It could thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose a threat to us and human mastery of nature seems absolute. “In our normal life,” Singer writes, “there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.” Such a statement assumes a decidedly urbanized “normal life,” one that certainly no farmer would recognize.
I would like more information on what he means by a "normal life" between humans and animals
An Animal’s Place
I am wondering in this specific title, if he means we are in the animals "place" or world?
To the “they do it, too” defense, the animal rightist has a devastating reply: do you really want to base your morality on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too. Besides, humans don’t need to kill other creatures in order to survive; animals do.
I don't agree with this because the animals situation of "natural" is completely different with the human way- we have our own worlds but have different viewpoints
animals and humans
Animals and humans are not the same- although we are more moral, we were not evolved by monkeys or apes therefor we are not the same
That said, it can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction
Although I believe that this is true, it doesn't prove much about how they should be treated.
Humans provided the animals with food and protection, in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk and eggs and–yes–their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the relationship: animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves (evolution tends to edit out unneeded traits), and the humans gave up their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled life of agriculturists. (Humans changed biologically, too, evolving such new traits as a tolerance for lactose as adults.)
Evolution did indeed change the way of living for both human and animal life- way of eating and hunting
Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production.
Although there are many vegetarians, most people do need met for nutrients which are essential
philosophical father of animal rights was himself a carnivore.
Yes, we are indeed carnivores. We eat meat and we have been for years- It's a part of our food chain is other animals!
Native Americans and other hunter-gathers would give thanks to their prey for giving up its life so the eater might live (sort of like saying grace). Many cultures have offered sacrificial animals to the gods, perhaps as a way to convince themselves that it was the gods’ desires that demanded the slaughter, not their own. In ancient Greece, the priests responsible for the slaughter (priests!–now we entrust the job to minimum-wage workers) would sprinkle holy water on the sacrificial animal’s brow. The beast would promptly shake its head, and this was taken as a sign of assent. Slaughter doesn’t necessarily preclude respect. For all these people, it was the ceremony that allowed them to look, then to eat.
This whole argument just proves that we as humans hunted thousands and thousands of years ago and it was part of rituals, diets, and ESPECIALLY how we grew up eating. Now why would you want to take that away from our food chain- it's been in our system for years
If there’s any new “right” we need to establish, maybe it’s this one: the right to look.
Honestly, this would make things ten times worse. If you are arguing about wanting animals to live, why would you want the "right" to watch?
No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians.
Of course this would be true, if animals had "rights" then no one would be able to eat them- Many would become vegetarians.
Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals, we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony and respect they deserve.
Honestly I think his whole argument is ridiculous but he does have good points, not much proven though.
Slowly but surely, the white man’s circle of moral consideration was expanded to admit first blacks, then women, then homosexuals. In each case, a group once thought to be so different from the prevailing “we” as to be undeserving of civil rights was, after a struggle, admitted to the club. Now it was animals’ turn.
The author is saying that slowly the human race is being more discriminating towards people and even the animals now that we're basically cutting them off
Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing animals for sport: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view “speciesism”–a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes–as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism
He is describing how cruel we have been to the animals- how we eat, wear, experiment, practice, etc. He feels as we discriminate them as we do with racism or anti-Semitism.
supporters of animal rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
I think this is interesting because he is possibly saying to the supporter of animal rights he was doing something that Tom would do in the book that took place in 1852.
The first time I opened Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation,” I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare
This beginning has a way to grab the reader's attention by explaining something he is doing at the moment.
(pain, fear, tenderness)
Is this source still from the "Why look at animals?" essay or a different source?