Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Peter Singer on the Ethical Fight for Animal Liberation Now EP 296

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Do you want to make a tangible impact on reducing speciesism? Look no further than Peter Singer, who shares the solution for achieving a more compassionate world through the power of plant-based diets, ethics, and systemic change. Singer explains how embracing a non-speciesist lifestyle can lead to a more equitable and sustainable future for all beings on this planet. Peter Singer is the author of Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed. Animal Liberation Now: Peter Singer's Call for Ethical Change. In this riveting episode of Passion Struck, Peter Singer and I discuss the relevance of animal ethics in the ongoing fight against speciesism. We expose the hidden hazards of factory farming on environmental and human health. Peter explains how to leverage your own consumer habits to drive meaningful change in the world. We delve into the alarming consequences of China's surging demand for animal products and the devastating environmental toll caused by rampant meat consumption. Brace yourself for a chilling revelation as we expose the profound risks posed by factory farms, with the potential to unleash new viruses even more devastating than COVID-19.  Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/peter-singer-animal-liberation-now/  Brought to you by Fabric. Go to Apply today in just 10 minutes at https://meetfabric.com/passion. Brought to you by Hello Fresh. Use code passion16 to get 16 free meals, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://youtu.be/QYehiUuX7zs  Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Catch my interview with Marshall Goldsmith on How You Create an Earned Life: https://passionstruck.com/marshall-goldsmith-create-your-earned-life/  Watch the solo episode I did on the topic of Chronic Loneliness: https://youtu.be/aFDRk0kcM40  Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  Passion Struck is now on the AMFM247 broadcasting network every Monday and Friday from 5–6 PM. Step 1: Go to TuneIn, Apple Music (or any other app, mobile or computer) Step 2: Search for “AMFM247” Network

Coming up next on Passion Struck. The more difficult question, how can we change this? I think what it takes is a critical mass of people who are prepared to make that change. It takes the pioneers who are prepared to go out in the limb and challenge the conventional beliefs and views about what we're doing. And when you get enough of them, then the safety numbers. People will find it more easy to join, whereas for the first few people to do that, it's really hard. And one of the positive things about the rise

in vegan eating over the last 10 or 20 years is I think we're getting closer to that critical mess. We're not quite there yet, but when I started in this thinking about animals, nobody knew what the word vegan meant. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance

of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews,

the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 296 of PassionStruck. Recently ranked by Apple is one of the top two alternative health podcasts.

And thank you to each and every one of you comes back weekly to listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. In case you didn't know it, PassionStruck is now on syndicated radio, and we are featured every Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m. on the AMFM 247 National Broadcast, Catch Us on Tune In, Apple Music, or whatever player that you use. Links to the stations will be in the show notes.

And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans, favorite episodes. We organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com, slash starter packs to get started.

And in case you missed it, last week I had two great episodes. The first was with someone I've wanted to have on this podcast since I started, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith. And we discuss three of his New York Times best selling books, including The Earned Life Triggers. And what got you here won't get you there such an inspirational discussion that you don't want to miss. I also interviewed Dr. Scott Lyons, who is a holistic psychologist,

and we discussed his latest book Addicted to Drama. Please check both those episodes out. And if you like them or today's, we would so appreciate it if you gave us a five star rating and review and they go such a long way to helping not only the popularity of the show but bringing more people into the passion struck community where we can teach them how to create a limitless life while providing hope meaning connection and inspiration and I know our guests love hearing from you as well and speaking of guests let's talk about today's episode. Back in 1975, the term vegan was unfamiliar to almost everyone.

In fact, reforming was a concept that was only known to a handful of individuals. However, today, nearly 50 years later, it's difficult to come across anyone who hasn't heard of these terms. Despite the significant changes that have taken place over the past 50 years, Peter Singer's commitment to freeing animals and eliminating species are systematic neglect of non-human

animals, remains unaltered. Singer's book Animal Liberation has stood the test of time and is regarded as the Bible in the modern animal rights movement. It has never gone out of print and has been recognized by time as one of the all-time 100 best nonfiction books. Its relevance today is just as strong as ever. Today marks the launch of the renewed edition titled Animal Liberation Now, where Peter Singer revisits his key arguments and sheds light on the current treatment of animals. Singer emphasizes that animal exploitation is not a mirror ethical concern, but rather a matter that affects every component of modern society.

It causes prolonged suffering to countless animals and has far reaching consequences such as climate change, pollution, before-station, food scarcity, and the emergence of diseases like COVID-19. These issues are without a doubt some of the most significant challenges of our time and intimately linked to species and animal liberation now. Singer calls on all of us to take a stance on this crucial social and moral issue. He argues that we cannot claim

to live an ethical life while turning a blind eye to the impact of our actions on non-human animals. The encouraging news is that individual choices can make a positive and lasting difference. Dr. Peter Singer is dubbed the world's most influential living philosopher by the New Yorker and has written, co-authored, edited, or co-edited, more than 50 books in over 25 languages, including practical ethics, writings on an ethical life, a life you can save and more. His TED Talk has over 2.25 million views. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now let that journey begin. I am absolutely honored to have Peter Singer on PassionStruck, welcome Peter. Thank you John, it's my pleasure to be on PassionStruck.

I like to start the episodes out by giving the audience a little bit of information about the guests that I have on. And I believe that we all have defining moments in our lives. And I wanted to ask you what led you to stop eating meat. Really, over 50 years ago, when you were around 25 years old, long before the vegan movement was even a thing. Yes, you're right. In fact, even being vegetarian was very unusual in 1970 at least in Western societies and the circles I moved in. And I can identify, I think, the crucial moment, which was a lunch that I had with somebody who was a fellow student. I was a graduate student at the University of Oxford and a Canadian student called Richard Keschen, got into a conversation with me after a class

and invited me back to his college for lunch. And at that lunch, the only options you could have for lunch at the college were either spaghetti with a kind of red-brown sauce on top of it or a salad plate. And Richard asked whether the sauce on the spaghetti had meat in it, and when he was told it did, he took the salad plate. So that was a surprise and as I said, it was very unusual to meet somebody who wasn't eating meat. So I asked him what his problem with meat was. And he didn't give me, as I might have thought, a kind of a religious answer or an answer that suggested that he thought all killing was wrong, he was a pacifist or anything like that. He basically said that

he didn't think we were right to treat animals the way they were treated in order to be turned into a plate meal. And he didn't just mean the killing. He meant the suffering that we inflicted on them along the way, which I didn't really know much about at the time, just as there were a few vegetarians. So there was really no discussion of factory farming. I'd imagined the animals were all living outside, pleasant lives until they got few mainly killed. But Richard encouraged me to look into that

and I did, that was certainly not the case. It was from that moment on, I guess, that started the train of thought that led me quite soon to stop eating meat. You wrote animal liberation in 1975, about five years after that discovery, and it's played a major role in creating both the animal rights movement and the vegan movement.

Why did you think now was the time to update a renewed version of it? Well, I did revise the original 1975 version in 1990, so there was a 1990 edition that was updated, but that's 33 years ago. And the book has quite a lot of descriptive material, well as the ethical argument which hasn't changed so much. There's a lot of description of particularly factory farming and what goes on there with animals, but also of the book in 2023 would say, well, this happened in the 1980s, but what's the relevance of that? What's happening since? Having things improved. And so I felt I needed to update that to keep the book relevant. And the other thing was I also wanted to let people know about the progress that has been made, which is a positive story, but it's certainly not enough.

And I didn't want people to be complacent and think, oh well, all those problems senior wrote about in the sevenies have been taken care of, because that's certainly not the case. And then finally, I wanted to add in climate change, which is obviously a really major crisis that the world is entering, and which is connected with

what we eat because the raising of animals for food is a major contributor to greenhouse gases. So I want to bring that into you. Okay, and I think for someone who's listening and they haven't read your book before before they might not be familiar with the term species. Can you explain what species is and what are two major examples that you consider in the book? Yeah, certainly. So we're familiar with racism and sexism. In both those cases we have a dominant group, a powerful group, whites, males, who use their dominant position to take advantage of those who are outside that group and develop a whole ideology to suggest that those outside the group are in some way inferior to them.

This is most blatantly saying the kind of racism that led to the slave trade, which said that Africans were really only fit for being slaves or being led by white people. And really, we can now see very finally, it was an ideology to justify them in slaving Africans and using them for free labor. Well, the term speciesism is intended to suggest that humans as a whole are a dominant group when it comes to our relations with the other sentient beings on our planet and non-human animals who also have interest in not suffering pain and enjoying their lives and whom we also use and exploit in many ways for their flesh, their meat, for their milk or eggs, as tools for research in laboratories, or sometimes killing them for fur. We also developed this ideology, which says, well, either they don't feel anything, or they're so inferior to us, that it doesn't matter, or God permits us to do this to them. And I think it's just as similarly unjustified as racism and sexism are unjustified. It's just an assertion of our brute power and an attempt to smooth that over and make us

feel good about it. We need to really look very critically at that and change our thinking about animals and then change our practices too. What are some of the biggest strides that have been made in toppling species since 1975 when you wrote the book? Well, I wish I could say that we have made huge advances in toppling speciesism, but I think we're only still nibbling at the edges of it. We do have more understanding of the idea of animals as other beings who have their own lives to live. We have a lot more scientific research, understanding that they're like us in various ways. I just happened to

glance at the New York Times online half an hour ago before coming on this program. And I saw a little article about why do ape spin? There's images of apes who are grabbing onto a vine hanging from trees and spinning around just as children might do on a kind of playground to spin. And suggesting it may be the reasons of the same as us. They enjoy it. They find it fun to be in that situation.

And that's not only true of apes. there's a lot more research going on about the complexities of behavior of cows and pigs and chickens and fish too. More evidence about fish being capable of feeling pain and having great variation in their capacities. So I think that's important and that's starting to break down the species as barriere. But also there have been some changes in law. The European Union, for example, has a basic law recognising animals as sentient beings, which means that they're not just items of property. They're not just things like tables and chairs. And the United Kingdom recently passed a similar law. So that's an important recognition.

I think there are more people who understand this view and some of them have become vegetarians and vegans as a result of that. So that's a good thing. There are efforts to recognize the rights of great apes. They've been going through the courts in a number of countries in the United States. They haven't succeeded, although they have recently in New York State, the Court of Appeal, the House Court in New York State, had a split verdict on the question of rights

for and the misnamed elephant, I should say, in the Bronx Zoo. And two of the judges would have upheld the complaint and rounded happy the right to a better life, but the majority did not. But in some countries, those lawsuits have succeeded, particularly in Latin America, as a couple of cases in Argentina, recognizing the rights of apes. So we're making some progress,

but the progress isn't nearly as fast as it I'd like it to be. In the forerun of the book, you will know a horary rights that animals are the main victims of history. And I wanted to ask you, what are the major time periods in history that you consider have had the most major impacts on species. I think especially as the earlier periods,

generally quite negative. It's very hard to find in ancient periods or in the medieval period really the idea of animals having rights or anything of that. So there's a couple of ancient writers, Flutak's protested against some of the practices of Romans and orphry of Pythagorean also argued against eating meat, but it is very little. And through the medieval period, you get this interpretation of Christian ethics, which is very negative for animals. So, for example, Augustine explains the fact that Jesus made the devils go into a herd of swine and who then

drowned themselves in the sea as Jesus demonstrating to us that we have no duties to animals. That was why he did that. And Aquinas, who was extremely influential for many centuries in the Catholic Church, took that idea up and said we have no duties to animals. So those are two periods that I think of very negatively at least in Western thought. Then if you come to the 18th century you start to get a bit of a change, you start to get some riders thinking that the way between animals is wrong. They're not anti-spezist. For example, David Yoon, the 18th century Scottish philosopher, says we owe animals gentle usage so he's not challenging

the idea that we can use them but he is suggesting that this usage should be gently done and you get a few voices standing up for animals particularly horses for instance obviously gentlemen and England had a close relationship with horses, but it's really not until the 20th century that you start to get serious arguments for animal rights. And I think in the last quarter of the 20th century when you got the growth of big animal organizations like people for the ethical treatment of animals standing up for radical views about animals, that's when things started to change. And you got similar organizations in the United Kingdom and Europe and Australia.

I've had some involvement with those organizations. So I think that's really the crucial period. But I felt that it still needed more boosting. We haven't got far enough. That was also part of the motivation for renewing animal liberation, turning into animal liberation now, to say, this is the moment when we have more understanding of the issues, we have a lot more vegans and vegetarians, but we still need to move forward because the factory farming is still occurring on a vast scale. It's a disaster for animals, it's a disaster for public health a scale, it's a disaster for animals. It's a disaster for public health for humans. It's a disaster for the climate.

We really need to do something about that. Yes, I found it interesting in the book how it laid out when Australia was colonized, where you're sitting today and ended up causing demise to, I think it said 95% of what would be considered significant animals. And in the United States, 15,000 years ago, it led to about the demise of 85% of the significant animal species that we had in the continent that I'm sitting in. I think I have those numbers pretty accurate. Yeah, so I can't vouch for the numbers, but it's certainly when humans arrived in these places where they had not been humans before,

there were great extinctions of the species that they could hunt and kill. Same is also true in New Zealand, which was much more recently settled by humans as late as the 13th century. By the marries and the name Mary comes from the Moa, the giant bird, like a giant ostrich that was plentiful when humans arrived and became extinct fairly rapidly thereafter. One of the other interesting things that you've all wrote in the forward was that for billions of years life was dominated by natural selection. And he wrote that now it's being dominated

by an intelligent higher power. Do you agree with that sentiment? The intelligent higher power being humans. Being humans, yes. We are individually intelligent. There's no question about that, but are we intelligent collectively? I think we're being tested very severely on that. Climate change maybe is the greatest test of whether individually intelligent beings can work together to prevent something that threatens to be a catastrophe for all of us. I have to say we're not doing too well in rising to that challenge. So we'll see whether the planet is really being run by intelligent beings who are intelligent

enough and unselfish enough to put aside their personal interests and work for the general good. On the podcast, I have tried to do a number of episodes that have focused on climate change, ethics and morality, systems change and altruism. And one of the episodes that I did on climate change was with Seth Godin. And we discussed his book, The Carbon Almanac. And he raises the issue in the Almanac that cows are one of the four horsemen of greenhouse gas emissions. How, if someone who's listening to this might not understand, does the cattle industry contribute to the catastrophic changes on a scale that's comparable to the entire transport sector put together? The reason the cattle make this contribution is that as part of their digestive process,

they emit methane. And methane is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas. In fact, I think a lot of people, even those who are knowledgeable about climate change generally underestimate the significance of methane, particularly if we're thinking about the fact that we need to do something drastic within the next 20 years. And the reason why I mentioned the time frame

is that methane breaks down more quickly in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. So if you say a ton of methane now and you ask how much will this warm the planet over the next century compared with a meeting a ton of carbon dioxide, the answer that the scientists will give you is maybe something like 28 times as much. Right, that's pretty bad, but people will still say, yeah, but cows don't emit as much methane as all of the transport industry in mid-carbon dioxide.

So it's not that bad. But we don't have a century to get things under control. We have the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said there's a rapidly closing window of opportunity to prevent disastrous climate change to prevent things really getting completely out of control. In fact, they said we have to do something within the decade.

But let's say, well, that's slightly alarmist. Let's say we've got 20 years to do something. So if you take the relative importance of a ton of methane over 20 years compared with a ton of carbon dioxide, it's 84 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. So essentially that triple the importance of reducing methane over the next 20 years. And we can do that by reducing the number of cows on the planet. And that's really, in a sense, the easiest way to do it. It's easier than trying to get all of our fossil fuel renewable or trying to get everybody

to buy and drive electric cows. So that's why I think it's really important for people to realize this and to say, okay, my contribution to the planet is going to be, I'm not going to buy products that come from cars, whether it's beef or dairy products. Both of them are really harmful for the planet. So what you're talking about are the daily choices that we can make

to do something different. And as you and I talked about before the show started, this podcast is all about how do you live intentionally through the power of our daily choices and something that you bring up is a concept of and something that you bring up is a concept of expected utility theory, which if the listener is not familiar with it, it's an economic theory on rational choice that provides a way of ranking the acts according to how choice-worthy they are. The higher they expected utility, the better it is to choose the act. How does this theory relate to our individual choices when it comes to the right of animals? Well, the first important thing to say when you're asking how

expected utility theory applies to animals is that animals have utility of their own and I don't mean the use we get from them. I mean the pleasures that animals have in their own and I don't mean the use we get from them. I mean the pleasures that animals have in their life and the sufferings that they go through in their life can't in terms of any reasonable assessment of the utility of our actions just as the pleasures and pains of yourself or your neighbour or a stranger living somewhere else. We can't justify just saying, well, I don't know that person, so that person's utility doesn't count. And that applies, as we were saying earlier, to beings of different races, different sexes,

and different species. So the first thing that you need to do is to try to say, am I causing a lot of suffering to non-human animals by choosing, for example, to buy, let's say factory found chicken, to take a different product from the cows we've been talking about. And I think the answer to that is very clearly, yes. I can go into lots of details, but we have bread chickens to grow extremely fast.

That has caused lots of problems, most obviously in the fact that they put on weight so fast that their immature leg bones don't support their weight easily. Professor John Webster who is an eminent veterinarian at the University of Bristol, says that it's like somebody with arthritis being forced to stand up all day. So that's just one of the many forms of suffering we inflict on chickens and on a vast scale, where the United States produced about nine billion chickens a year. So if you compare that with, so how much utility do I get by eating chicken rather than by eating a plant-based meal, the difference there, maybe I think I get somewhat more utility, but it's

going to be pretty small compared to the many weeks of suffering that the chicken has been through for you to be able to read that factory farm chicken. So that's I think how those calculations come out. And if we're going to consider calculations come out. And if we're going to consider the interest of animals, if we're going to say, I don't support cruelty to animals, then we have to include not only the dogs and cats who we live with and love, but also the animals we're responsible for exploiting through buying those products in the supermarket. We're responsible for exploiting through buying those products in the supermarket. Well, a lot of this book is really about the topic of ethics. And that is something that I've tried to highlight on the podcast by bringing on people you would

know, such as Max Baserman, J. Van Babel, Don Moore, Dolly Chug, to discuss ethics. But I wanted to ask you this, what is psychology's ethical dilemma when it comes to our relationship with animals? Well, the dilemma that we have when it comes to our relationship with animals is that we like to think of ourselves as being kind to animals. We don't like to think of ourselves as being cruel or indifferent to their suffering. And that's an attitude that

particularly we feel about dogs and cats and maybe horses. But when we pause and reflect, we recognize that if the suffering of a dog is a bad thing, then the suffering of a dog is a bad thing and the suffering of a pig is a bad thing as well and of other animals too. So we don't want to think of ourselves as involved in inflicting a lot of suffering on animals. But we do want to continue to eat them because it's a habit that we've been brought up with. That's the way most of our friends and family eat and we don't want to challenge that and maybe we think that it wouldn't be as good to eat bad-based foods, either taste or health or whatever, I don't think those things are true, but we may think that. So the result of that is that we have this cognitive dissonance as a psychologist call it, that is a misfit

between ideas of ourselves and the kind of person we are, not somebody who's cruel to animals, and what we're eating. The interesting thing that psychologists have shown through a clever set of experiments is that when we actually think about what we eat, we tend to think less of those animals. So the psychologist asked students in a group to sort of answer a whole lot of questions. They didn't tell them the experiment or was about attitudes to animals.

A whole lot of questions, that included questions about, do you think cows and pigs and chickens are capable of feeling things? Do you think they feel pain? Do you think they're intelligent? To what extent, and so on? So they got them to answer those questions and then they did other things and later on they then said, okay, we're not going to serve you lunch and randomly some of the

students were told that for lunch they would be getting a plant-based meal and some of the students were told that for lunch they would be getting a hamburger. Before they ate lunch they said, look, we'd like you just to go back over some of these questions that you answered before. Can you tell us again some of these things about what you think about animals? And the ones who were getting the plant-based meal didn't change their attitudes to animals at all. They gave the same answers that they had previously. Whereas the ones who now knew that they were going to be eating beef very soon actually took a lower view of the capacities of cows than they had in the earlier, around the questions. That's interesting how consciously and

subconsciously they answered the questions differently when they were placed into different situations for how they were thinking about the answer to that question. Yeah, I think it's clear evidence of this cognitive dissonance that we don't like to think of ourselves as eating sensitive, intelligent animals. And so if we know we're going to eat them, we're going to put them down in some way. It's, it enables us thought of not completely, but get closer to thinking, oh, well, I don't really matter that I feel too much. Thinking about consciousness, how does consciousness supply to animals in their psychological and physical needs? Because I know that this is something that you cover in the book as well. That's right. So I think everybody would accept that

animals certainly vertebrate animals, but also I think some invertebrates, I capable of feeling pain, that they behave in ways that indicate that they can feel pain. And we don't really know that. But a lot of people want to say, basically, there's nothing else going on. And there's plenty of research now showing that there's a lot more going on. And that applies both to negative things.

For example, research showing that animals get bored and that they suffer from boredom and try to relieve that boredom in various ways. And this is not only true of the animals that we normally think of as more intelligent like dogs or perhaps pigs, but it applies to chickens as well. And chickens want something to do and better if you give them things to do. Whereas in a factory farm, for instance, you have pigs who have nothing to do all day, say the breeding sars, the mothers of the pigs,

are often kept completely isolated in narrow stalls. They can't walk around. They're lying on bare concrete or on metal slatted floors so that you can more easily and hose off the manure. They get fed once a day. They eat what's given to them for half an hour or something and then they have nothing else to do for the remaining 23 and a half hours.

Whereas if you allow them more space and you allow them to forage for their food, they're very active animals, they're constantly active. And that's a more natural and healthier lifestyle for them, just as it is for us, right? It's not a healthy lifestyle to just sit somewhere all day and be giving you a food and eat it. And that's it. So I think we now realize that animals have this wide range of behavioral needs. They also have social needs, social animals and peaks and calves and chickens are all social animals.

So they need to be with a group of the right size. They don't want to be isolated, like the size I just mentioned or some young avial calves who may be kept isolated. On the other hand they also don't want to be in a shed with 20,000 other birds as chickens raise to me, standardly are, because they can't possibly get to know that many birds. And so whereas hands in a flock of say 20, 30, 40, hands will know each other as an individual and they will know which of the more dominant ones that they have to get out of the way of or they'll get picked and which of the ones they don't

have to worry about being aggressive towards them. But you put them in a shed with 20,000 birds, they have no way of establishing that picking order as we call it. So they're much more stressed through being with this huge crowd of strangers. So a follow up question to this would be if someone is on the other side of the fence and they're doubting your argument. A question they might ask is, why should we assign rights to animals when we already recognize duties of care, preservation of their species towards them?

If animals have a right to life, for example, must we protect them against natural predators, including humans? So, I think we should recognize that they have interests that we cannot justify or ignore. And you can use the language of rights to regard that as grinding them rights. That's I think perfectly acceptable popular discourse. I'm not going to argue whether they have fundamental and self-evident rights in the way that the declaration of independence said that humans have. I think that's a more abstract philosophical concept, but the important point is that they're in interest matter and they matter in themselves, not just at the extent

that they're useful to us. Now, what does that mean about wild animals and the situation of nature in which there are predators and there are prey. And philosophers have started to look into that, and that's actually another of the differences between the original animal liberation, which didn't really discuss this and animal liberation now, where I talk about the work of some of these philosophers who've asked, should we try to reduce the suffering

of wild animals? But generally, I think that while the suffering of wild animals matters, the ways in which we should do this, first and foremost, other ways, is that we are inflicting suffering on wild animals. And it's not just enough to protect them from extinction from their species. The suffering of individual animals is a bad thing. So, for example, if we put in windows in our house that birds don't see and they try to fly through what seems to them to be an open space and fill themselves or injure themselves crashing into windows, that's something that we can do something about. We can prevent that, we can forms of glass that don't,

that the birds can actually see. And if it comes to wild animals, then the fishing industry is a major human destroyer of wild animals because the fish who are trawled up from the ocean are wild animals and we are reducing the stock of fish in the ocean. And even if you buy found fish, at least if you buy carnivorous found fish like salmon, you are still responsible for the trawlers and in the ocean because they're catching huge numbers of cheap low value fish

to be grand up turned into pellets and then fed to this carnivorous fish. So it's actually worse to eat found salmon than to eat fish who were caught directly in the oceans because firstly the found salmon have a worse life. And secondly, you're responsible for killing even more fish when you eat cannabis fish. So that's another area where we can change our practices

with regard to wild animals. But I'm not advocating that we try to eliminate predators. I think that would be disastrous for ecosystems. And I don't think anyone is really seriously advocating at this stage. There may be questions about reintroducing predators into areas where they become extinct, about whether is that a wise move or not, does that take into account the interest of the prey species? that a wise move or not, does that take it or cap the interest of the price species? But we do need some balance in our environments. And if we don't have predators, then the price species will multiply and quite likely they'll stop the death as they run out of food. And that's going to be a worse and

slower death than being killed by wolves, for example. Well, I found it interesting that in the book, you argue, just as society adopted racism and sexism because it served the interest of the dominant groups, so too, or specius, allowing their interest to override the greater interest of members of other species. And I think a lot of this has to do with our perceived identities. And I wanted to ask why when our identity is on the line, and we feel threatened, are we resistant to information that challenges beliefs about the dominant groups we belong to. And a follow up to that would be how do we change this behavior? Well, the phenomenon is certainly a familiar one, and it's not familiar only in the case of humans,

vis-a-vis animals, but as you are suggesting, it's also familiar in the case of dominant races or the mild dominance of females. We're reluctant to absorb information that will make us change practices that we're comfortable with. And very often, but therefore, we don't look at it, we just ignore it. People will even say to me, don't tell me about factory farming, I don't want to spoil my dinner. And that's, I think, a really ethically dishonest practice, if somebody is that aware of that,

then they should be saying, I do want to know about what's happened to the animals I'm planning to eat for dinner because I want to be ethically aware and I need that information and it's I don't like to make comparisons between the Holocaust and animals really but we're all too familiar with the decent Germans who had nothing to do with the Holocaust except they didn't inquire into what was happening to the Jews, their neighbors who were being taken away by the Gestapo because that would have made life very difficult for them to accept that they were ethical people, not doing something to protest about this, but of course it would have been very risky for them protest about it. Well, it's not so risky to stop eating animals,

but still people do adopt these strategies in order to avoid doing it. Now, you then ask the more difficult question, how can we change this? I think what it takes is a critical mass of people who are prepared to make that change. It takes the pioneers who are prepared to go out in the limb and challenge the conventional beliefs and views about what we're doing.

And when you get enough of them, then the safety and numbers people will find it more easy to join, whereas for the first few people to do that,'s really hard and one of the positive things about the rising in vegan eating Over the last 10 or 20 years is I think we're getting closer to that critical mass We're not quite there yet, but when I started in this thing about animals nobody knew what the word vegan meant If you'd said to somebody I'm a vegan they would have put the deos if you'd said you're from a different constellation. So that's changed and bought by his products and supermarkets everywhere in affluent countries. So I think that it's getting easier to build that critical mass and it's getting easier for other people to say, yeah, I'm joining. people to say, yeah, I'm joining.

Well, I recently did a really interesting interview with Guy Bernstein, who's a law professor at the Seenhall Law School. And she's written this new book called Unwired. And what it's trying to tackle is the addiction. So many people have to their smart devices. And one of her arguments in it was for a long time, people smoked. And there was really no stopping it until the leaders started to recognize the health issues that it was causing. And then it was really the health industry that started to announce the alarming facts of how it was leading to people's early demise. And she was equating that the same thing needed to happen as it pertains to social media

and how it's creating loneliness, depression, more anxiety, social distortion, et cetera. But as I was thinking about that, it also made me think of the way that we eat. And I wanted to ask, how do you think leaders, whether they're in the government or the leaders of the food industry play an important role in perpetuating the beliefs that we have about our food habits. Well, in the United States in particular, the corporate agriculture business lobby is extremely powerful

and that makes it difficult for political leaders to take a stance against the factory farming. They've done something when Joe Biden came into the White House, there was a statement about political leaders to take a stance against factory farming. They've done something when Joe Biden came into the White House. There was a statement about the dominance of big corporate agribusiness. And the statement was more about doing things for small farmers than about animals. But it was something of a challenge.

But I can't say that a lot has really happened in the Biden administration to change things with regard to corporate agribusiness and factory farming. The leader who has stood out and made a stand about plant-based eating is Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City. There is himself a vegan and has instituted, I think, vegan school lunches one day a week in New York schools. That's a lot of lunches. And I think could vegan males into New York hospitals. That's a lot of lunches and I think

Good Vegan Males into New York hospitals at least as an option for every patient. So he's stood out and isn't personally on the health issue I think is why for him this is really so important because going plant-based really made a significant improvement in his health. And Carrie Booker is a senator who's spoken up for plant--based diet, but it's not very common in the United States. So I think that we do need more leaders to stand out, and particularly we need people in the health sectors. There have been some of this, but rather more in Europe and the UK than in the United States. So a Lancet, which is one of the top two medical journals in the world, set up a commission

called the Eat Lancet Commission, looking at diet and health. And it came out with a very strong report in favor of cloud-based eating, both for the health of the consumers individually and for the health of the planet as a whole because of the climate issue. What other benefits would ending factory farming have on the environment besides the immediate effect on climate change? Well, factory farming is enormously damaging to the environment in other ways too.

One really important effect is that if we take animals away from the pasture that say cows we'd graze on and pigs to some extent as well and find roots and so on, if we take them away and we lock them up in a building, obviously we have to grow all the food that we feed to them, or in some cases catch fish and say grind them up and feed them to the animals. And that's actually a very wasteful process. In the case of cattle, we have to feed something like 10 times as much food value, both calories and protein, to the animals as compared with what we get out of it. So we're

shrinking the food available to us by 90%. And with pigs and chickens, it's not quite as bad as that, but even with chickens who are the most efficient of them, we're shrinking it by a factor of three. So we're getting about a third as much as we put into it. And that means that we have to use a lot more front land to feed the animals and ultimately to feed ourselves than we would if we ate the crops directly. So a great proportion of the grain that we're producing in the US gets fed to animals and therefore a great proportion of it effectively gets wasted. And the soy crop as well is fed to animals. So some of those people say to me when I tell them I'm vegan and they say, so you get your protein, I say, well, there's animals. So some of those people say to me when I tell them I'm vegan and they say,

so do you get your protein? I say, well, there's lots of great ways of cooking tofu, for example. And they say, oh, but tofu comes from soy and I know that the Amazon is being deforested to produce soy. And so I wouldn't want to eat tofu. But what people don't realize is that 77% of the world's soil crop is fed to animals. So they are eating soil indirectly, if they're eating beef or chicken or pork. And only I think something like 7% of the soil crop is eaten directly by humans as tofu or tempeh or soil milk or those products.

So that's one big factor. We could have much less pressure on our cropland, we could feed more people, and we could allow some of the land to go back to forests, which of course would soak up carbon. If we were not growing these vast quantities of grain and soy, just to feed two animals. A second problem is local pollution.

Talk to anybody who lives near factory farming. And they will tell you factory farms the worst kind of neighbors to have. For one thing, they stink the manureer, whether it's chickens or pigs or cows, the manure smell is terrible when the wind blows from the farm to your place. Secondly, they produce flies. All of that manure

is very attractive for flies, so you get millions of flies around the areas where they are. And, certainly, they pollute the waterways, because the manure, even though they try to treat it in some ways, but inevitably, some of it runs off. You have big, heavy rainfall and the places where they're holding it will overflow and leak into the rivers. So, you have big heavy rainfall and places where the holding it will overflow and leak into the rivers. So you can no longer swim in rivers that older people will tell you they used to swim in when there were kids, the fish will die off. So there's a lot of air and water pollution as well and all of this is a health hazard to the areas around factory farming. So it's a real environmental blot,

even apart from its contribution to climate change. Now, one of the things I was aware of was having been visiting India and China now for over 20 years that their diets are also changing. But what I didn't know was that in China, they have these growing use of huge skyscraper farms. And I was hoping you could talk about that and what could be some of the downstream impacts of where they're taking this. Yes, that's true.

China is now building 26 story pig farms, which will process huge numbers of pigs on all of these floors filled with pigs. Obviously, they never get to leave the building. They're reared there. They live there. They're slaughtered on the site. And vast of again grain and soy or perhaps fish meal have to get trucked in to feed them. It's a nightmare for the pigs but it's also extremely wasteful of the food that is going there and a lot of that food is being imported from other countries like Brazil's soy crop may be going to feed pigs in these enormous factory farms in China.

It's really a process that is using the resources, scarce resources of the planet to feed people who are reasonably affluent, they're the ones who can afford to buy these products and harming the planet, harming the people who can at least protect themselves against environmental change. And the next thing I wanted to talk about with systems change, and it's a topic that's come up in three of the interviews I've done came up in the interview I did with Seth Godin on climate change. It also came up in an interview I did with Jeff Walker. I'm not sure you're familiar with him, but he was the former vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase and is very big in the altruism community. And then it also came up in my interview with Jean Allwing

who leads Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Unite arm, where he's trying to focus on some of these mega issues. And they all told me that the need for systemic change is the most pressing issue in their opinions facing society. And I wanted to ask you, how do you believe that we can start transforming the lives of animals and people with systemic change? Well, ultimately, I think that's in the hands of consumers. I think that we have a capitalist system, a free market system, but don't think we're going to get rid of that within the foreseeable future, certainly not in time to prevent catastrophic climate change.

One of the things that you can't say for a capitalist economy is that it produces what people want to buy. And if people change their buying preferences, capitalism will adapt very quickly. Those businesses that are trying to sell people things they don't want will go out of business. And those that are selling things that people do want will prosper. And we've seen that many times, of course, that technological change happens, look at what happened to Kodak. They kept trying to produce cameras that used film when people no longer wanted film cameras. And the dominant player in the camera industry and the film industry just

went out of business. So it can happen. We can put Tyson's and all of these huge corporate agribusiness, part of business, or perhaps if they're smart, they'll invest in plant-based foods and they'll stay in business, but they won't be producing fast quantities of animals anymore. We have to make those changes,

we have to be part of the change and say, I'm going to stop buying products from factory farming. And then it simply won't exist. That's one part of the answer of how we get systemic change. Of course if we have governments that are prepared to see what's happening and facilitate those changes that would be better still. We really need to have corporate sanctions on producing products that harm others. So carbon

tax or something of that sort should extend not only to fossil fuels but to methane producing cattle in particular. Any fair-minded economist who defends the free market will acknowledge that there's a flaw in a system that imposes costs on those who are not parties to the market transaction. In other words, there's the producer who produces something and wants to sell it and there's the consumer who wants to buy it. But if the production process harms people who are completely unrelated to that market deal as methane will harm people all over the world then that should be priced into the price of the product But it isn't beef for example is too cheap because There is no accounting for the cost beef production imposes on

People whose payments are going to change whose land is going to get inundated by rising sea levels, whose land will come less, far more more because rainfall patterns will change. All of those costs need to be priced in to the cost of the product. Yeah, the other thing I couldn't believe that Seth told me was that cows, osso, and habits, 70% of the land in the United States, which was just mind-blowing when I heard that and how much land it takes for them to graze. So there was a huge amount of grazing land, a lot of which is public land, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, that is led out to cattle for grazing,

and that could be changed if we had an administration that was determined enough to do something about it. And then of course there's all that crop land which has to be used to grow the crops as we were saying to feed those animals. So it's not only land in the United States that goes into the beef that is consumed in the United States. It's also land in Brazil for example. It's Amazon rainforest that's being cleared for cattle grazing or for production of soy to feed to animals. So yeah, there's a huge amount of land use, but again, it's in the hands of consumers to change that. If they are educated about the importance of doing it, and if they are offered alternatives that are attractive to them. And that's perhaps one other possibility of bringing about systemic change that we should mention

and that is developing economically competitive tasty plant-based products that people can easily transition to that are not so significantly different to what they're used to eating as the plant-based products that I've been eating for the last 50 years. I think that can help. And so, I support companies that are producing plant-based alternatives or even cultured meat products, meat grown at the cellular level without using an animal, which would both avoid the cruelty to animals and be far more efficient in terms of food production and follow a greenhouse gas emissions than producing meat from an animal. Well, I wanted to end with two questions. One is, what is one small step a listener could take today

to further the goal of ending speciesism. Well, the small step you can take today is change what you're eating today, change what you're buying at the supermarket today. You can start that right now. There's plenty of other options and there's plenty of information online about what to cook, how to cook it for plant plant based on vegan diet. Just try it. I'm not saying become permanently vegan from this moment of life. You can do that fantastic, but try it. Make it every second dinner that you have. Make that vegan. That would be a

substantial contribution to improving the situation of the planet and that of animals. And Peter, my last question is, you wrote the original version of the book 48 approximately years ago. What is the thing probably back then and now that a listener or a reader, you would want them to take away from the book? I think what I would want to read as a listeners to take a right from the book is the importance of stopping to think about what we're doing when we use animals, when we purchase animal products, when we essentially support with our spending money, the exploitation of animals.

I'd like them to really reflect on whether that's something that they feel able to defend ethically or whether they agree when they think about it that what we are doing to animals is in the same way that what say the slave traders did to Africans, something that is indefensible that we do only for our inconvenience, and because we are not taking seriously the interests of other sentient beings. You were obviously very searchable. You've written 50 books, and you just type your name in, and it's everywhere, but if someone was interested or passionate about doing something

about this cause, where would be a place that they could go to learn more about how they could get more involved? Well, there are many good organizations, I think, that they can go to and look at the websites depending where they are. Particularly with, I would recommend they could start with animal charity evaluators. Animal charity evaluators or ICE is a website that tries to find the most effective animal charities, the ones that you could donate to where your dollar will do the most good. But it's not only a question of donating if you want to get involved with them, support them, it will give you the names of some of the most effective organizations,

and you can choose which of the ones that you want to support. So that's one thing that I would ask people to do to get involved with the animal movement. And Peter, one last thing, I understand that you're going to be doing a public speaking tour coming up in the United States, and I was hoping that you could tell the audience more about that, and maybe even beyond the United States, if they wanted to listen to it here, you talk more about this. Yes, absolutely. I'm delighted. So, I'm coming to the United States from Australia to publicize the book and I will be speaking

in Washington, DC on the 26th of May in Los Angeles on the 29th in San Francisco on the 30th and in New York City on the 1st of June. Then I'm going to London to speak in London on the 4th of June and later in July I'm speaking in Perth and Adelaide back in Australia. So if you want to find information about that, I think if you Google an evening with Peter Singer, you will find the website or it's too resorganized by Think Inc. So Think I NC and you can Google them

and you'll get details of where you can get tickets for the event. I would love to see you. Everybody buying a ticket will also get a free copy of the new book, Animal Liberation Now. And I hope it'll be a great rallying moment for people to join with others and get involved in supporting the animal movement. And one just slight deviation of that question, are you doing any virtual events as well? Yes, I'm doing a number of other podcasts and online events. I've just scheduled an interview with NPR's A1 radio program for May 25th.

I think it's a live interview at 1020 Eastern time I am. So if people would like to tune to that and I'll be doing a number of other podcasts as well as that. Okay well Peter thank you so much for joining me today from Australia was certainly an honor to have you on this podcast. I really appreciate you joining us today. Thanks very much John. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. What a powerful interview that was with Peter Singer, and I wanted to thank Peter, Ashton Blard, and also Harper Collins for the privilege and honor

of having Peter on the podcast today. Links to all things Peter will be in the show notes, at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. Advertisers, deals and discount codes are difficult to remember, so we put them all

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