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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So even if you're talking about protein equivalents, it's still roughly a three to one ratio. When you get to pigs, it's more like six or seven to one. The waste of, you know, we only get one back for every six or seven pounds that we're putting in. And when we come to beef cattle in a feedlot, it's one in 10 or even less than one in 10 that we're getting back.
We're wasting at least 90% of the food value of the grains and soy that we feed to cattle in feedlots.
Pigs nowadays, they're indoors all of their life. They're living either on concrete floors or on metal slatted floors. Both of those are easier to keep the manure off, to hose the manure down. But they're really bad for the hooves of the pigs. They're used to walking on soft floors, or they've evolved to walk on soft floors, I should say, in forests.
And they get foot deformities and foot pain from standing on concrete and metal. They don't have any straw to bed down into, which would make them more comfortable because that's another imposed cost to provide the straw and to clean it out. So everything is done just for the cost efficiency of the operation and nothing for the wellbeing of the animals.
And then with pigs, the worst thing that happens is that the sows are often kept in narrow stalls, so narrow that they can't turn around. So these are the mother pigs who produce the pigs that then get sent to market. And their role is just to produce litter after litter after litter. They're pregnant most of their lives.
And when they're pregnant, they're in these stalls where they cannot even turn around, let alone really walk around. So that's a really miserable situation for a lively, intelligent animal who would normally be foraging in the forest and still has those instincts, but has no ability to do it.
Well, if we're talking about cows kept for milk, they are also now increasingly concentrated. We have the image of the cows grazing in the fields, able to walk around in a herd that is natural to their kind. But the intensive dairies are nothing like that. A lot of people realized this a year or so ago when there was a fire that destroyed a Texas dairy and 18,000 cows died in that fire.
Now, these 18,000 cows were not caught in the fields. They were in a building or in several buildings, very concentrated together. Often they're tied up so they can't walk around. And again, that's for the convenience of the workers and puts the manure in the same spot, and then they're just fed there. So they're often just standing or sitting down all day. That's all they can do.
And they can't socialize with other animals in the way that they would if they were part of a herd. The other fact I should mention about dairy cows, of course, is that you have to make them pregnant to keep the milk flying. So, you know, as with other mammals, including humans, the females don't just produce milk without having a baby.
But if you want the milk to sell, then the standard practice is to take the calf away within the first hours of birth, which causes real distress to the cow and, of course, to the calf as well.
I think the only thing one can say about farmed fish is that there isn't as much research about what the fish go through. But we do know that fish can feel pain. That's been established beyond doubt by research by a couple of women scientists in the last decade or two, Victoria Braithwaite and Lynn Sneddon. So, you know, especially when we have carnivorous fish like salmon,
They are used to swimming long distances in the ocean, but of course they're confined in nets where they just go round and round in endless circles. To feed them, to keep a salmon and raise a salmon to its market weight, may take as many as 140 fish, one study showed.
There's fish that are often caught in the oceans, cheap fish that don't have high value in themselves, but they're caught and then they're ground up and made into fish pellets and the pellets are fed to the salmon. So it's actually, if you're eating farmed salmon, you're not just responsible for the death of your salmon, you're responsible for the death of maybe 140 other fish too.
There are two kinds of chickens that are factory found. One of them are the laying hens who produce eggs. And they are still unfortunately often in standard wire cages that would not allow even a single bird to stretch her wings if she were alone in that cage. But she's not alone. There's probably three or four other hens in with her.
And she's standing on a wire floor, which is not really suitable for her feet. She lays eggs on the floor, which when rolled out of the front of the cage saves labour, but it's an awkward perch for her. And, of course, the weaker birds have no way of getting away from the stronger birds in these small cages.
These cages, incidentally, are illegal in the European Union, across the entire European Union. They're also now, fortunately, illegal in California and a few other US states, but in the majority of US states, and especially those where most of the eggs are produced, they are not illegal. And when we come to the chickens raised from meat, they're not in cages, but they are incredibly crowded.
You might get 20,000 birds in a single shed. And if you look at a photo of it, it just looks like a white carpet across the floor of the shed. You can't see the floor. There's so many birds there. And they've been bred to grow extremely fast, so they put on weight.
The chickens sold in supermarkets are about six weeks old, but they're as large as birds that in the past might have been twice as old as that or more. So the problem there is that their immature leg bones can hardly bear their weight. And experts who've studied the chickens say that they're in pain as they gain weight.
They start to be in pain just because of the weight of their body pressing down on their legs and feet, which have not matured enough to support that weight.
There is demand for breast meat and chickens have been bred to grow fast and to have large breasts. In fact, that's even worse for turkeys because people particularly want the breast of the turkey. And so the standard breed, the dominant breed that's sold in American soup markets is actually called the broad-breasted white.
Showing 501–520 of 866 · page 26 of 44
← Previous
Next →