The OG book on the animal rights movement

Animal Liberation is one of those books you’d think every vegan has read, but it wasn’t the case for me. I only found out it existed a few years ago when I started hearing author Peter Singer‘s name everywhere and then learned he published Animal Liberation Now, an updated edition published by HarperCollins nearly 50 years after the original.

The book’s preface outlines how the book has impacted the animal rights movement over the years, and begins with a powerful introduction by Israeli intellectual and writer Yuval Noah Harari. I find it interesting that Singer isn’t an ethical vegan himself, but as he was vegetarian when he originally published the book and identifies as mostly vegan now, I think this is a status most people can and should aspire to.

Highlights I thought were worth mentioning:

• Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was considered absurd, as was the thought of not having human slaves. During this time, of course, there were no “animal rights” because there were barely human rights. It was also thought that animals didn’t experience the same pain and suffering as humans do. Many think that fish don’t feel pain and consider a pescatarian diet to be ethical, but studies on fish have proved otherwise.
• Speciesism should be as important as racism and sexism, but it isn’t.
• Singer dedicates several book chapters to the treatment of animals in research. Currently, 200 million animals are killed each year for this purpose worldwide. Throughout the 20th century, cruel maternal deprivation and stress experiments were done on (baby) monkeys, as were learned helplessness experiments on dogs, rats, mice, fish, and humans. These experiments have involved force feeding, inhaling, and addiction, testing for eye or skin irritants, and shock. In the 1980s, people protested against Revlon for its use of the Draize test, but they promised not to test on animals only after journalist & activist Henry Spira took out an ad in The New York Times.

Left: The ad taken out by Henry Spira on April 15, 1980 that led Revlon to search for alternatives to the Draize test, an acute toxicity test involving applying 0.5 mL or 0.5 g of a test substance to the eye or skin of a restrained, conscious animal, and then leaving it for a set amount of time before rinsing it out and recording its effects.

• Singer says these experiments (totalling 2500) were conducted because of “ethical blindness.” Many PhD students are told that animal ethics in research is taboo, so they don’t think to report their superiors.
• Psychologist Harry Harlow, who was responsible for some of these cruel experiments, wrote in 1962 that “most experiments are not worth doing.”
• While some animal studies have saved human lives and cures for cancer have worked on mice, they haven’t on humans.
• Singer goes into the common farming standards (or lack thereof) of chickens, turkeys, pigs, calves, dairy & beef cows, and fish. There is a lack of laws around painful procedures, transport, and slaughter of these animals.
• He talks about effective altruism and conscientious omnivorism (eating humanely treated animals), and the impact of the industry on climate change.
• He draws a line on not eating shrimp, oysters, insects, scallops, and similar animals.
• Singer outlines historical and philosophical views on animal rights, from Aristotle to Christianity (when animals were commonly killed to celebrate the Roman games), Catholic saints, Rene Descartes, and Charles Darwin, some of whom we might call the original “influencers” on our stance on animal rights.
• He talks about the current personal adoption of speciesism and the commonalities animal rights has with other social movements. For example, the UK RSPCA set up a National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1874 (think how many dang kids must have been abused or killed domestically!).
• He says people don’t need to go vegan and that we can purchase alternative products to reduce our consumption, reviews common arguments for animal cruelty (“plants feel pain too”), and how we can avoid speciesism.
• The book ends on a positive note with the progress that’s been made in federal bans on fur, foie gras, animal testing, cages, and so on, and with plant-based recipes.

Animal Liberation Now‘s just as important a book as it was in 1975, and I’m sad (but not surprised) that it hasn’t made a bigger impact than many of us vegans hoped. It’s one thing to read a book about what we do to animals (and let’s face it—many people don’t read books, which is why videos/films are so important). It’s another to actually act on it when you know what happens.

If you want to learn what happens to animals in industries, this is your go-to book. The other I’d recommend is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.

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