Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Nihal Arthur Nanaika, and today I'm speaking

to Peter Singer, a philosopher and professor of bioethics at Princeton University, who first

became well known after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975, and has been a leading

thinker and campaigner in the field of animal rights ever since.

He has published a number of books, including the life you can save, the most good you can do, and ethics in the real world.

An Animal Liberation was included in Time magazine's list of 100 best non-fiction books published since 1923.

A revised version, Animal Liberation Now,

has just been released and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to talk to him today.

Peter Singer, welcome to the Penguin podcast. Thank you. I'm delighted to be with you.

Peter, in a age before social media, can you explain the kind of pushback that you received in 1975 when Animal Liberation was first published and how vitriolic it was?

Yes, there was certainly a lot of pushback.

It came obviously from the farming community,

farming lobby. It also came from some people involved in experimentation on animals in labs.

When I appeared on talk shows and radio and television, there was a certain amount of ridicule of the idea that

animals might have rights or that our concern for animals should extend beyond cats and dogs

and perhaps horses. The idea of concern for chickens was something that seemed to some people

just too extreme to really take seriously.

How did it compare to the pushback that had happened hundreds of years before when women

first decided to say that they should be treated equally?

I think there was a parallel there really, because that too, of course, was ridiculed.

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