very conservative about.

It's embedded in our culture and our traditions.

There's a lot of conformity, I think.

I wrote "Animal Liberation" in 1975

because I was convinced that I had stumbled onto something

that most people were oblivious to.

The fact that the animals I had been eating

had not had pleasant lives outside in the field

until one final day they were trucked to slaughter.

But rather increasingly,

more and more of them had lived their entire lives,

crowded into sheds, treated in ways

that were obviously quite contrary to their welfare,

just so that their meat, eggs,

or milk could be produced as cheaply as possible.

That led me to think about

what is the moral status of animals?

Are we really justified in treating them this way?

And I fairly quickly decided that we're not,

and that therefore the way I'd been eating

and the way the majority of people in the world were eating

was really indefensible.

I'm Peter Singer. I'm professor

of Bioethics in the University Center

for Human Values at Princeton University,

and I'm the author of "Animal Liberation Now."

Upton Sinclair said it's difficult to get a person

to understand something if their income depends

on them not understanding it.

I would adapt that to, it's difficult to get people

to understand something if they believe their dinner depends

on them not understanding it.

So most people are speciesist.

If you remember the species, Homo sapien, great.

You have rights, you have moral status.

But if you're a member of another species,

you don't have rights,

we don't have to take your interests into account,

we can do what we like with you.

Most people say we're different from non-human animals.

We are rational beings and we can think about the future.

None of them can use language like I'm now using.

So doesn't that show that we're superior to them?

And of course, it does show that we are superior

to them in our intellectual capacities.

The question is, does that really determine

what a moral status is?

Jeremy Bentham, who was the founder

of Utilitarianism in the late 18th and early 19th century,

responded to people who say just that and said:

And I think he was right about that.

If I wanna characterize philosophically what I'm arguing,

I would say we ought to apply the principle of

Any being with interests in the sense of being able

to feel pain and

therefore have an interest in not suffering,

those interests ought to be taken into account

and they ought to be given equal weight

with the similar interests of other beings.

So equal consideration of similar interests does mean

does mean equal weight for pain.

Essentially, it means pain is pain,

no matter what the species.

We have to acknowledge the enslavement, cruelty,

and, effectively, war

that humans have been conducting on animals

for a very long time.

Let me give you three examples:

The standard wire cage for egg-laying hens was one

of the worst things that I came across.

It's a really small wire cage, too small for even one hen

to fully stretch her wings.

And yet, one hen wouldn't be alone in that enclosure.

She'd be there with three, four other hens.

So incredibly crowded; a miserable life for hens.

- 'Do the chickens miss scratching in the barnyard?

Probably not, they have never known

any other life but this.'

- Secondly, for breeding sows, the mother pigs

of the pigs center market,

they were confined in very narrow stalls

or crates; so narrow that they couldn't turn around.

And that's clearly a terrible life

for these intelligent animals.

If a person took a large dog

and locked that dog up in a crate so narrow

that the dog could never turn around,

most people would be horrified,

maybe you would be convicted of cruelty to animals.

But factory farmers can do that to millions of pigs

and nobody bats an eyelid.

The other concern that I have is

in the chicken meat industry,

so we're talking worldwide

of 70 billion chickens raised each year,

these birds have been bred to grow faster and faster.

Nowadays, when you buy a chicken at the supermarket,

it's been killed at about six weeks of age.

Really, it's a baby.

But it's a very big baby.

They put on weight so fast that their leg bones struggle

to bear their weight, and in some instances,

their legs collapse under them.

They can't move, they can't get to food or water,

and they're just gonna die of dehydration.

We need to allow chickens to live a bit longer in order

to give them a somewhat higher level of welfare.

That is, of course, if people are gonna eat them at all-

if we didn't eat them, we wouldn't have this problem.

The agribusiness industry justifies what it does

by saying it's producing cheap food

for people who wanna buy it.

And that has to be admitted, is true.

You have to point out that when it says cheap,

it means the consumer pays less

for it than they would if they gave animals better lives.

But of course, it's not cheap for the animals.

It's not cheap for the local environment.

Factory farms are major polluters of waterways.

And of course, in one sense, they're not cheap

for anyone in the world

because they're contributing to climate change.

The other victims are the workers.

They're often immigrants,

sometimes undocumented immigrants, poorly paid.

This is a really unpleasant job.

They leave at an enormous rate.

In slaughterhouses, for example,

the whole workforce is churned over within a year.

So there is in fact an immense cost for factory farming.

The justification that it's cheap only works as long

as you don't build those costs

into the true cost of the product.

If we did, we would see

that it's actually a very expensive product indeed.

In some parts of the world,

there have been significant reforms and improvements made.

I'm not saying that they're sufficient,

but we have to acknowledge that some of the worst forms

of confinement that I described in 1975 are no longer legal

in the European Union, in the United Kingdom,

and in some states, but unfortunately not yet most states

of the United States.

And the interesting fact is legislation requiring

that animals have enough space to turn around

or stretch their limbs exists predominantly in states

that have the possibility of citizens bringing a referendum

to vote on an issue.

California is the best example of that.

So California has had two separate referendums

and both of them have passed very easily.

So if you put these issues up before voters

and you inform them as to how animals live,

a great majority will say, "No, I don't wanna support that.

I wanna stop it.

It costs a bit more, nevermind,

I don't wanna see animals treated like that."

There are some people who accept my arguments

against factory farming, but say they still think it's okay

to eat meat if it comes from animals who've had good lives.

They call themselves:

And I think this is a possibly defensible position

if they really are conscientious

about where they're getting their animal products from.

But it's quite difficult depending where you live.

It can be really difficult

to get genuinely animal welfare-friendly products.

I would question whether you can believe every label you see

on a product that might say "Certified Humane."

Their food would be more expensive.

Depending on what it was,

it might be 20%, 30%, 40% more expensive,

or it might be 100% more expensive.

But I think that they would appreciate it more.

Meat would become more of a treat,

more of a special occasion.

We could envisage a different society in which some people

still ate some meat less often, better quality,

more expensive, and lived longer and healthier lives.

So it is getting easier.

I think that there is a good hope that we will

actually make much more progress, and that's

because I think we are going to be able to have the ability

to produce a lot of foods

which will be more closely resembling meat,

but will not come from animals.

I'm thinking here, both of plant-based products

like the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat,

but I'm also thinking of meat grown at the cellular level,

or cultured meat, which will be real meat,

but will never have come from an animal,

and will have a drastically reduced carbon footprint.

Look, there's plenty of great meals around.

You don't need to eat meat,

you don't even need to eat animal products.

We've seen a lot more people going vegetarian and vegan.

We've seen a lot more convenience vegan foods

in the supermarkets.

More and more restaurants have vegan options,

and I'm hopeful that

that will mean more people start to join.

And if they do, it'll get easier for others to join as well.