Animal Liberation

One of the very important agricultural issues is treatment of animals especially those grown in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

Singer was among the very first who wrote about how animals are treated by the agricultural enterprise and by people. He was among the first to tell us that animals can suffer and therefore we must consider our moral obligation to any creature that can suffer.

Animal science has made more progress than most other agricultural disciplines in changing the way animals are treated. There is still a long way to go.

Few books have had as great an impact on how humans think of our fellow creatures as has Singer’s Animal Liberation. In exploring the ways in which humans treat other animals—including, with utter honesty, the ways in which we have treated the animals that we intend to consume—Singer’s aim was to stir “emotions of outrage and anger, coupled with a determination to do something about the practices described,” as he writes in the preface to the book. To my great shame, I confess that, for some years after I read the book in the early 1990s, I resisted the… show more.