Animal Liberation Now

I could input any type of data highlighting the atrocious actions we commit against different species, but does it matter? Will it change what people consider to be an acceptable treatment for different entities? Will it make an ordinary person change their diet or style preferences, or will it generate such negative sensations that soon it will be forgotten?

One way or another, we know, sense, or feel that our general treatment towards animals is bad. In his well-known book Animal Liberation, Peter Singer talks about this terrible treatment and argues that we must treat animals altogether differently. Animal Liberation was first published in 1972. Since then, it has been in continuous print. Today, this book is considered the definitive text on animal rights and activism. Animal Liberation Now is the 2024 revised edition, which provides an update on what has been done and what still needs to be done.

Picture this (yes, I am going to present some data about these gruesome actions): between April and June 2020, at the start of the pandemic, five veterinarians planned and directed the killing of 243,016 pigs (equivalent to the population of a medium-sized city) from several states in the Midwestern United States (Baysinger et al., 2021). The pigs were transported to retrofitted, sealed barns. In groups of between 1,500 and 3,700, depending on their age, they were asphyxiated by turning off the ventilation and increasing the temperature. This process took between 30 and 65 minutes. This was because the slaughterhouses that were supposed to take the pigs had shut down due to the pandemic. According to Singer, if a cruise ship sinks in a storm and passengers drown because there are no lifeboats, the owner is responsible. Similarly, animal producers who fail to plan for problems in the slaughter chain demonstrate that they care more about the economic benefit than the welfare of the animals they produce (Singer, 2023, p. 109).

This occurs not only in the farming and food industries, but also in research. As recently as 2015, just ten years ago, some members of the U.S. Congress wrote to the director of the National Institutes of Health to express concern about experiments conducted by Dr. Stephen Suomi and his mentor Harry Harlow dating back to the mid-20th century, in which monkey models of mental illnesses such as psychopathy were produced and studied. One of the ‘fascinating ideas’ that Harlow and Suomi developed was to induce mental illness in these animals by allowing baby monkeys to form an emotional attachment with cloth surrogate mothers that could then become aggressive (Singer, 2023, p. 39). How does this work? The initial endeavour was to devise a fabric simian-shaped surrogate mother that would, at the pre-determined time or at the behest of another, expel high-pressure compressed air with sufficient force to cause the animal’s skin to be practically blown off its body. In those situations, the baby monkeys clung tighter and tighter to their mother, as any frightened infant would. No psychotic monkeys resulted from this experiment, so the next attempt involved a surrogate that would shake so violently that the baby’s head and teeth would rattle. This did not work either, leading to the third attempt: a surrogate with an embedded wire frame that would push the infant away from its chest. In these cases, the infant would pick itself up off the floor, wait for the frame to return to its original position and then cling to the surrogate again. The final attempt involved building a porcupine mother. This surrogate would eject sharp brass spikes from its chest. Although the infants were distressed, they simply waited for the spikes to recede before clinging to their mothers again.

Eventually, they gave up on this artificial mother monster surrogate. They thought of something they liked more: a real mother monkey monster. They would isolate a female monkey and expose her to negative and aversive stimuli. Then they would impregnate her by a process they called ‘rape back’. When the babies were born, they studied how this first generation of mother monkeys, isolated and traumatised from birth, would treat their offspring. Some would simply ignore the infants (they were the lucky ones), while others were brutal or lethal towards them. “One of their favourite tricks was to crush the infant’s skull with their teeth. But the really sickening behaviour pattern was smashing the infant’s face into the floor and rubbing it back and forth.’ (Singer, 2023, p. 29) (Harlow & Suomi, 1974).

Jet, these awful and atrocious experiments (one of which Singer narrates in chapters two and three) lead to another dreadful ethical dilemma: either the minds of these animals are not like ours, in which case the experiments are useless for understanding more about human mental illnesses, or these animals do in fact have minds like ours, with emotions and fears similar to ours. In the latter case, it would be immoral to treat these fellow beings in this way.

But why? Why would it be wrong to do these things? One might argue that one should only act in a way that could become law for everyone, which is reminiscent of a Kantian perspective. However, Singer does not take this approach. Instead, he proposes the principle of equal consideration. In the first chapter, he considers how differences between humans and other animals must give rise to different rights for each group (Singer, 2023, p. 2). Take, for instance, the fact that both men and women have the right to vote. This is because they have a series of capacities, such as making rational decisions, thinking about their future, and their political and ideological differences. Since they can (i.e., have the capacity to) vote, they should have the right to vote. However, neither animals nor children can vote, they lack the aforementioned capacities. Given this, does recognising this not count against extending a more basic principle of equality between humans and children, and between human and non-human animals?

According to Singer, this basic principle of equality does not imply equal or identical treatment. What it requires is equal consideration, and equal consideration for different beings can lead to different treatment and rights.

One might argue that the principle of equal consideration applies only to humans, and that considering other species as equal is wrong. Peter Singer argues that this line of reasoning is based on prejudice: speciesism, i.e. a form of prejudice or bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species, on the basis of species membership alone. Singer considers that having or not having certain capacities is not a good argument for speciesism, since some members of the human species do not have these types of capacities: babies do not have language, critical thinking or the ability to reason (Singer, 2009). In that sense, we do not treat them worse; the principle of equal consideration demands that we adjust this consideration to their capacities and, in that sense, to their specific rights.

However, it could be argued that our capacity, as a species, to engage in critical thinking or complex future thinking is what makes us special. However, Singer does not consider this to be the aspect that leads to equal consideration. This is because some people have these capacities and others do not, and considering a group of individuals as ‘species’ is irrelevant, as it would simply be discrimination based on membership of that specific group (Singer, 2009).

So what is it? What capacity or aspect leads the principle of equal consideration to adjust to respective rights? Singer references an excerpt from Jeremy Bentham’s 1780 work, ‘An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation’, in which Bentham discusses the mistreatment of people of African descent by the British, contrasting it with how those pe>ople were freed by the French.

So, what is it? If we know that their capacity to suffer is the trait that gives these entities real moral rights, why don’t we treat them as such? In chapters two and three, Singer describes the evil treatment that we both acknowledge and perpetuate in scientific research, product development and industrial farming. In chapter four, he recommends ways to take action and move away from the moral speciesism we have inherited. He advocates effective altruism: doing as much as possible with the resources one has. How can we achieve this? There are various ways to improve one’s position in the world, such as eating ethically, avoiding animal products wherever possible and boycotting. These simple actions target the root of the animal farming industry, thereby reducing the suffering of these animals. However, these actions have fundamental ripple effects. Adhering to a plant-based diet is instrumental in preserving the environment and ensuring greater food availability for other creatures. It is, in general, of paramount importance.

To conclude this review, I would like to discuss Harari’s preface, in which he states that “animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals on industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history”. The human species can cause enormous suffering to the animal kingdom, especially to farmed animals. Like any other species, these animals have inherited some needs from their wild ancestors that go beyond the fundamentals of existence. Emotional and social needs are as important as being fed, vaccinated or having a certain number of hours of light per day. A need shaped through thousands of generations continues to be felt subjectively, even if it is no longer necessary for survival; this is something that we humans feel, and so do the rest of the animals.