Peter Singer

speaker

866 appearances 5 recordings 3 series first heard Nov 2020 last heard 20 Apr

Peter Singer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 351 | Peter Singer on Maximizing Good for All Sentient Creatures · 20 Apr 2026 podcast

So that's a

It doesn't mean exactly that they're protected in the same way as other animals, but at least there's something there.

It's a legal basis for courts or government policies to give them weight now.

Yes, although they're not separate, as you might think, because there are moves to factory farm octopuses.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a proposal in the Canary Islands, which is part of Spain, for a large sort of underwater factory farm for producing, I don't know, millions of octopuses.

And I think there are other proposals around.

So, yeah, don't assume that your octopus has had a happy life living freely in the sea until it was caught.

If you do eat octopus, and I agree, we shouldn't.

I think that factory farming is really one of the great moral atrocities that's going on right now.

And the reason I think that is the scale is so mind-bogglingly enormous.

If we're talking about land-based factory farms, it's probably something like 70 to 80 billion animals a year.

If we're talking about, if we're including factory farms for vertebrate marine animals, so for fish basically, it probably goes up to something like 200 billion animals a year.

And if you were to include shrimp and other animals, you're getting into the trillions, but there's less certainty about whether they can suffer.

So let's leave them out of it if you like.

But just talking about 200 billion vertebrate animals crowded together in conditions that are solely directed to producing their flesh or their eggs or their milk in the cheapest possible manner.

with no independent concern for their welfare.

And often those conditions thwart a lot of basic instincts that they may have, you know, social instincts to be in a group of size where they can identify other individuals, which, you know, let's say chickens and turkeys might do if we're talking about 20 or 30 or even 50 individuals.

But when you've got 20,000 birds in a single shed, that's not possible.

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