Most people point to Animal Liberation as at least a starting point for this discussion. So how do you respond to people who feel The Way We Eat is too watered down, that it doesn’t make as strong an argument for vegetarianism as you have in the past? I don’t think that the ultimate argument is different. I’ve not said anything in Animal Liberation I no longer believe or say in The Way We Eat. Other than strategic issues—how do we get more people to do something that will reduce animal suffering—I certainly stand by the ethical argument of Animal Liberation. I think people are mistaken if they think I’ve watered down that underlying ethical argument. Now, other people assume, incidentally, that in Animal Liberation I said that killing animals is always wrong, and that was somehow the argument for being vegetarian or vegan. But if they go back and look at Animal Liberation, they won’t find that argument. But vegetarianism and veganism is still a consistent response to factory farming and its overwhelming abuse and exploitation. That’s right.