Peter Singer

Instincts to play, which many animals have.

We're talking about young animals, pigs, for example, playful, intelligent animals.

instincts to move around freely and to root around and have something to do rather than just stand and sit and lie all day and eat occasionally when the food is put in front of you.

I just think there's a huge amount of suffering that is going on there.

And it's completely unnecessary.

That's the other factor.

It's not that this produces more food for human beings.

It actually dramatically reduces the availability of food for human beings because when we grow crops, grain or soybeans, and feed them to animals, we get back only a small fraction of the food value that we feed to them.

In some cases, perhaps less than 10% in the case of feeding grain to beef cattle.

And in others, it's more, but it's always a minority.

It's always less than half of the food value.

Well, I think that's unfortunately largely a false impression, but it depends a little bit where you are.

In the European Union and the UK, there have been, you know, if you go back sort of when I first wrote Animal Liberation, it came out 1975, so just over 50 years ago.

There has been some progress, not that producers are trying really to be nicer, but that the animal movement has succeeded in getting laws which reduce the amount of suffering, but only marginally, I would say.

So you can't keep laying hens in cages, small wire cages where they can't even stretch their wings anymore.

You can't keep veal calves in individual stalls where they can't turn around.

Similarly, the mother pigs, which used to be kept in stalls that are too narrow for them to turn around or walk more than a single step, are no longer kept.

um allowable in in the eu and the uk and in some states of the united states particularly california but unfortunately in the united states these are still standard practices all the things i mentioned that are banned in the eu and the uk are still standard practices in the states that produce most of the the animals in other words in

Iowa and North Carolina and the south of the US and Nebraska, those states have no such laws.

And so this degree of confinement goes on.