Veal calves and breeding sows used to be housed in stalls so narrow that they were unable to turn around or walk more than a single step that is now also illegal. The European Union and the United Kingdom have prohibited keeping hens in bare wire cages that prevent them from stretching their wings.

In the decades since, the animal-welfare movement has achieved important reforms, especially in Europe.

Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has written that the book “made people-myself included-change what we ate, what we wore, and how we perceived animals.” Animal Liberation seems to have helped change that. Back in the early 1970s, the treatment of animals was a nonissue, especially on the political left, where it was seen as a sentimental concern limited to animal lovers. More birds must be raised and killed to produce the same quantity of meat, and they are raised in more crowded and intensive conditions than cows are.Īt the same time, I would have been pleased to know that the book would succeed at changing minds. That’s even worse from an animal-welfare perspective. The average American is eating less beef, but that has been more than offset by higher consumption of chicken and turkey. But even in the United States, per capita consumption of meat and poultry is 24 percent higher than it was in 1975. Some of the rise in meat eating simply tracks population growth and increased prosperity in countries, like China, whose citizens were once too poor to afford meat. Measured against those expectations, Animal Liberation was a failure. It seemed reasonable to hope that the market for the products of factory farms would soon shrink or even collapse. If I, an academic philosopher, could win over the editor of what was then America’s preeminent publication for progressive ideas, surely millions of other converts would swiftly follow. Robert Silvers, the magazine’s legendary editor, told me that my arguments persuaded him to give up meat. It began as an essay in The New York Review of Books. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the publication of Animal Liberation. The process has made me wonder what my younger self would have thought if he had known that, 48 years later, meat consumption would be higher than ever. I have been asking myself this question recently while working on Animal Liberation Now, which renews and updates my earlier book. I never could have predicted that vegan living and carnivorousness might rise in tandem in the same society. And yet the paradoxical fact remains: Even as the ethical arguments for avoiding meat have become better known, meat consumption has risen not only in countries that are emerging out of poverty, but in the U.S. I believed I had proved that there was no reasonable defense for animal cruelty.Īt the time, my position was widely considered radical, even bizarre. Though I described how animals are forced to endure extreme suffering on factory farms and in laboratories, my appeal was to rationality, not emotion. On that basis, I urged readers to stop eating meat. I argued that our treatment of animals is ethically unjustifiable: If it’s wrong to cause unnecessary suffering, then it’s wrong regardless of the sufferer’s species. My book Animal Liberationwas published in 1975, when I was 29 years old. H ow do you persuade the whole world to stop eating meat?

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