Even before the publication of his seminal Animal Liberation in 1975,
Peter Singer, one of the greatest moral philosophers of our time,
unflinchingly challenged the ethics of eating animals. Now, in Why
Vegan?, Singer brings together the most consequential essays of his
career to make this devastating case against our failure to confront
what we are doing to animals, to public health, and to our planet.
From his 1973 manifesto for Animal Liberation to his personal account
of becoming a vegetarian in "The Oxford Vegetarians" and to
investigating the impact of meat on global warming, Singer traces the
historical arc of the animal rights, vegetarian, and vegan movements
from their embryonic days to today, when climate change and global
pandemics threaten the very existence of humans and animals alike. In
his introduction and in "The Two Dark Sides of COVID-19," cowritten with
Paola Cavalieri, Singer excoriates the appalling health hazards of
Chinese wet markets--where thousands of animals endure almost endless
brutality and suffering--but also reminds westerners that they cannot
blame China alone without also acknowledging the perils of our own
factory farms, where unimaginably overcrowded sheds create the ideal
environment for viruses to mutate and multiply.
Spanning more than five decades of writing on the systemic mistreatment
of animals, Why Vegan? features a topical new introduction, along with
nine other essays, including:
- "An Ethical Way of Treating Chickens?," which opens our eyes to the
lives of the birds who end up on so many plates--and to the lives of
their parents;
- "If Fish Could Scream," an essay exposing the utter indifference of
commercial fishing practices to the experiences of the sentient beings
they scoop from the oceans in such unimaginably vast numbers;
- "The Case for Going Vegan," in which Singer assembles his most
powerful case for boycotting the animal production industry;
- And most recently, in the introduction to this book and in "The Two
Dark Sides of COVID-19," Singer points to a new reason for avoiding
meat: the role eating animals has played, and will play, in pandemics
past, present, and future.
Written in Singer's pellucid prose, Why Vegan? asserts that human
tyranny over animals is a wrong comparable to racism and sexism. The
book ultimately becomes an urgent call to reframe our lives in order to
redeem ourselves and alter the calamitous trajectory of our imperiled
planet.