Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads: The Case for Treating Animals With Dignity
Slate Books
Slate Podcasts
3.8 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2023
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emily Bazelon talks with author Peter Singer about his updated and re-released book, Animal Liberation Now. The classic text has been an integral part of the animal rights movement since its publication in 1975. They discuss what we’ve learned about animals in the last several decades, including the intelligence of animals, why people should become vegan to help with climate change, and what we've learned about animals over the last four decades.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of June. |
| 0:09.6 | I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the hosts of Slate's political GabFest. |
| 0:14.4 | I am here today to talk about the book Animal Liberation Now with the Australian philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer. |
| 0:23.4 | Peter, welcome. |
| 0:24.5 | Thank you, Emily. |
| 0:25.2 | It's good to be with you. |
| 0:26.3 | Yeah, such a pleasure to talk with you today. |
| 0:29.0 | Peter Singer teaches at Princeton University. |
| 0:32.0 | In addition to the publication of this new edition of Animal Liberation Now, he is the author |
| 0:37.3 | of another new edition of the book Eth Now, he is the author of another new edition of the book, |
| 0:39.9 | Ethics in the Real World, 90 essays on Things That Matter. And we are going to be talking about |
| 0:45.9 | animal liberation now. This book is originally from 1975. It is often called the Bible of the Animal Liberation Movement. |
| 0:56.2 | The introduction to the new edition of your book is by the philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. |
| 1:01.6 | And he writes that animals are the main victims of history. |
| 1:05.2 | And the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. |
| 1:11.3 | Do you think that's a defensible claim? |
| 1:13.4 | I think it's defensible because of the numbers of sentient beings who we are ruthlessly |
| 1:21.2 | using exploiting and causing to suffer. |
| 1:24.4 | The numbers are simply staggering. |
| 1:25.7 | If we just take vertebrate animals who we are |
| 1:29.8 | currently raising for food, that is about 200 billion animals per year. So it dwarfs the entire |
| 1:39.7 | human population. And these animals, we are really inflicting miserable lives on all of them. |
... |
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