January 28, 2010



I finished reading Peter Singer's classic 1975 work "Animal Liberation" today and thought it interesting for non-vegetarians to outline some quotes taken from the book on this blog.
And here we go:

BECOMING A VEGETARIAN
Animal production compares poorly with crop production as far as water use is concerned. A pound of meat requires fifty times as much water as an equivalent quantity of wheat. Newsweek graphically described this volume of water when it said, "The water that goes into a 1000 pound steer would float a destroyer". The demands of animal production are drying up the vast underground pools of water on which so many of the drier regions of America, Australia, and other countries rely.

Over the past twenty-five years, nearly half of Central America's tropical rainforests have been destroyed, largely to provide beef to North America. Perhaps 90 percent of the plant and animal species on this planet live in the tropics, many of the still unrecorded by science. If the clearing continues at its present rate, they will be pushed into extinction.

Unless we can be sure of the origin of the particular item we are buying, we must avoid chicken, turkey, rabbit, pork, veal, beef, and eggs. [...] It is possible to obtain supplies of all these meats that do not come from factory farms, but unless you live in a rural area this takes a lot of effort. Most butchers have no idea how the animals whose bodies they are selling were raised.

How far down the evolutionary scale shall we go? Shall we eat fish? What about shrimps? Oysters? To answer these questions we must bear in mind the central principle on which our concern for other beings is based. As I said in the first chapter, the only legitimate boundary to our concern for the interets of other beings is the point at which it is no longer accurate to say that the other being has interests. To have interests, in a strict, nonmetaphorical sense, a being must be capable of suffering or experiencing pleasure. IF A BEING SUFFERS THERE CAN BE NO MORAL JUSTIFICATION FOR DISREGARDING THAT SUFFERING, or for refusing to count it equally with the like suffering of any other being.

So out of concern for both fish and human beings we should avoid eating fish. Certainly those who continue to eat fish while refusing to eat other animals have taken a major step away from speciesism; but those who eat neither have gone one step further.

Nutritional experts no longer dispute about whether animal flesh is essential; they now agree that it is not. If ordinary people still have misgivings about doing without it, these misgivings are based on ignorance.


MAN'S DOMINION
The creation of the universe seems a fit starting point. The biblical story of the creation sets out very clearly the nature of the relationship between man and animal as the Hebrew people conceived it to be. It is a superb example of myth echoing reality:
"And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beat of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and overthe fowl of the air, and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

Voltaire:
"There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so greatly surpasses man in fidelity and friendship, and nail him down to a table and dissect him alive, to show you the mesaraic veins! You discover in him all the same organs of feeling as in yourself. Answer me, mechanist, has Nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel?"

The enlightenment did not affect all thinkers equally in their attitudes toward animals. Immanuel Kant, in his lectures on ethics, still told his students:
"So far as animals are concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious, and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man."

Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.


SPECIESISM TODAY
Our attitudes to animals begin to form when we are very young, and they are dominated by the fact that we begin to eat fish at an early age. Interestingly enough, many children at first refuse to eat animals, and only become accustomed to it after strenuous efforts by their parents, who mistakenly believe that it is necessary for good health. Whatever the child's initial reaction, though the point to notice is that we eat animal flesh long before we are capable of understanding that what we are eating is the dead body of an animal.

In fact, those who claim to care about the well-being of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests.

To say that people are "humane" is to say that they are "kind"; to say that they are "beastly", "brutal" or simply that they behave "like animals" is to suggest that they are cruel and nasty. We rarely stop to consider that the animal who kills with the last reason to do so is the human animal. We think of lions and wolves as savage because they kill, but they must kill, or starve. Humans kill other animals for sport, to satisfy their curiosity, to beautify their bodies, and to please their palates.

It is often said, as an objection to vegetarianism, that since other animals kill for food, we may do so too. This analogy was already old in 1785, when William Paley refuted it by reference to the fact that while human beings can live without killing, other animals have no choice but to kill if they are to survive.

The point of altering one's buying habits is not to keep oneself untouched by evil, but to reduce the economic support for the exploitation of animals, and to persuade others to do the same. So it is not a sin to continue to wear leather shoes you bought before you began to think about Animal Liberation.

The core of this book is the claim that to discriminate against beings solely on account of their species is a form of prejudice, immoral and indefensible in the same way that discrimination on the basis of race is immoral and indefensible.


________________
I am now reading (and studying) "EATING. What we eat and why it matters" (2006) by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.

January 19, 2010

Better late than never: happy new year, everybody! XD

Full NYE picture gallery on facebook.

January 18, 2010

X-MAS and WINTERWONDERLAND.
Pictures from one week in Northern Finland, in the Posio-area. We rented a beautiful hut including sauna, lake, boat (useless, but anyway) and have also seen northern lights again, yay! Maximum minimum temperature: -31°C.

Full gallery on facebook.


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