Hello and welcome to Gapfest Reads for the Month of June. I'm Emily Vaslon, one of the

hosts of Slate's political Gapfest.

I'm here today to talk about the book Animal Liberation Now with the Australian philosopher

and ethicist Peter Singer. Peter, welcome.

Thank you, Emily. It's good to be with you.

Yeah, such a pleasure to talk with you today.

Peter Singer teaches at Princeton University in addition to the publication of this new

edition of Animal Liberation Now. He is the author of another new edition of the book

Ethics in the Real World, 90 essays on things that matter.

And we are going to be talking about Animal Liberation Now. This book is originally from

1975. It is often called the Bible of the Animal Liberation Movement.

The introduction to the new edition of your book is by the philosopher Yuval Noah Harari.

And he writes that animals are the main victims of history. And the treatment of domesticated

animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. Do you think that's

a defensible claim?

I think it's defensible because of the numbers of sentient beings who we are ruthlessly

using, exploiting and causing to suffer. The numbers are simply staggering. If we just

take vertebrate animals who we are currently raising for food, that is about 200 billion

animals per year. So it dwarfs the entire human population. And these animals we are

really inflicting miserable lives on all of them. We are doing what most produces those

products we want in the cheapest possible manner. Welfare doesn't come into it. It's just

a matter of getting the products out there. And as I show in the new version Animal Liberation

...