Why Have You Failed?
“Why have you failed?”
That’s the poignant yet sobering response Peter Singer offers in a recent interview when asked what he thinks animals would ask him if they could communicate with him. After all, Singer is the philosopher widely credited with helping to launch the modern animal protection movement with his 1975 book Animal Liberation, so what animals might ask him is surely an interesting thought experiment.
It’s been a long time since I last read Animal Liberation. My introduction to the book was in 1994, about a year after I’d decided to become vegan, and it helped arm me with rational arguments for sentiments that had been building in me for some time. In the years that followed, I decided to devote my life to trying to give nonhumans a better lot in our human-dominated world, a core purpose which remains unchanged for me today.
When I learned that Singer was set to publish the first update to the book since 1990, Animal Liberation Now, I was eager to read it. Just as with my first reading three decades ago, I felt a sense of both disgust over the myriad ways our species so casually inflicts misery on others, as well as a sense of hope that perhaps, one day, we’ll see the error of our ways and change.
There’s Never Been a Worse Time to be an Animal than Today
The book does a good job of cataloging some of the wrongs we inflict on animals and offering cogent reasons explaining why such wrongs are indeed wrong. But what struck me the most while reading the new edition was, as Singer points out several times, how little has changed for animals since the book first came out nearly 50 years ago. Even worse than animals’ plight remaining largely unchanged, Singer agrees with Vox writer Kenny Torrella’s seemingly inescapable conclusion: “For just about every animal species besides Homo sapiens, today is probably the worst period in time to be alive.”
Singer writes that the same tortuous tests he lamented in the 1975 edition of the book, from Draize and LD50 to maternal deprivation and electric shocking, are still carried out on animals in labs. Thankfully, some of those tests, such as LD50 and Draize, are less frequently performed today than then, but they remain legal and in use. He notes some important progress, such as certain countries and states banning cosmetic testing on animals, but he correctly points out the distressing fact that record high numbers of animals are used in labs globally today. And even in the US, nearly none of them have any legal protection whatsoever.
While the new book enumerates important advancements made to ease the suffering of farmed animals in some Western countries and states, Singer reflects honestly on the hard fact that life for nearly all farmed animals still involves routine torment that we wouldn’t allow for even the most heinous criminals. In other words, yes, in some Western countries a small portion of farmed animals have gained some protections while living on factory farms. But overall, nearly all animals living on factory farms still lack pretty much any legal protections.
Perhaps more dishearteningly, the number of animals who are farmed has exploded. As Singer concludes, “clearly, my call for a boycott of meat has been a dismal failure.”
For example, in the book Singer notes how many more animals are used for food today both in the US and especially in China. While meat demand in Asia has skyrocketed since the 1990 edition, he writes that per capita meat demand has risen “moderately” in the US. According to industry data, the average American ate about 197 pounds of land animal meat in 1990, and today it’s about 227 pounds — a 15 percent increase. Combine that with the fact that the US has also added 80 million more humans since 1990, billions more land animals are farmed for food annually in the US today than when I first read Animal Liberation. The situation for aquatic farmed animals is similar.
So really, why?
Singer’s question remains: Why? The failure to stem the growth of human-caused animal suffering is, of course, no one person’s fault. In the past half century, Singer inspired large numbers to take up the animals’ cause. But the painful question still nags: Why, despite decades of advocacy, is it true that, according to Singer, “there are now more animals suffering in laboratories and factory farms than ever before.”
In the new edition, Singer notes that he does “not think that an appeal to sympathy and compassion alone will convince most people of the wrongness of speciesism,” which is why he instead focuses on rational argumentation. That’s understandable — a philosopher should focus on rational argument.
But what if, just like sympathy and compassion alone won’t save the day, rational arguments about ethics also aren’t the main driver of people’s food choices? What if most people just don’t consider ethics when determining what to eat, and instead pick the foods they simply enjoy the most, have easy access to, and can afford? This seems far more reasonable than assuming we can change what motivates people to eat what they do.
Singer devotes two paragraphs of the new book to what he calls “an alternative strategy” — mainly using food technology to render factory farming obsolete. Instead of persuading people to shift from meat to lentils, could animals be liberated if we had delicious, affordable animal-free meats?
To expand on those two paragraphs, looking at a few historical examples offers reason to focus on new methods of meat production rather than compassion or rational arguments alone.
How Animal Liberation Has Historically Occurred
It’s hard to think of many categories of animal use that have ended solely as a result of pleas from animal advocates. Granted, there are examples where concerns about animal welfare have driven important reforms that improve animals’ lives, such as bans on puppy mills, cage confinement of farmed animals, and more.
But when it comes to fully displacing animals however, more often than not it’s a result of better technology. For example:
- Geese are no longer live-plucked for their quills not because anyone made persuasive arguments for the birds, but because metal fountain pens were invented.
- Carrier pigeons aren’t forced to fly long and dangerous routes not because we cared about the pigeons, but because the telegraph was invented.
- Fireflies are no longer “harvested” by the millions for the biotech industry not because it was unsustainable, but because scientists synthesized luciferase.
- Horses are no longer whipped to carry us around not because of animal advocates, but because of the invention of bikes and cars.
- Whales are no longer harpooned for their oil not because 19th century social reformers gave whales a voice, but because kerosene offered a cheaper, cleaner way to light our homes.
The list could go on and on. For example, Singer also credits the novel technology of sexed semen with allowing dairy producers to avoid creating male calves, averting one animal welfare concern associated with dairy production — another case where a problem for animals was resolved by technology, not concern for animals. (Admittedly, the market for such dairy products is largely people motivated by ethical concerns, since such milk is more expensive.)
It’s seductive to think that humans, when we learn about an abusive industry that we finance, will recoil from our ways and change our behavior. Ethical concerns may cause us to vote the right way in a ballot measure. But will rational arguments drive mass dietary change? Sadly, our species rarely works that way.
As the late Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” And that’s just about changing our minds, not even our actions, let alone actions that nearly everyone around us is taking too.
Good Intentions or Good Inventions?
The point isn’t to stop making the ethical arguments Singer does. Rather, the point is that moral awareness is nearly never sufficient to end an animal-abusive industry, and the “failure” that Singer mourns is likely to continue if we only expect people to do the right thing for the right reasons.
Yes, animals need humane sentiment, arguments, compassion, and awareness. But they also desperately need inventors, entrepreneurs, and investors who can pioneer new products that will simply render their use as obsolete as a whaling ship is today. If Singer writes a 75th edition of Animal Liberation and the situation has improved by then, it’s hard to see how new technology won’t have been in the driver’s seat of fomenting that change.
While technological hope for animals is a very small portion of the new Animal Liberation, Singer agrees with this point, telling me:
“I strongly support the use of technology to produce foods, whether they are plant- or fungi-based, or grown from animal cells, that are similar to animal products, but do not involve living animals. Ethical arguments do have a decisive impact on some people, but not on everyone, and the existence of alternatives that taste as good or better than animal products, are nutritionally similar, and are not more expensive in price, would help many more people to make the shift that we so urgently need, to a more ethical way of eating.”
Singer ends the new edition of Animal Liberation with a question: “Will our tyranny continue, proving that morality counts for nothing when it clashes with self-interest, as many cynics have always said? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species over which we have power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible?”
But what if it’s not a “capacity for genuine altruism” or rational arguments about “moral indefensibility” that ultimately liberate animals, and instead the outcome is driven simply by new inventions? History shows us that humans are highly unlikely to selflessly give up the power we hold over other species. More likely is that we’ll invent new ways to satisfy our desires that simply don’t involve harming animals. When that day arrives, I suspect it will be much easier to see indeed how morally indefensible what we once did was.
Paul Shapiro is the CEO of The Better Meat Co. and the author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World.
