Product Description

In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave brings together the best current ethical thinking about animals. Edited by Peter Singer, who made "speciesism" an international issue in 1975 when he published Animal Liberation, this new book presents the state of the animal movement that his classic work helped to inspire.

Long hailed as a brilliant and controversial philosopher, Singer has assembled incisive new articles by philosophers and by activists. In Defense of Animals is sure to inform and inspire all who want to understand, or contribute to, the unfolding moral revolution in the way we treat animals.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #135352 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781405119412
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
“Paul McCartney once said that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. This book continues Peter Singer's important, urgent project of turning these walls, one by one, to glass. The essays alert us to the holocaust that continues in farms and laboratories; a holocaust that most people ignore - not because they are bad people, but, perhaps, because the horror of what we do to animals is too big to contemplate. … The wonderful essays in this book remind us that any form of humanism must respect all sentient beings, and that a culture that can create workers who can bear listening to the screams of the "animals" they kill … and that can also create people who are prepared to look the other way and enjoy the spoils of the whole endeavour - is a culture that is not only cruel and deluded, but well primed for the next human holocaust.” The Independent on Sunday

"Peter Singer’s writing changed my life. I have waited for this book for a long time, a quarter of a century in fact. What an exquisite collection of fine writers with compelling philosophies, philosophies that translate into positive ways to change society and one’s own daily life for the better.” Ingrid Newkirk, President, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

“A survey of the new wave of philosophy, science, and action in the cause of animals. The theoretical essays give a masterly overview of the field, while the essays on animal-rights activism are engaging and full of good sense.” J. M. Coetzee, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2003

“Take your fork out of that animal on your plate, and sit down in a comfortable chair and read this book instead. Essential reading for anyone who cares deeply about the lives of animals.” Jeffrey Masson, author of The Pig Who Sang to the Moon

"I welcome the era when overwhelming, unconscionable cruelty is not longer the outstanding feature of people's interactions with animals. The books under review facilitate that era's arrival." Peter S. Wenz, Social Theory and Practice

From the Back Cover
In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave brings together the best current ethical thinking about animals. Edited by Peter Singer, who made “speciesism” an international issue in 1975 when he published Animal Liberation, this new book presents the state of the animal movement that his classic work helped to inspire.

Long hailed as a brilliant and controversial philosopher, Singer has assembled incisive new articles by philosophers and by activists. In Defense of Animals is sure to inform and inspire all who want to understand, or contribute to, the unfolding moral revolution in the way we treat animals.

About the Author
Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. He is the author of Animal Liberation, first published in 1975, and is widely credited with triggering the modern animal rights movement. His Practical Ethics is one of the most widely used texts in applied ethics, and Rethinking Life and Death received the 1995 National Book Council's Banjo Award for non-fiction. He is also editor of four other titles for Blackwell: A Companion to Ethics (1991), A Companion to Bioethics (with Helga Kuhse, 1999), The Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature (with Renata Singer, 2005), and Bioethics: An Anthology (with Helga Kuhse, 2nd edn., 2006).

Customer Reviews

Contents:
Articles and essays from different people like philosophers, biologists, activists and lobbyists. Here you learn first hand accounts of the stories that have made headlines around the world...the plight of the Silver Spring laboratory monkeys, the freeing of the Island of the Dragon dolphins, the successful campaigns against the Draize and LD50 tests, extinctions of species, and confinement of animals in farm factories and zoos.

In the future
I think Peter Singer is right in the battle to protect the animals. He shows in the book why is necessary the men change his mind .

Right argument, perhaps the wrong person arguing
I have thought for several days about posting this review, but in the end I felt I could not remain silent. The ethical treatment of living beings is something my wife and I believe in very strongly. You do everything in your power to give those beings in your care a comfortable, fulfilling life be they animal or plant. Every day we grapple with the fact that for us to live we must destroy others, and we do not take this fact lightly. So when someone comes along with the powers of persuasion and the well constructed arguments Mr Singer has you tend to embrace the book, and say, "see this is what I meant."

The problem is that Mr Singer also justifies the killing of human infants if they have some kind of "grave physical abnormality" like hemophilia. Mr Singer does not consider these infants "persons" because they do not have a sense of their own future; but the same argument could be made about the animals he is supposedly trying to save. A calf has no sense of its future, and it knows nothing about running and gamboling outside if it has never done it, so by extending Mr Singers arguments even the cruelest forms of producing veal is justifiable.

The eugenics movement of the last century advocated the improvement of the human race by castrating or eliminating the physically and mentally imperfect. Mr Singer has taken the stand that it is justifiable to kill the imperfect to make room for the, supposed, perfect. A concept Adolf Hitler took to its terrible limits.

I just find it sad that a movement as important as animal rights should have as one of its major voices a man who would have no philosophical problem killing me sixty year ago, or my grandson two years ago. You can kill a bleeder because they aren't really a person, but don't you dare kill a chicken.