Home » People » Peter Singer

• 

  Why I Started Working on Behalf of Animals (Peter Singer)

  Peter Singer is widely regarded as the father of the modern-day Animal Rights movement. Peter is a part-time Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and part-time Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. His most famous book is Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals, originally published in 1975.

• 

  Animals, Slavery and the Law (Compilation)

  Steve Wise, Gary Francione and Peter Singer explain the connections between animals, slavery and the law.

• 

  Consequence of Being Property

  “If you have a chimpanzee, you bought it, you legally own it, you don’t want it anymore, there’s really nothing to stop you killing it. So, in that sense they really are like slaves.” Peter Singer

•  
• 

  One Thing to Improve the Lives of Animals (Compilation)

  Peter Singer, Lee Hall, Richard Epstein, Steve Wise, Jarrod Bailey, Sarah Baeckler, Katherine Meyer, Pat Dingle and Gary Francione recommend one thing to improve the lives of animals.

• 

  One Thing to Improve the Lives of Animals (Peter Singer)

  “[T]he simplest thing really, is to stop eating them because it’s in the food industry that the greatest amount of abuse of animals occurs. In the United States alone, 10 billion animals get killed for food each year. It’s vast. It dwarfs all of the other forms of abuse of animals.”

• 

  Where Would You Draw the Line? (Compilation)

  Jarrod Bailey, Richard Epstein, David Priestman, Laurie Pycroft, Roger Fouts, Steve Wise, Katherine Meyer, Theo Capaldo, Gary Francione, Lee Hall, Peter Singer, Sarah Baeckler, and Pedro Pozas Terrados respond to where they would draw the line and what criteria they would use when granting rights to animals.

•  
• 

  Drawing the Line (Peter Singer)

  “For me, any being who can feel anything, can have any experiences, or as we might say any sentient being, has interests.”

• 

  Why Not Start with All Animals?

  “I think the Great Ape Project has prospects of succeeding much more quickly than projects that include all animals, partly because to tackle the idea of removing property status from all animals would effectively be to wipe out major industries that exist by exploiting those animals, particularly the food industry.” – Peter Singer

• 

  Legal Guardians for Animals

  “Just as with a human who’s not mentally competent, you would appoint a legal guardian who would have the best interests of the ape as their brief… I think there’s a clear model for legal guardians in the case of humans who are not in possession of their normal mental capacities and it would work fairly similarly.“ – Peter Singer

•  
• 

  About The Great Ape Project

  “The mission is to get basic rights for all great apes. By basic rights I mean the rights that we grant to all human beings irrespective of their rationality or intellectual level…They should have rights to life, liberty and protection from torture, subject to reasonable constraints.” – Peter Singer