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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