Hook, Line and Singer

By A. Adam Glenn

One of the more serendipitous aspects of the network lunch gatherings on Friday, Oct. 27, was the impromptu appearance by Peter Singer at the discussion on "Animal Rights: Where Creatures, Ecosystems, and Societies Collide." Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton and at the University of Melbourne, is perhaps the leading thinker in the field of animal rights, so having him at the table was a little like a group of high school science students having a sitdown with Steven Hawking.

Singer had been a panelist on the "Eating as an Environmental Act" session a short while before, during which he mentioned animal rights-related issues relevant to factory farming. That's the subject of his new book, "The Way We Eat." He also talked about an upcoming ballot measure in Arizona that would for the first time ban veal crates, as well as limit the use of restrictive crates for pregnant sows ((PDF of legislative analysis; plus a page on the measure from the Humane Society).

Afterwards I invited  Singer to join us at the network lunch, and he agreed. A dozen of us squeezed around the table for a great hour-long talk with him about a wide range of animal rights-related issues, including the ways in which journalists are missing (and getting) the animal rights component of larger environmental stories, and the different ways in which the public responds to stories on factory farm animals versus stories on more human-like higher primates.

Singer also left us with at least one suggestion on how to track developments on the issue: the web site, Dawn Watch, which has has news alerts on animal rights stories on a daily basis.

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