My writings against eating animals go back forty-seven years. The fact that they are appearing here suggests that they are still relevant today – and that’s the problem. It would have been so much better if we could put them in the same category as arguments against slavery: of historical interest, but no more than that today. Our ethics regarding animals are still a long way from reaching that point. Nevertheless, the extraordinary spread of vegan food over the past decade, coupled with the billions of dollars invested in developing plant-based alternatives to meat, has brought the goal of a vegan world from fantasy to a possible future.
People are shifting away from animal products because of three main concerns: animals, climate change, and their own health. It was the first of these that led me to become a vegetarian in January 1971. Shortly before that, I had learned some facts about the way the animals I was eating were treated before they were killed. I talked about it with Renata, my wife. We could not justify supporting those practices through our purchases, so we stopped eating meat. At that time I was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Oxford, with a strong interest in ethics.
The earliest writings in this book show how I developed my position on our relations with animals. I am not, strictly speaking, an animal rights advocate, because my views are not based on attributing rights to animals. Instead, I argue that we should not support practices that cause avoidable suffering, as eating animals does. Despite that, my work has been credited with triggering the modern animal rights movement, and I don’t object to being considered an animal rights advocate in the popular sense of that term.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that I became aware of the problem of climate change. Several more years passed before the contribution made by the meat industry was clear enough to play a significant role in people reducing their meat intake. The first mention of climate change in this book dates from 1998, and the emphasis becomes stronger in two essays towards the end of the book, which date from 2007 and 2018.
In 2011, when Bill Clinton, looking healthier and slimmer than he had in many years, revealed that he had become a near-vegan to reduce the danger of heart disease, it was a sign that health concerns were leading people to eliminate, or drastically reduce, their intake of animal foods, and it influenced more to follow Clinton’s example. I have no special expertise in health or nutrition, so I have investigated that aspect of avoiding animal products only to the extent required to assure myself that it is no less healthy than a diet including animal products. Experts in nutrition generally recommend that vegans take a B-12 supplement, but as long as that is done, vegans generally enjoy health at least as good as that of meat-eaters. Given the animal- and climate-related reasons for avoiding animal products, that is reason enough to change your diet.
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic brought a fourth reason for avoiding meat. The pandemic appears to have come to humans via the so-called “wet market” in Wuhan, China. Wet markets are places where live animals, sometimes including wild animals, are sold and then slaughtered on the spot for the purchaser. They are hell for the animals, and as we know now, a major health hazard. But Westerners who blame China for allowing markets in wild animals need to look at what they are eating themselves. The factory farms that produce their meat and eggs crowd tens of thousands of animals into a single shed, creating an ideal environment for viruses to multiply and mutate. The 2009 swine flu pandemic appears to have come from a pig farm in North Carolina, and different forms of bird flu have started in intensive chicken farms. At least one of them – H5N1 – was far more lethal than COVID-19. Moving away from meat, whether from wild animals or from factory farms, would reduce the risk of another pandemic that could make COVID-19 look like a minor problem.
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Now for a disclosure that may surprise you: strictly speaking, I’m not really a vegan, or even a vegetarian. Why not? There are several reasons.
First, as I have already said, I became a vegetarian because I did not want to support practices that inflict suffering on animals. So my concern is not for “animals” as such, but for sentient beings – that is, beings capable of suffering and of enjoying their lives. The category of “sentient being” overlaps with the category of “animals”, but not completely. Oysters, mussels, clams, and scallops are animals – to be more specific, bivalves – but they lack a central nervous system and a brain, so it is very unlikely that they can feel anything. Most oysters, and some other bivalves, are farmed in environmentally sustainable ways, so that isn’t a problem either. I occasionally eat bivalves, which means that I am not completely vegetarian.
Second, I occasionally eat free-range eggs, which means that I am not completely vegan-except-for-bivalves either. Hens able to roam around a field, or even a suburban garden, have good lives, and don’t seem to object to their eggs being taken away. It’s true that the male chicks of egg-laying breeds are killed shortly after hatching. I’m hopeful that this problem will soon be overcome by identifying the males as embryos in the eggs, before they are sentient, a technique already in use in Europe. That won’t change the fact that commercial egg producers kill their hens once the rate at which they lay starts to decline. So the question is: Are the good but short lives enjoyed by the hens better than no lives at all? And does that outweigh the killing of the male chicks? It’s a compromise I’m willing to make, especially given that hens, unlike grass-fed cattle, who also have reasonably good lives, don’t emit large quantities of greenhouse gases.
I call myself a “flexible vegan.” I’m predominantly vegan, but I don’t treat veganism like a religion. I judge actions by their consequences, and the consequences that matter are the benefit or harm we cause to sentient beings. Minor departures from vegan eating don’t really matter much. My aim still is, as it was when I first became vegetarian, to avoid supporting, by my purchases, practices that are fundamentally unethical.
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In the interests of presenting my ideas in the form in which they first appeared, I have resisted the temptation to revise these writings, apart from the removal of an occasional paragraph that would have repeated something already said elsewhere in the book. I have even left unchanged, in the earliest of these writings, my unenlightened use of male pronouns to include women, and of “man” to refer to all human beings.
The central argument against speciesism that I made in the earliest of these writings has, I believe, withstood all the objections raised against it over the years, and so my conviction that it is sound is firmer than ever. On some of the more applied questions, however, I have changed my mind. Moreover, some of the descriptions of how animals are treated in the earlier articles are no longer universally accurate for the very pleasing reason that laws, regulations, and practices have prohibited them. In particular, some of the worst forms of factory farm confinement I describe in the 1973 essay “Animal Liberation” are now illegal in the entire European Union, the United Kingdom, and in the state of California, as well as some other jurisdictions. Similarly, some of the experiments I discuss in that same essay would not even be proposed today, because the researchers would know that an animal experimentation ethics committee would be unlikely to approve them.
All this progress is very welcome, but we still need a lot more of it. I hope this brief book will lead others to join the movement working for a world in which we inflict less suffering on animals and do less damage to the climate of our planet.
Peter Singer
Melbourne, April 2020