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. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem, to supporters of animal rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852

jokes

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

A recent Zogby poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that primates are entitled to the same rights as human children.

One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens.

There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig–an animal easily as intelligent as a dog–that becomes the Christmas ham.

Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away.

Because Singer is so skilled in argument, for many readers it is easier to change

But Singer had planted a troubling notion, and in the days afterward, it grew and grew, watered by the other animal rights thinkers I began reading:

But it turns out that this would be fine by the animal rightists: for if pigs don’t exist, they can’t be wronged.

Otherwise, why would cosmetics testers drip chemicals into the eyes of rabbits to see if they sting? Why would researchers study head trauma by traumatizing chimpanzee heads? Why would psychologists attempt to induce depression and “learned helplessness” in dogs by exposing them to ceaseless random patterns of electrical shock?

ett writes in “Kinds of Minds,” “we can rest assured there is no invisible suffering somewhere in their brains. If we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty.”

From everything I’ve read, egg and hog operations are the worst

Christian conservative, has no patience for lefty rights talk, arguing instead that while God did give man “dominion” over animals (“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you”), he also admonished us to show them mercy. “We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality but . . . because they stand unequal and powerless before us.”

in the industry’s latest plan, by simply engineering the “stress gene” out of pigs and chickens.

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