Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals

Singer begins the final chapter by analyzing the state of speciesism in the world today. He believes that a child’s initial hesitance to eat meat, though a broad overgeneralization, is born out of the contradictory messages about humans’ relationship with animals. In fairy tales and stories, some animals are seen as friends while predatory wolves are the villains; yet, humans likewise eat cows and other animals. Children struggle with this paradoxical conditioning, and parents often show images of happy and imaginary farms to quell their children’s fears. Singer believes that children can be taught to respect animals, just as a new wave of feminist media in children’s literature empowers girls. A child’s “instinctive rebellion” to eating meat can be fostered by appropriate literature on the matter (208). 

Singer partially blames the media for not calling attention to the topic of animal rights. Without information and education, the public remains ignorant to the truth. Before recent exposés on animal laboratories, most experiments would never have seen the light of day. Singer believes that “[i]gnorance, then, is the speciesist’s first line of defense” (208). If the public and individuals both remain uneducated about the reality of factory farming and animal testing, there can be no change. Singer also speaks directly to animal welfare establishments that have not been able to prevent the “clear cruelties” he’s written about in the previous chapters (210). Singer asserts that while these associations often begin as radical groups, as they gain money, influence, and power, they eventually “became part of the ‘establishment’” (210). 

Singer also claims that the idea that “human problems come first” has been detrimental to the animal rights movement (213). He goes into further detail about how the animal rights movement and its leaders have often had historical connections to feminist and anti-racist movements, just as they were the first to fight for children’s rights as well. For example, several of the founders of the RSPCA led the abolitionist movement in the British Empire. Mary Wollstonecraft, a British women’s rights advocate, wrote stories that encouraged kindness to animals, and abolitionist writer Horace Greeley practiced vegetarianism.

Singer continues to discuss the rhetoric around the slaughter of animals. He states that the term “harvest” “indicates that the hunter thinks of deer or seals as if they were corn or coal, objects of value only in so far as they serve human interests” (225). Singer also works to discredit common arguments against vegetarianism. To those who ask if plants can feel pain, Singer states that there is not scientific basis to believe that flora are capable of feeling pleasure or pain. Singer ultimately ends the book by listing a few triumphs for the animal rights movement: greater awareness and public outrage against animal experiments, ten nations of the European community announcing that they will accept alternatives to the LD50 animal tests, and Jennifer Graham’s triumphant 1988 lawsuit against her high school in protest of animal dissection. Singer concludes his argument by entreating his readers to recognize that speciesism and animal cruelty are indefensible and to put into practice “our capacity for genuine altruism” (236).