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I write this review from a place of some bias.Sausages. Rotisserie chicken. Lamb chops. Bratwurst. Roast Beef. These words marked out the evenings of my childhood. We ate meat twice a day, and on holidays thrice, moving through the day from a bacon fry-up to a ham-sandwich to a steak with mushroom sauce. A meal without meat was considered incomplete, and vegetarianism was a scorned and alien disease that infected no-one among my family or friends.I was no supermarket meat-eater, hiding from the
I was sitting in a doctor's office many years ago when a young woman came out of the doctor's office, looked over at me sitting in his waiting room and blared out, "I just ruined by health by being a vegetarian!" It isn't easy being a vegetarian, it sure wasn't for her, so if anyone takes on this endeavor, I hope they are well read up on the subject. This book doesn't take this into account; instead he says to not worry about your health, it will be okay. Then he says that he grows his own food....
‘This book does not make sentimental appeals for sympathy towards cute animals, but it is an attempt to think through the question of how we ought to treat nonhuman animals.’ And nothing is less true. What an amazing book. Peter Singer wrote this piece of art back in 1975, when animal liberation was even more of a joke to the general public than it is now. At the end of the book, he mostly pleads for being a vegetarian, since veganism wasn’t even a thing yet. However, Singer starts with an in
Strong philosophical moral case against speciesism.This book by Peter Singer, written in 1975, is for everyone who wants to deal with the basics of animal ethics or in general the value of life. More or less the important starting point of the animal rights and anti-speciesism movement. Animal Liberation is already a required reading in most ethics courses, and rightly so.Can influence many of your daily choices.Don't expect to get through this quickly, it's quite dense so expect your mind to ex...
i've read some of singer's later work on euthanasia and infanticide. guess it all flows logically from this. i want an edition printed on vellum, and bound in leather.
So this book.I love this book for what it did for bringing animal rights into the semi-mainstream. Singer was a proper philosopher, not (just) a kookie hippie. His importance cannot be overstated.But it wasn’t a shocking or profound read for me personally, probably because it’s so very influential. I spend a lot of time reading about animal ethics, so nothing- neither the animal abuses recounted nor the philosophical arguments against speciesism- was new to me. Still, I feel remiss giving it les...
This is an animal rights classic, and although there are so many animal rights books now, this is still worth a read. It's been a very infuential book to many and hasn't lost much of its impact over time.
Animal Liberation is credited with launching the animal rights movement in the industrialized world when it was first published in 1975 by the then relatively unknown, Peter Singer ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Si...]). You can blame all of the illogical stupidity of [http://www.peta.org] PETA on this book. But PETA's antics tend to blind people to any logical discussion of the real points in Animal Liberation. Singer does not support the animal rights movement epitomized by PETA but hold...
Normally I won’t review nonfiction, since most of the time I don’t even give them a star rating. However, there a few exceptions. First of all I may end up reviewing some memoirs since I consider a good memoir to be a blend of fiction and nonfiction (think James Frey here, but also less sinister examples). So my major exception will be this book. I feel okay with reviewing this book because I do have a philosophy degree, and also because this book had a major impact on me at a fairly young age.
Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, wrote "Animal Liberation: A New Ethics For Our Treatment of Animals" over forty years ago. I was still in high school and it was one of the "buzz" books of my generation. I decided to re-read it with the new additions this year because my son is a life long vegetarian, he loves animals and I wondered does it still hold up? Would this younger generation still want to read it? The answer is yes.The treatment of farm and lab animals are still as bad as they wer...
This book made me grateful for having cut my vegan teeth on abolitionist theory without first getting tangled up in this sort of watery utilitarian thinking. Apart from introducing the philosophically convenient (and I think accurate) concept of speciesism, this book presents little of real ethical value. In fact, my complaint with this book is the same as my complaint with welfarism and utilitarian theories of animal ethics as a whole: it acknowledges the problem of animal abuse without strikin...
Edited 4/1/22 to adjust star rating and note continued discussion in the replies. In a word: yikes. My relationship with Singer and the entire philosophical foundation of this book is complicated, to say the least. There were pages where I nodded along to the familiar litany of abuses and exploitation that I have, myself, brought up in discussions about my plant-based diet. And then there were all the other pages, where I had to set the book down and move it away from me to prevent a violent inc...
Peter Singer builds a step-by-step, iron-clad ethical case for considering the welfare of animals as part of our ever-expanding circle of moral consideration. While non-human animals may not be our equals in many respects, the only thing that really matters is their shared ability to experience pain and suffering. Any attempt to draw a line between what makes humans worthy of consideration and non-human animals not worthy of consideration fails in establishing any kind of logical distinction. If...
This is a book that I wish was required reading in schools. Everyone needs to have read it - even if they don’t agree with everything in it.
“Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.” Animal Liberation is a defense of animal lives and a counter to an injustice Singer calls spieciesism, which he ranks beside slavery, racism, and sexism.In the first chapter Peter Singer supplies the moral argument against the killing of animals. To me
This book is tough. It's tough to the point that I emerged at the end having ethical dilemmas that now make me reconsider how I live my life moving forward. So yeah, after reading this book, I have some thinking to do.See, this book didn't come to my attention until it was recommended to me by a reader (Renan, if you're reading this, I apologise for the time it took me to finally get to this book. As you may have known, I have a long list.). It took me a year or two, but eventually I got my hand...
Animal liberation review This book is very hard to read, what I mean by that is, this is the book that disclose the ugliness of humankind and their violent behaviour towards other species on our planet. The book begins with an introduction of animal liberation and the common argument, then follows with the truth in animal lab, factory farm and how unnecessary it is to force such violence and pain to other sentient beings. In the end, there’s a history of the forming of speciesism, and speciesism...
Even after so many years, most people remains either unaware or indifferent to the horrible way we are treating animals. Most people are unaware because it is difficult to see connections when you live in a city you never leave and just see a piece of red, inanimate matter wrapped in plastic that just tastes delicious.Animal liberation must have been a shocking book, a revelation to many people about the unfair use and abuse animals suffer because of our insatiable search for pleasure, our ignor...
So glad to have finaly read what many consider as the "Bible of Animal Rights". It certaintly met my expectations and grounded, developed and solidified my views on the subject.I assumed that it would be just philosophicaly centered all the way through, with a few references here and there to shed light on what animals actualy go through behind the scenes. I was pleasently surprised that he dedicated two whole chapters to describing the realities behind animal testing and factory farming. Chapte...
An intriguing and informative book. I'll give it 4 stars because it's well written and makes you think, though I can't say I'd bother reading it again.Modern philosopher Peter Singer argues--both abstractly and with detailed, concrete examples--that we are currently "speciesist" who must acknowledge that animals may not be our intellectual equals, but the relevant question is whether they, like we, suffer. He documents how they can and do, both psychologically and physically, in animal experimen...