Peter Singer

put the number of hens per hectare on their box.

And that's interesting information.

And it varies from 10,000, at least here in Australia, you can't call eggs free range if you have more than 10,000 birds per hectare.

But some of them, and some of them do have 10,000 birds per hectare.

And some of them just have, you know, like 1,200 or something.

And obviously that's a significant difference in quality of life for the hens.

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, you could see the unifying thread of the things that I've actually worked most intensively of and where I work not only as a philosopher, but also as an advocate in terms of trying to eliminate pointless or unnecessary suffering.

So I think the suffering of factory farming is pointless and unnecessary, pointless in that it doesn't produce more food.

I think that the suffering of people in extreme poverty is unnecessary because we have the means to end it.

And on a much smaller scale, the suffering of people who are terminally ill and understand that they are not going to survive very long and don't want to go through those last days or weeks or possibly months before they actually die from the disease they're suffering from.

is completely unnecessary, completely pointless and actually in economic terms wasteful because hospital beds are expensive.

But I'm not thinking of it from the point of view of healthcare economics really, I'm thinking of it from the point of view of those people

who want to die, are making a rational choice to die, given that their prospects are very poor, and yet still in many countries and jurisdictions are not able to die, are not able to have medical assistance in dying anyway, and they don't want to go and kill themselves by jumping off a building for good reason.

So I think that that's completely pointless suffering and I'm pleased to say that over the years that I've been working on this, this has now been legalized in more and more countries, starting off with the Netherlands in the 1980s where it began to be openly practiced.

But we've now got a lot of different countries allowing this and a growing number of states in the United States as well.

I would advocate that under certain conditions.

I think they need to have good reasons.

So I would not like to see anybody able to do this even if they're just temporally depressed and have a prospect of recovering or, you know,

lovesick teenagers whose partner has broken up with them um and think that they'll never be happy again uh i think you know we need a certain amount of paternalism in other words here i'm not an absolute autonomy overrides everything here but um if they can give us good reasons um why that might be so um then that's something that i would allow them to choose