July 2023, Westview News

A conversation with the father of the modern animal rights movement

In 2020, while we struggled with the growing horror of the pandemic, virtually none of us knew what was happening on factory farms as the pace of slaughter slowed.

In states where pigs are raised, several thousand would be transported at a time into sealed barns. All ventilation was then shut off. Heaters and steam generators sent temperatures above 150 degrees with 90 percent humidity.

When I learned about this, I couldn’t help but to recall another time many decades ago when Zyklon-B pesticide pellets were dropped into gas chambers and death would come within 30 minutes.

With the pigs, it took up to 90 minutes before the pigs suffered heat stroke and suffocated to death. This cruel process continued until a quarter million of these creatures were slaughtered and then trashed.

This is just one aspect of the nightmarish cruelty of factory farming, which had been officially sanctioned by the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Was this the only option a civilized society could devise to deal with too many farm animals?

That’s the question posed by Peter Singer, the father of the modern animal rights movement. He knows of no other country whose veterinarian leadership would ever have signed off on such a barbaric practice. He says the US is well behind most of the developed world when it comes to agricultural and commercial treatment of animals.

The author of Animal Liberation, the seminal book that recognized the shocking way we treat animals across the planet, came to speak at the Great Hall at Cooper Union in June. The occasion: release of Animal Liberation Now—an updated version of Singer’s book nearly a half-century after its original publication.

The Princeton professor of moral philosophy and bioethics wasn’t destined for a career fighting for improved treatment of animals.

Initial awareness came to the former carnivore during lunch with a fellow graduate student at Oxford, who explained why he didn’t eat meat. The conversation stuck. And five years later, Singer wrote Animal Liberation, released by the venerable publisher Harper Collins and translated into 16 languages—a testament that Singer was on to something.

His readable book questions whether the way we treat animals is defensible—from dubious medical research and cosmetic testing to factory farming. Singer concluded: “It wasn’t, and that we were doing a massive wrong to a vast number of other animals with whom we share the planet.”

Responsible for virtually all the animal flesh produced in the US, factory farming is by far the most hellacious manifestation of the problem. Involving the horrific treatment of hundreds of millions of animals every year, Singer calls it, “a massive atrocity, and my priority is to try to alert people to that and to get them to cease to buy its products so that eventually it fades away.”

Singer’s work doesn’t just address the practical ethical question of how we treat animals. He directly links the issue to climate change and the misallocation of natural resources, along with the massive creation of animal waste around factory farms that taint our air and water.

He hopes, “we can replace these products with plant-based products, or possibly in the future with products that are produced at a cellular level, so they’re identical, but they don’t involve animals. I think we really need to find better ways of producing food.”

The ever-expanding numbers of animals slaughtered every year suggests that Singer’s fighting a losing battle. But there is growing public awareness, most evident with the explosion of plant-based alternative food companies and the growing number of vegetarian options on restaurant menus.

Singer also sees positive glimmers from court rulings to papal encyclicals in support of more humane treatment of farm animals.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that California voters had the right to ban pork sold inside the state that’s raised in crates smaller than 24-square feet (that’s a space less than five feet by five feet). Iowa farmers, the country’s largest pork producers who brought the suit, maintain pigs in half that space.

Utah’s attorney general lost a case against two activists who stole two sick piglets from Smithfield’s farm factory (the country’s largest pork producer), in the process videotaping the horrific conditions in which animals are raised. The two men, charged with felony burglary, were acquitted.

Singer noted Pope Francis’ belief that “we have moral responsibilities to look after God’s creation, we have to be stewards for it, and we have to care for the animals.”

The papacy was an unexpected source of light. “I’m pretty much known as a militant atheist, so I’m not going to gain much traction from most religious communities.” In fact, Singer is quite blunt about the moral contradictions he sees in spiritual leadership and practice. “Religion doesn’t give you immunity to ethical issues,” he quips.

There was a certain symmetry seeing Peter Singer at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. He reminded the audience that it was in this historic place where Abraham Lincoln had made the argument against slavery. And he hopes there will come a time when mankind more fully realizes the wretched life animals endure before ending up neatly packaged on grocers’ shelves—and eventually decides that this must stop.

https://www.loc8nearme.com/new-york/new-york/the-great-hall-at-cooper-union/7569112/

Peter Singer was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. After teaching in England, the United States and Australia, he has, since 1999, been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. In 2012 he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, the nation’s highest civic honor.